One word of warning: the potential for spoilers exists within the piece…like, to the point where Firth asks during one of his answers “not to turn this into spoilers when you write about it.” But, look, if you don’t want to know, then don’t read it. But given that the original novel was published in 1974, followed by the TV miniseries in 1979, it’s not as if you haven’t had plenty of time to absorb this information already…

Journalist: Are you a fan of the espionage and spy films?

Colin Firth: I like the good ones, yeah.

J: Do you have any favorites?

CF: No, not really. [Gesturing toward the journalist sitting next to him.] We talked about this, actually, him and I. He had to help me out. [Laughs.] No, I’m one of those people where, if you say, “Tell me what your favorite music is,” I can’t think of any music in the world. So that’s a difficult question. You throw something at me, I’ll tell you whether I like it or not. But, yeah, I’m a fan.

J: Well, we’re all like that. You ask me, and I’d do the same thing.

CF: Yeah, I know. Nothing is more guaranteed to draw a blank, I’m afraid.

J: In the film, we were trying to figure out exactly who the people up in that big office were.

CF: [Uncertainly] Oh, I hope I can help…

J: What does Bill Haydon (Firth’s character) do?

CF: He…right, okay, I’m going to get stuck here, so don’t trust me too hard on this. [Laughs.] He runs London Station, which means that, basically, he’s in charge of operations in the home base. From the home base. And I…don’t quite know how that configures, because MI-6, as I understand it, technically does not exist. Nobody acknowledges it. It’s so secret that there’s no such thing. And then MI-5, I guess they call it Military Intelligence Five, but Six, because it’s to do with foreign operations, and there aren’t supposed to be any… [Clears throat.] So that’s the zone that they’re in. So he’s one of the very, very senior guys, and very much a candidate to take over the whole thing.

J: Those are all senior guys up there, right?

CF: Yeah, those are the five guys.

J: How would you describe your character without giving anything away?

CF: Can’t. [Laughs.]

J: I loved that you didn’t telegraph it at all, but…how do you carry the knowledge (about your character) throughout your performance without giving it away?

CF: Well, it’s a tricky one in a way. I mean, some people would say that they did know. I mean, it’s obviously not a state secret, because the book’s been there for 40 years, and there was a TV series. So we’re not entirely dependent on not knowing. Because the story, in the end, is about much more than that. The thing is, everybody who is featured has some sort of alternate life, another agenda, whether it’s some sort of broken relationship or some guilt or disappointment. They’re all wearing a mask for one reason or another. And I think the beauty of the film is that we get that revealed in little hints. I think in a way it’s much more a personal, emotional story about the kind of things that people hope for and are disappointed in, and about loneliness and the failure to find trust or intimacy, than it is about who did it. Smiley has an attractive wife who will betray him constantly, and he will constantly forgive her and constantly take her back. And I think he feels that way about…his institution and about his country. You know? He has this endless faith in what the value system should be, and the romance that he bestows on it…he will stay committed to that no matter how often he is disappointed. And I think that is accurate in his marriage.

J: Haydon had (a relationship with) a boy and a girl in the film, so…

CF: [Laughs.] Haydon doesn’t care too much. He cares enough to tie the ends up. You can argue that Haydon’s the most mysterious character in a way. The motif of the Russian doll…what do you call those, when it’s a doll within a doll within a doll?

J: Nesting dolls.

CF: That was actually used in the TV series as the logo, in the opening credits. And that’s drawn from a passage in the book, where Smiley, having just interviewed Haydon at the end, he speculates…he spends about three pages trying to guess what Haydon’s motives are and what he’s really made of. And he compares him to one of those dolls. You get an interpretation, you look inside, and there seems to be another one, and then there seems to be another inside that. Is he motivated by genuine altruistic political ideology, or is he just a narcissistic sociopath? Is it all about him? He thinks he’s Lawrence of Arabia. He wants to drag the ignorant and afflicted out of the darkness and lead them into the light and into prosperity. But he also just wants it to be about him. He’s the guy leading on the light charge, you know? So you can ponder that forever. I’m trying to answer your question, but…he’s affectatious. He wants to convince us that he’s a bohemian of some sort. He’s powerful and bright, forceful and charismatic enough to break some rules. He’s not a swaggering non-conformist, but just enough to…it’s little grace notes. This is why when I read it…it’s not described in terms of what he wears and everything, but I just said, “Well, he paints, let’s put him in the tweeds so he’s not as city-business-y as the others. And let’s give him red socks. And a flowery pocket handkerchief or something.” Just to say a little flamboyance and a twist.

J: But in a way, by betraying others, he stays true to himself.

