What makes Statham such an enjoyable action star, I think, is the fact that he looks like the most evil and disreputable kind of hooligan but manages to convince us that there’s a decent guy in there somewhere. In “Killer Elite” (adapted from Ranulph Fiennes’ novel “The Feather Men” by director Gary McKendry and co-writer Matt Sherring), he plays a onetime super-secret British SAS fighter named Danny who’s retired himself back to the Australian outback, where the girl he grew up with (Aussie model/actress Yvonne Strahovski) is hanging around waiting for him in various fashion-shoot locations. Of course that won’t last, and when Danny’s onetime Yank mentor Hunter (it’s Robert De Niro, in one of those baffling recent De Niro performances that’s above a cameo but not quite an actual role) gets taken prisoner by some mysterious Middle Eastern potentate, we’re off on an exceptionally convoluted journey from Oman to London to Paris, full of bombs, guns, period automobiles and double-crosses.

I’m not sure I can explain the plot, and not totally convinced that McKendry could either. (This is his feature-film debut, and I look forward to much more morally ambivalent but highly watchable trash from him.) That also may not be a liability; Fiennes’ novel — which is supposedly based on real Cold War-era history — is an ultra-tangled yarn of mercenaries, defrocked agents gone rogue, reactionary conspiracies, vengeful Arab sheiks and a British military campaign in the Middle East so secret it remains blacked out today. Part of the idea in “Killer Elite” is that Danny, Hunter and Spike (Owen), the shadowy British agent who’s pursuing them, do not themselves understand the larger parameters of the game they’re playing. Which certainly does not stop them from striking cool poses, wearing vintage shades and spreading mayhem across two continents, in a movie that might not have too much intelligence, coherence or morality but is nonetheless confident, sneaky, stylish and never boring.

Perry — and he’s always, fondly, Perry, more like a son than a hero — is likable enough, but there’s something unformed about him. We don’t want to suspect commercial motives in a writer as strong as le Carré, any more than we care to suspect lechery in a friend’s May-December affair. But there’s something less than seemly when a writer of le Carré’s pedigree and maturity keeps writing main characters playable by movie stars instead of character actors. It’s as if the author of “The Perfect Spy,” after a career spent making literature out of espionage, has decided he wants to be Ian Fleming after all.

To be fair, no one would ever mistake “Our Kind of Traitor” for “Thunderball.” It’s too well-written for that, and too structurally tricky besides. Like his beloved touchstone Joseph Conrad, le Carré tells his story here through nested narrative filters. Roughly the first third of the book recounts how a lapsed academic like Perry came to be brokering the defection of a billionaire Russian money launderer named Dima to Great Britain. At first we find them in Antigua, as a friendly tennis match with the comically boorish Russian evolves into the makings of an international incident. Gradually we learn that we’re getting the story secondhand, recapped alternately by Perry and his plucky girlfriend, Gail, to their MI5 debriefers. At first this is complicated verging on baroque, but le Carré has the nuances of their interrogators’ separate voices down perfectly, and it’s all tidy enough in retrospect.

The middle third of the book focuses on Perry and Gail’s indoctrination into the ways of the British Secret Service. They learn the finer points of tradecraft from experts who can only dream of the access that our heroes have blithely lucked into. A defection in Paris is planned, and we learn more about the destabilizingly massive amounts of money that Russian oligarchs have been shunting around the planet lately.

Shining a spotlight at corners of the world we ignore to our cost is where le Carré usually excels, but Russian billionaires aren’t exactly untrodden ground in recent fiction. (Martin Cruz Smith, in particular, has been doing a sturdy job of translating thorough research into palatable thrillers.) Even if a certain freshness of subject is lacking here, le Carré can still write circles around most novelists, spy or otherwise. The climax partakes of the author’s signature nonchalant authority about espionage, with excruciatingly tense vigils punctuated by absurdly brief, confident action. It all invites credulity, though by now whatever we do or don’t find believable in such an esoteric profession owes a lot to previous work in the genre, the best of it le Carré’s own. If it’s hard for him to sound a false note, it may be because he tuned the piano himself years ago.

Repeating himself is harder for le Carré to avoid. We’ve met and loved his overmatched naifs before, and seen many of them introduced, as here, playing at some innocuous pastime: riding a wonky bicycle in “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” docenting antically for bored tourists in “Absolute Friends,” doing a birthday-party magic act in “Single & Single,” and now playing boyishly energetic tennis in “Our Kind of Traitor.” A le Carré hero exists to be comeupped by the world for his innocence.

Dima, too, for all the blood on his hands and the rubles in his Swiss bank accounts, cherishes some endearingly childlike illusions about the superiority of a British public-school education. Alas, like the infighting spymasters back in London, he registers more strongly than le Carré’s hero. Perry’s nice enough, but as readers we’d much rather hear Dima stipulating about his daughter, “My Natasha go to Eton School, OK? Tell this to your spies. Or no deal.” Over Perry’s demurral he adds, “I pay good. I give swimming pool. No problem.”

No problem is right, either with le Carré’s assured dialect comedy or his usual fine, understated internal monologues, tightly clipped as a military mustache. A veteran novelist’s wee impatience with the mundane bricklaying of fiction is detectable in a paragraph that reads, in its entirety, “Business with the bottle and water jug” — but let it stand.

The problem, what there is of it, lies with a focus so ripped from the headlines that the author concludes with an actual 2009 story reprinted from the Observer. Time was, we looked to le Carré for next year’s news, not last year’s. Over the last few books, sadly, le Carré’s grown more reactive. As a result, many of his fans have gone from rabidly anticipating his next effort to more respectfully marveling at his undiminished productivity.

It’s a measure of how much longtime readers owe the man that we keep returning to le Carré’s work expecting revelations instead of his usual simple, undervalued proficiency. For him to astonish us again, as he once did with “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” or “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” he may need a fresh story more worthy of his gifts, his energy and his doughty outraged liberalism. Is it too greedy to hope that this precise anatomist of the world’s most ruthless bureaucracies might yet turn his twilight powers to the great slow crisis of our time — the one that, by its very incremental pace, has so far bested all attempts to turn it into bracingly cautionary fiction? In other words, wouldn’t it be just too perfect if the arch-poet of the Cold War could yet perform the service of writing us the great unwritten novel of global warming?

Former book editor/critic of the San Francisco Chronicle and director of literature at the National Endowment for the Arts, David Kipen recently opened Libros Schmibros, a lending library/used bookshop for the once majority-Jewish, now majority-Latino Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights.

Since the end of the Cold War, le Carré — who years ago admitted to playing a “tiny” part in the conflict during a stint as a British spy in Germany from 1959 to 1964 — has found plenty to write about in the contemporary scene. From the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 to the soulless skulduggery of multinational pharmaceutical corporations in Africa, he seems more engaged — and decidedly more outraged — than ever before. Le Carré’s latest novel, “Absolute Friends” (to be published Jan. 12), takes on the War on Terror and the U.S. invasion of Iraq; if anything, he finds the wilderness of smoke and mirrors surrounding both more treacherous than the old-school intrigues between the Soviets and the West.

The hero of “Absolute Friends,” Ted Mundy, is an Englishman with international yearnings, a former spy who was dragged into the secret world in the 1970s by Sasha, a German-born friend of his firebrand ’60s youth. Reduced in the post-Cold War years to working as a tour guide in one of King Ludwig’s Bavarian castles, Mundy rails against Britain’s support for the war in Iraq. But when Sasha resurfaces and invites Mundy to do more than talk, the choice turns out to be trickier than either anticipates. Salon reached le Carré at his home in England to talk with him about the role of intelligence agencies in the post-Sept. 11 era, the eternal problem of reconciling politics with human decency and his dismay at seeing two nations he admires embroiled in a war he deplores.

What interests you in writing about a character like Mundy, who’s the pawn of a lot of external forces, rather than a man like George Smiley [the protagonist of "Tinker, Tailor" and several other novels], who is usually driving the action?

Sasha and Mundy appealed to me because both men are historical prisms. They’re relics of history. Mundy, of his father’s colonial history and of the unbreakable English class system that sets him up as a member of the chosen class, and Sasha with that appalling background that he comes from, which extends back into Nazism. What brings them together is the feeling, though they never quite express it, that their origins should not become their destinies. They’re determined to make new people of themselves.

I’ve always struggled to reconcile human decency with political necessity. When you talk about the two kinds of character, actually George Smiley is both kinds. He’s somebody who can make things happen but also, during those Cold War years, accepted that he was the creature of almost unstoppable forces. He was a kind of moderator between the two great monoliths. I don’t think it’s quite so easy as to say that there are those who manipulate and those who are manipulated.