CF: If you believe his ideology is as sincere as he says it is, yes. This is precisely what he says – and, actually, it’s a line I have to say because the script was, brilliantly so, pared right down. But the first draft of the script didn’t have the line about having to choose a side, and we didn’t ever really find out what Haydon’s motives were. And I said, “Well, listen, I don’t want to make it about Haydon and what he did and why, but I do think it adds complexity to the universe of that film.” Because that’s not an uncommon point of view. Certainly of that generation, during the period of Communism, where it wasn’t…loyalty to an ideology or a cause took precedent very comfortably for a lot of people. Loyalty to your nationality, what your government tells you to do. And if you profoundly disapproved of your government or your country, then I think some people did feel a loyalty to ally themselves with one that they approved of. And he says that. “Yeah, I had to pick a side, and the west had become so ugly.” And in the book, he goes into greater and greater detail about that. He deconstructs it. And he certainly wouldn’t have been the only one.

Burgess, Mclean, Philby, Blunt…they’re not famous names to anyone who’s not British, but these were spies of that generation who…again, I can trust all of you not to turn this into spoilers when you write about it, because when applied to Haydon, it gives too much away. But these men shared secrets with Soviets for reasons which were not to do with self-advancement or finance. They just did it. And they were all like Haydon: educated in the elite system, I think most of them went to Eaton, or if not, Oxbridge. There was an above average number of gay guys among them. They were considerably about average intelligence. And privileged. And you have to ask, “Why?” Why would privileged people, who are taking all the benefits of the decadent Western capitalist society, throw it all away for giving secrets to a system which is to do with egalitarianism and is anti-capital and anti-wealth?

A very interesting piece of symmetry, just from my own personal point of view: the first play and film I ever did was called “Another Country,” which was entirely based on Guy Burgess’s formative years, asking, “Why would someone from a privileged school like that become a spy?” And it was, in the theoretical world of this writer, it was connected to his homosexuality and to the era in which he grew up. The 1930s, during which communism could be far more comfortably idealized. We didn’t know about Stalin’s purges. The Spanish Civil War was raging, people were flocking to fight the angels or the devils, however they saw them. And the fact that the Burgess character, if you like, who’s called Guy Bennett, the fact that he’s gay means that he feels that he has to hide a lot. And he feels that he has to use subterfuge to conduct his personal life. And, therefore, the school becomes a sort of training ground to become a spy. And it also becomes the place where you most learn to want to screw the system. So that story ends the character saying, “You know what? To hell with them all. I will take their privileges, but I’ll be undermining them and I’ll be screwing them at the same time.”

J: Could your character exist now?

CF: I can’t imagine it. Not in those configurations. I can’t imagine somebody…I think those figures, the components aren’t the same. That generation of pre-WWII, pre-Soviets elite English schoolboys who were weaned while the British Empire was still very much alive as an idea. And so was Communism. And those things made very convenient polarities in people’s political minds. Now, those polarities have disappeared, so those components are gone. So it’s very hard to see how anybody…how exactly the same kinds of people would do those same kinds of things for the same reasons.  I think it’s pretty unlikely.

J: There’s also the idea of someone from a privileged background who’d like to share his wealth.

CF: Now, I think that is possible. Absolutely. I was listening to a guy on TV…he didn’t come from a privileged background. He came from a poor background, but he became a successful lawyer, and he gave it all up for politicking. This guy was on C-SPAN this morning, he was talking about Occupy, and he’s part of it. He just said, “No, I’ve thrown that away, because I think it’s far more important to think about how we should live our lives, that they aren’t just to do with personal gain and personal achievement.” And he’s a highly educated guy who had the capacity to…who I think did earn a lot of money, but he decided to go a different way. So I think there are variations on it, just in terms of people giving things up. Having said that, I’m not going to idealize the likes of, for instance, Kim Philby, on whom I think Haydon is largely based or at least inspired by. And I know that le Carré would not want that man idealized. le Carré was an active intelligence officer at the time they killed Philby. He was active, and…I know this from interviews that le Carré’s done – it’s not anything I’ve been privy to, that I’ve heard personally [Laughs.] – but, yeah, you know, he’s just a very harsh judge of Philby. He’s very clear on the fact that Philby’s treachery cost lives. And I think we’d probably question the purity of his ideals as well. So it’s complex. And I wouldn’t say that Burgess, Mclean, Philby, or Blunt were motivated by exactly the same things. Burgess seemed to be to be a more feckless creature than Mclean, who I think was more serious politically. They just happened to have come up through the ranks together.

J: How familiar with the book were you?

CF: Not at all.

J: Have you read it since?

CF: Oh, now I have, yes. Several times.

J: But not back then?

CF: No.