Nick Amory, Mundy’s former handler, is another fascinating character.

To me he’s the son of Smiley. He’s inherited all that stuff and he believes in the service he’s performing to his country and the service that he’s a member of. But he’s completely dismayed by the way the world has gone. He says somewhere, “I used to believe that I was right to lie for my country, and now I don’t know what the truth is.”

He seems more lost in a way than Mundy is.

I think we’re all wrestling at the moment, wherever we stand politically — I don’t mean that in party-political terms or doctrinal terms, but however we feel about the present state of affairs — wrestling with interpretations of patriotism and loyalty. As somebody who played his part in the Cold War in a minute way, I think of myself as somebody who loves my country. But it’s taken a terribly wrong step. And therefore my own sense of patriotism is confused.

A wrong step in following the U.S. into the war in Iraq?

Yes. I love America and see America as, historically speaking, the great shining light of liberal thought and opinion and many liberal actions — from Jefferson to Kennedy and beyond. But what with what is happening now, my views are not anti-American but they are profoundly anti-neocon ideologue. I think that a great country is being propelled by the wrong forces and my own country mistook the current. I’m told that Blair could practically run for president in the United States. The comedy is that his position here is anything but stable.

That must be a shock.

It is a shock, especially for those like myself who wept for joy when he was elected at the end of that dreadful post-Thatcher period, finally. It is extraordinary to discover that we voted for somebody whose neoconservative position was really no different to Thatcher’s. Mercifully, he has enacted social reforms to a small degree, but the vision that we had of a more liberal country has, I think, been greatly disappointed.

One aspect of the current war on terrorism that must be particularly interesting to you is the resurgent emphasis on intelligence, especially human intelligence, rather than the high-tech stuff they’d been focusing on in recent years. Yet the old-school intelligence people that you depict in “Absolute Friends” — people like Amory — feel sidelined.

There are two breeds of intelligence people, two kinds of spook. We have people like Amory, who derive their attitudes from the Cold War. I think it’s perfectly true that after the Cold War ended and the secret war against terror and the business of spying on terror got going, as always the new war was being fought with the weapons of the old one and it didn’t work. It’s terribly difficult to spy on a multinational organization that doesn’t oblige you by using all the toys you can catch them out with: telephones, cellphones, radio, codes that you can break. It doesn’t have a command and control structure that you can penetrate. If you get a brave or sufficiently corrupt person to get alongside the leadership, he still doesn’t have anything like access to what used to be thought of as “the plans.” It’s all fragmented. They work in tiny cells. They’ve often transmitted their messages and their money by word of mouth. It’s very, very hard to get into.

That’s one side of it. The technological revolution in intelligence left people with the notion that the human side of intelligence was of secondary importance. I think that’s always been a great nonsense. It was a great nonsense in the Cold War too, even if we did manage to break their codes. I think the CIA and the Brits or whoever else would much rather have had access to Gorbachev’s private secretary than to Gorbachev’s telegrams. Human sources — you can ask them questions, they can reply. You can tell them what to look out for, what to listen for. You can get an impression of whether they think people are lying, which is completely unavailable in technological intelligence. They’re vastly more economic.

How so?

Your intelligence budget for the CIA alone is, I think, $30 billion a year. The result is a huge proliferation of junk. The art of refining that and turning it into a lucid statement you can write on a postcard and put in front of a busy politician really is very, very difficult stuff. The intelligence business is threatened by exactly the same bad people that your business is threatened by. In good journalism, you’ve got people back from the field who are sitting behind desks who can smell a rat when it comes in. They can identify the young Turk who has just been taken on by the foreign desk who wants to make his name and may be fabricating. They can look at information obtained and think, “Well that may be planted so that we’ll think that way. But is it really true?”

In the intelligence world, with so much money around, there are tremendously sophisticated peddlers who are just making stuff up, feeding information to the empty areas of your head and taking huge sums of money for it and disappearing into the smoke. And I think some of the intelligence services fell for some of that stuff.

What is the other kind of spook?

The other kind of spook in my book is trying to produce the information that conventional intelligence services wouldn’t or couldn’t produce and conducting the kind of operation they’d shy away from.

Do outfits like the kind you depict in the book actually exist?