J: And the TV series?

CF: I don’t know whether I saw it. It’s one of those things that’s so present in one’s life that you know it whether you’ve ever seen it or not. I mean, I probably saw some episodes, and it was…whatever you were watching on TV at the time was so constantly being traded that you were being aware of it all the time. And then people talked about it all the time. So it had a huge presence and a huge impact. You know, I remember at one point not being able to remember if I’d ever actually read “Great Expectations.” [Laughs.] Or if I’d only ever seen films and TV adaptations and had it read to me at school in class. Had I ever actually at any point sat down and read it? But I could probably take you through that story in great detail…and I don’t think I read it! And le Carré’s a bit like one of these cultural reference points. When the Berlin Wall came down, I think most people were less concerned about what would happen to the political geography of Europe than they were about what would happen to John le Carré. [Laughs.] Actually, I think some of his best work is post-Cold-War stuff.

J: Having read the book finally, are you impressed that it was pared down to just over two hours?

CF: Absolutely. Well, yeah, I think what the film has done – and I think this is why he has endorsed it so heartily – is, instead of trying to capture every prosaic detail of the whodunit and all the strands, it basically focuses in on what the experience would be like, to have put your trust in an institution like that and to be in that world, where it’s all you’ve got. Because you can’t put trust in your personal life if you’re a spy. You can’t share that. You know, I think that I do know…I’ve heard that there was a response from a group of spies who saw this film, and there’s a line that Tom Hardy has, where he says, “I’ll do this one condition: I’m out. I want a family. I don’t want to end up like you lot.” And apparently it got a big laugh…of painful recognition. [Laughs.] And I think it’s as much about that as anything else. It’s about loneliness – male, mostly – and isolation, and I think it’s to do with what that feels like, rather than chasing down all the storylines.

One word of warning: the potential for spoilers exists within the piece. But, look, given that the original novel was published in 1974, followed by the TV miniseries in 1979, it’s not as if you haven’t had plenty of time to absorb this information already…

Journalist: How liberating was it for you to be told (by John le Carré), “Don’t reshoot the book?”

Peter Straughan: Very. [Laughs.]

Tomas Alfredson: Yes, very. I was much more so, I think. Peter wasn’t too worried, but I was very reverential about the book and was very nervous about taking a foot off the path. So it was just very good that John le Carré was there to push us off the path and tell us to do something different.

J: Can you each tell us about your first encounter with the book, if you had read it a long time ago? Did either of you?

PS: I’d read it, yeah. And Bridget had read it years earlier and loved it. In the UK, it’s considered one of the greatest novels of the 20^th century, let alone spy novels. And then we read it again when we were asked to come in to discuss adapting it. Which made us quite nervous. [Laughs.] You read it, and…it’s quite a difficult book to adapt!

J: Because it’s so well known, or because of the complexity…?

PS: Because of the complexity. Because it’s quite an interior story. So much of it takes place in Smiley’s mind and Smiley’s memory. And also because, in the UK, it’s a holy cow. As is the TV series. So there was a sense of…I think we were maybe the only writers who rushed in and said, “Okay, we’ll do it!” Everyone else would say, “No, we don’t want to do it!” [Laughs.] Fools rushing in where angels fear to tread.

TA: I think it’s…very much about not deciding, “Okay, I want to do this,” but it’s about, “I want to start working on this, to start the process.” And early on, it was…I remembered the old TV series and the reading of the book, but also meeting with the actual persons, with Peter and Bridget and le Carré and the producers, who are very nice people. To do a scary thing like this, you need to be encouraged, and if you’re surrounded by encouraging people who you trust, it’s much easier.

J: The press does mention that you actually made the phone call. “I want to make this movie.” Is that true?

TA: Well, it was…one of my managers had heard that Working Title had retrieved the rights to the book. And then I had been looking quite awhile for my next project after “Let the Right One In,” and for some reason I couldn’t come to a decision. And then I heard about this, and it just felt, “Yes! The timing is right!” It just felt like the right thing to do. And I think…then they set up a meeting for us, and then it just started. I think it was the vulnerability and loneliness of the soldiers of the Cold War that was sort of my first thing that made me want to do this. How they work and what soldiers were needed in that war in comparison to a hot war, which is very different.

J: I think in the book one of the characters – I don’t remember which one – says that the secret service would reflect the subconscious of a country. Do you think that it was true then, and is it true now?

PS: Yes, I think there’s some truth in that. I think that was a valid idea, that the disguise that a person chooses sometimes reveals exactly who we are, in fact.

TA: Yeah.

J: Also, during that time, they were all living with a sense of doom because of the Cold War, and now we’re living with another sense of doom…a different one, but one with economic uncertainty. I wondered if that was something you had in mind when you tried to not adapt the book.