I have no idea. But it’s the kind of thing that Donald Rumsfeld’s rather shadowy Office of Special Plans might have been set up to do, that is, to bypass the CIA and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency and to produce, by whatever means, sexed-up proof that certain bad things were happening.

In order to justify policy decisions?

Yes. Here, in Britain, we’ve watched this same process happening. The thing about spying is that it’s simple. It sees itself as a pure science, exactly as very good journalistic reporting is. As with journalism, there are two absolutely sacred areas. One is the sanctity of sources and the other is the objective truth. What we saw here, in the preparation of that disastrous dossier that so embarrassed Colin Powell in the United Nations, was the attempted corruption, if you like, of pure intelligence and, at a certain level, the politicization of the intelligence arm. When you do that as a politician you actually deprive yourself of true objectivity. You say, “I know there are weapons of mass destruction out there, so go and damn well find them!” That’s no way to give a brief. You’ve got to say, “Come to me and tell me what you’ve found.”

Things have come to a pretty pass if you’re making the CIA out to be a beleaguered bastion of integrity.

I’m certainly doing that here. A hundred years ago, for a short time, I was a totally ineffectual spook. What I remember in all seriousness is the extraordinary integrity with which people handled information. They may have gotten it wrong here and there, but they would not be bought off a particular view. And if they didn’t know, they said they didn’t know.

But when the pressure is so intense and politicians are screaming at the spooks, “You say there’s nothing there. How can you prove a negative? You’ve got to say that there’s maybe something there!” That was the level of conversation that was going on. The CIA is not an organization for which I have a natural sympathy, but I have to say that the marginalization of their product — the American taxpayer paid for it, for heaven’s sake, it should have been properly evaluated. Instead of which, a great impatience set in among the policymakers and they did something of almost medieval stupidity, which is to say, “Go and find me a different truth.”

The old saw is that it became difficult to write espionage novels after the end of the Cold War. But you’ve gone on to describe the ways that power has been reconfigured in the world. How do you frame a spy novel now? What do you see as the forces at work?

As with previous books, I’ve just used the furniture of the spy world to tell a fable about our time. What do you mean by “the forces at work”?

In the Smiley novels, the Cold War novels, you have these two superpowers and this very complicated minuet going on between them and also this moral smudging that happens in the course of that. Some people might say that today you don’t have the same clear struggle that you had during that time, but in a way there’s more of a strong moral sense in your recent work. It feels to me that in this book it’s far more clear who’s right and who’s wrong.

I think that a great deal of disenchantment is spoken for here. I did believe that when the Cold War ended there was a moment when the world could be redesigned. A superpower had emerged. Russia was on its knees. The knight had died inside his armor. At that moment, there were wonderful things that could have been done. The biggest question was whether we could resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, which was constantly the tinderbox for the whole of the Middle East and for a great section of world policy. Beyond that, whether the surviving superpower could exist and define itself without the existence of an enemy. Those are the two mysteries that are still in the air.

The bizarre thing is that instead of becoming less ideological, the people who are in charge of the last superpower have become, at least in this administration, even more ideological.

I think they have become insanely ideological. I feel that these are tendentious ideologies and we need to have them clearly defined for us. We’ve almost reached a point, I think, where people should state their religious convictions when they enter high office. It’s certainly of great concern to me. It really matters if a politician believes, for example, that the Jewish people have an absolute right to “Greater Israel.” That’s something we need to know about. If he believes that Islam is something close to the Antichrist, that’s also something we need to hear about.

Do you feel that leaders are insisting that their religious beliefs — not just moral principles, but literal religious beliefs — be enacted in the political realm? That’s not being acknowledged.

People are not acknowledging it, not looking it in the eye, and if you do look at it in the eye, you get into deep trouble. My book’s just come out here [in Britain] and been greatly attacked by the right-wing press and applauded on the whole by the critical press. One argument that’s been used against me is very interesting: that the book is too political to be a novel. It leaves me with the impression that for as long as you write about the status quo, you’re OK. But to take up arms against the status quo is subversive.

There are two ways that those critical of the war have described the motivations behind it. One interpretation is completely mercenary: It’s just about oil. But some of these people — however much we may disagree with them — are also motivated by ideals that are, as you put it, often religious in nature. That’s what’s confusing about it. The left is used to thinking that it has idealism on its side. These people have these ideals that may seem crackpot to us, but they believe they’re going to change the world for the better.

They do. That’s what’s really terrifying. In order to carry out their campaigns, they have to reduce the world to black and white. They have to arrogate to themselves the right to determine what is a bad state and what is a good state. They also arrogate to themselves not just the right to take preemptive action, but to take preventative action. There’s a difference in international law. The effect is that the superpower can say, “We don’t like the look of that country. It has bad intentions, and we will attack it.” It doesn’t have to say that the country is threatening us.

The attack on Iraq was planned, we now know, about three or four years before it took place. It was 9/11 that legitimized it. Through an extraordinary trick of public persuasion in which they were greatly assisted by the corporate media, the neoconservative ideologues persuaded the U.S. to a great extent — one’s told seven out of 10 people — that somehow Saddam was mixed up in the destruction of the twin towers and the attack on the Pentagon. He wasn’t. They admit they have no evidence of this. Anyone who’s taken even one bus ride through the Middle East would surely know that between the secular Baathists of Iraq and the infuriated fundamentalists that follow Osama bin Laden there is no conceivable bond possible. The religious extremists loathed Saddam because Saddam and the Baath Party were secular and anti-clerical.

Are your critics claiming that this new book is too political to be literary?

Too political to be real. My problem is that I think the status quo stinks and I want to say that. I found myself joining the big marches against the war and mingling with people who just thought they had no chance of being heard. There is no political party in England with any power, any force or any credibility that has opposed the war. And so I’ve felt, well, I can do something and I do feel this stuff and I will make a story about it.

Boorman’s playful dip into the tropical fleshpots is greatly assisted by a cast led by Pierce Brosnan as MI6 operative Andy Osnard, a scheming, avaricious scalawag hornier than Brosnan’s Bond and lacking 007′s redemptive patriotism. British intelligence assigns Osnard to the Panamanian backwater as punishment for his sins. Once there, he enlists expatriate ex-con Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), a tailor to Panama’s political elite, in an effort to destabilize the country and enrich themselves in the process. Along the way, Brosnan’s whiskey-swilling Osnard attempts to screw every female in the land, including Harry’s wife, Louisa, played by Jamie Lee Curtis.

With generous dollops of black humor and sterling supporting performances from Leonor Varela, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine McCormack and playwright Harold Pinter as Pendel’s Uncle Benny, “The Tailor of Panama” serves Boorman’s legend well. The 67-year-old creator of such films as “Deliverance,” “Excalibur,” “The General” and “Hope and Glory,” is a mercurial, entertaining personality who recently sat down to discuss the glories of Panama’s whorehouses, J.R.R. Tolkien and one psychotic’s contribution to the Oxford English Dictionary, among other things.

Spoiler alert: Boorman also discusses the ending of “The Tailor of Panama” at length in response to the sixth and seventh questions, which are on Page 2.

How close is the Panama you filmed in to the Panama of le Carri’s novel?

You know, the book was translated into Spanish and widely read there. So I encountered quite a bit of hostility from the Panamanians because they were wounded by this description of them. More so because it was closer to the truth than they would like. But what I found there is what’s in the film. Which is: Panama City is a money-laundering, drug-running place with all these banks that’s totally corrupt. And their canal is this vital gateway. It’s a very steamy mix. Also, it’s the brothel capital of Central America.

For that brothel scene where Harry [Rush] goes to see Osnard [Brosnan], we were shooting in this hotel. There was a young Panamanian who was helping us, and he said, “My uncle’s got a chain of brothels. I can get you any number of whores you want.” So I said, “OK, I’ll need about 24.” Then I went to the hotel and told them what we were up to. They said, “We have whores. What’s the matter with ours? Why do you have to bring others in?” It caused some bad feelings there, so I compromised. I brought 12 in and used 12 of their whores. That’s Panama.

Were there really vibrating beds and hardcore porno on the tube, like in the film?

No, I added those things. All these scenes were about finding settings where Osnard can put Harry at a disadvantage. He’s torturing him. So he takes him to that hotel or to that gay disco, settings that make Harry feel uncomfortable.

The Irish press reported that you were enraged with your crew because they were spending too much time in the bordellos. Did that really happen?