TA: Not me.

PS: Not me.

J: Because we kind of identify with the pessimism of the characters and this kind of betrayal.

TA: I think that films and literature, they work differently in different times, depending on in what era it’s made, and also in what context you’re looking at the film. I don’t think that you…it’s very dangerous to be a philosopher on film. The philosophy, I think, is something that happens in you when you look at it, when you sort of put the pieces together. For me, this film is much more about human values and betrayal of friendship and loyalty rather than a documentary about the Cold War. Maybe it wouldn’t have been possible to do this film this way back then. Maybe people would have thought it would be too emotional, or they wouldn’t understand it if it was made in ’73. People might would’ve wanted something more true to reality.

PS: I agree. I think it probably would be dangerous…I think it’s always probably dangerous to try and draw out contemporary relevance from a project. I think it becomes then too self-conscious, and you’re going to trip up over that. I think you owe it to yourself to respond emotionally to the piece itself and don’t worry about anything else. They’re always reflecting the times they’re made in, anyway. In hindsight, you can always see it. But I think you can’t see it when you’re doing it, and you shouldn’t be trying to see it when you’re doing it.

J: What is it about George Smiley in particular that’s made him such an enduring creation for le Carré fans? Just as a main character, he’s very reactive, very restrained, he’s not as dynamic as some supporting characters. What’s his attraction?

PS: I mean, he’s described as a person you would immediately forget. Anyone’s uncle. Like a piece of the wallpaper. And that is his great talent: that he makes people talk. [Turns to Tomas.] That sounded like a commercial, didn’t it? “He makes people talk.” [Laughs.] But that’s his great talent, and he doesn’t send any signals at all. And as we learn during the film, he is carrying a big cross, this man, and must be extremely lonely. But he never complains. He’s never whining. And he is the most loyal person you could ever imagine. He is beyond every limit that I could imagine doing myself. And I think that is sympathetic. He is a sympathetic character.

TA: I think there’s a kind of method at work which always works with an audience. That’s the kind of Clark Kent mechanism, where he’s sort of looked over, but we realize that he isn’t Clark Kent but, rather, he’s wearing blue tights under his suit. [Laughs.]

J: We so often see Gary Oldman in very different roles than this. Why Gary Oldman? How did his name even originally come up?

TA: It was quite hard, to be honest, to find the right name. We didn’t get the right idea for a very long time. I think over six months we discussed different names, because we needed some kind of a chameleon. And if you look at Gary’s work, what he’s done is very different personalities. He’s almost never type-casted. And I thought he would be ideal for the part when that came up. We almost gave up. And I said, “I don’t want to do anything casting before we have George.” So I flew over to Los Angeles to meet him, and…I didn’t have a list. I just had one name on the list, and it was him. And we connected very well, and I’m very happy he did it. He’s the kind of an actor…he’s so experienced that he dared not to do too much. You have to have done so many portraits, as he has done before, to dare to be this quiet and silent.

J: How was working with Alberto Iglesias? And who came up with the idea of the Julio Iglesias song at the end, the version of “La Mer”?

TA: The two Iglesiases… [Laughs.] People often ask Alberto if they’re related, and he said, “Yes,” but, of course, they’re not. Alberto is…I have been a big fan of his for 20 years or something. I think he’s one of the greatest contemporary composers there is, so it was indeed a dream come true when he said “yes” to do the score, and it turned out to be the perfect choice. The way he…I don’t know if you thought of that, but the way he finds the cues is exceptional. I haven’t heard that before, the way he’s not using the very obvious points in the film, where the music starts or stops. So he has a very unique way of cueing the music. And the story about Julio Iglesias was that we wanted to give a little glimpse of George’s personality when he’s by himself, so I wanted to see him listening to his favorite record. [Laughs.] And we were, like, “What kind of music would George listen to? We can’t have him listen to opera, that’s too easy.” So I thought, “Why not Julio Iglesias?” Because he’s everything this world is not. He’s the dream of the sun, the Mediterranean, the easy life. And we did the scene, but…it was too strange. [Laughs.] It was a little too much. But when I was listening to music to find the right song, for that scene, I found this very rare live recording of him singing “La Mer,” and we used it for the very end sequence instead, which was great.

PS: But that happened very early on. Tomas was already thinking of pieces of music very early on.

J: Lastly, where was John le Carré in the film?

TA: He’s in the second Christmas party sequence, where we see the Lenin Santa. When they start singing the Soviet national anthem, he’s in the front, singing. [Laughs.]

P.S. Don’t forget to check out our roundtable interview with Colin Firth!