That was a very unfortunate remark of mine. It wasn’t the film crew itself but the construction crew. They were painters and carpenters — some of them had never been out of Ireland in their lives. Suddenly, they’re in this place where all these things are possible. I went away, and when I came back, they hadn’t progressed as much as I’d hoped because they’d been expending some of their energies on visiting these houses of ill repute. But it’s kind of tricky because their union is threatening to sue me over this. Some of these fellows got in trouble with their wives. So I regret saying that very much.

What draws you to a scoundrel like Osnard?

That’s the thing, Osnard is a totally reprehensible character, and yet, you kind of like him. He’s got a certain charm. That’s largely due to Pierce himself. Both Osnard and Harry are strangers in a strange land. Le Carri says these spies, particularly British espionage — which has a long history because the British Empire was controlled by spying — have nothing left to spy on. Even the Cold War’s gone. They’re just treading water. So they produce that sort of self-involved character like Osnard, who’s out for whatever he can get. And he’s delighted to find out some information, true or not, that he can impress his superiors with. They want something good enough to earn a seat at the table with the Americans.

Le Carri was himself a spy, and he was recruited very young. He said it destroyed his relationships because he couldn’t confide in anybody. These spies are posted to these places, and they become isolated and disassociated. So here’s this spy that’s lost. And then here’s this other guy who’s reinvented himself and living a lie. What Harry can do is weave these stories and invent things. They become very dependent on each other. Their relationship becomes kind of important to them because they have this secret knowledge. It’s almost like a seduction, like they’re having an affair.

What was it like working with le Carri on the screenplay?

He wrote a first draft of the screenplay, which was full of vitality and fascinating things, and I did subsequent drafts and worked from the book. We only met a couple of times. He’s a marvelous man. Tremendous mind. Very witty. A great raconteur. We had a terrific fax relationship. I would write a scene and send it to him, and he’d scribble notes on it and send it back. That’s how we proceeded. He’s been unhappy with previous film adaptations of his books, and they’re not easy to adapt. Very complex. Great galleries of characters. Subplots. They work by an accumulation of details. Tough stuff to put on film.

When we were at the Berlin Film Festival with the film, at the press conference, he was asked, “What’s the process of adapting a book into a film?” And he said, “It’s like turning a cow into a bouillon cube.” I thought it was a great metaphor because in a sense, the bouillon cube does contain the essence of a cow.

That said, how faithful is the film adaptation to the novel?

I think it’s faithful to the characters and the basic situations, but the ending is very different. The book came out before the Canal was handed over to the Panamanians. It postulated a situation where the Americans did what they did to Noriega — took over the Canal to prevent it from being given away. They bomb Panama. And at the end, Harry’s so filled with shame and self-disgust at what he’s wrought, that he walks into the flames and immolates himself. I felt I couldn’t get to that point in the film. It was too apocalyptic. So I pulled back and had Harry shooting Osnard. We actually filmed that. And when I put it together, even that seemed too heavy a solution.

It trivialized that big scene where Harry confesses to his wife, because he’s just killed somebody. So I reshot it so Osnard escapes. The tone of the film is that the bad guys get away with the money. For me the turning point for Harry, and the film, is the death of his friend Mickey. Harry feels responsible for Mickey’s death. And that’s the point at which he says, OK, I’m going to tell the truth now. He tries to tell the truth, but no one wants to listen to him. His life is in ruins, which is more interesting than having Panama in ruins. And when he tells the truth to his wife, it redeems him.

Was that a decision you made as the director?

Yeah. I felt that I’d gotten to a false point there. The other thing I changed had to do with an audience preview we had out in the San Fernando Valley — the “killing fields” of movies. They recruited people by asking, “Do you want to see Pierce Brosnan playing a spy?” They were expecting a quasi-Bond film, and it colored the whole way they looked at the film. It didn’t get great scores. That’s when I realized that I was going to have to make it clear at the beginning of this film that he was a bad guy. Then I shot that scene at the beginning where he’s sent off to Panama. You get the notion that he’s this disgrace. That solved that problem along with a few tongue-in-cheek references to the whole Bond thing.

Is that a humbling process — having your film test-screened?

It was horrible, just ghastly. Then they get a focus group together to tell you all the things you did wrong in making the picture. I do think it’s dangerous the way studios slavishly follow whatever the scores are. But previews can be helpful. In this case, it defined a problem, and we solved it. In Berlin, we showed it on a big screen to an audience of 2000 people, and they embraced it. Everything was fine, but a lot of films have been completely abandoned after not doing well enough in previews. In a way, it gets the executives off the hook because they don’t have to make a decision or commit to a film. They just think, “It didn’t score well; let’s dump it.”

How intimately were you involved in the casting of this picture? Obviously having Pierce Brosnan in the key role gave the whole thing a sense of irony it wouldn’t have had otherwise.

I started out with Geoffrey because that’s a deceptively difficult role. He’s playing a man who’s playing a man. And it couldn’t look like acting. We needed a very solid core to this character. Then the studio said, “We don’t think he’s enough to carry the film. We need someone in the other role.” I came up with Brosnan. I could see the dangers of that, and so could Pierce. He was trampling on his image in a way. Those were the only roles that the studio was interested in having an opinion about. There were just a couple of others to cast, including Brendan Gleeson, who was in “The General.”

I wanted to ask you about “The Lord of the Rings.” Were you planning to do a live-action version of the trilogy in the ’70s?

Yes, I spent a year on it. United Artists owned the rights. And at the end of the day, when I was ready with it, UA had gone into a very bad period. They didn’t have the money. It was expensive, you know. For a while, I got Disney interested in doing it. But it languished there as well. Then I told Tri-Star I wanted to do it. The rights then were with Saul Zaentz, who produced the animated version. I was authorized to offer him a million dollars for the rights. He wanted more, but Tri-Star wouldn’t pay any more.

Is it true you were so distraught over it that you could never watch the animated version? And how do you feel about the Peter Jackson film due out this year?

Yes, that is true. I never watched the version animated by Ralph Bakshi. As for the Jackson epic, I think it was a brilliant idea to make three films. Fundamentally, what had happened for me is that I made “Excalibur.” Everything I learned, the technical problems I had to resolve in planning for “The Lord of the Rings,” I applied to “Excalibur.” That was my recompense. I’m glad “The Lord of the Rings” is being made now, and I’m looking forward to seeing it. I’m sure it’ll be a big success.

Did you ever meet J.R.R. Tolkien?

I didn’t meet him; I corresponded with him. He was reluctant to have a film made of it at all. It was only to secure the education of his grandchildren that he agreed to sell the film rights. He wrote to me and asked me how I was going to make it — live action or animation. And I told him I was going to make it with actors. He wrote back, saying, “I’m so relieved, because I had this nightmare of it being an animated film.” And of course, that’s what happened. But he was dead by the time an animated film was made.

I know you corresponded with James Dickey regarding “Deliverance.” Do you often do that — correspond with your collaborators?

Not really. The problem with Dickey was that he was such a drunk. Whenever we met, he’d get very excited and terribly soused. You could never get a sensible word out of him. We had great times, but it wasn’t helpful to the script. So we did a lot of it by correspondence. I’d send him a comment and he’d send it back. It was marvelous. But in person he was just a mess.

I remember I brought him out here to L.A. with me to work on the script, and he was holed up with this dancer. I couldn’t get him out of his room for three days. We finally go back to Atlanta, and on the plane, he falls straightaway into an alcoholic sleep. About an hour later, he came awake, and he says to me, “If I wasn’t a famous poet and a Baptist, I’d divorce my wife and marry the dancer.” [Laughs.]

Will your next film be about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary?

Yes, I’ve just done a script on it, The Professor and the Madman.” This Scot named James Murray was the editor. He was an autodidact with no formal education. But he spoke 20 languages fluently, and he was the only guy who could do it. Even though all these Oxford dons were horrified that they had to turn to someone who was academically unqualified. The other guy who helped him was an American surgeon who had gone crazy, killed someone and was locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane in England. He became the most important contributor to the book, and no one knew that he was a murderer and a madman. They had a great relationship, these two, and eventually James Murray got him released. Mel Gibson’s company is making it, but we still don’t know if he’s going to play one of these characters.

Most of your films tend to deal with the world of men and what it means to be a man. Why is that an important theme for you?

Because I’m a man. We live these very comfortable kinds of lives where we’re cut off from nature to a large extent. I think it’s the cause of neurosis if you’re not in touch with nature. There’s a danger that you become disassociated, and I believe it causes a lot of our problems. So I’m always compelled to set myself challenges in relation to nature, to put myself in touch with nature by sleeping out in the forest, swimming in rivers or going out to make these movies and testing myself.

Le Carré introduces another layer: a disgraced British intelligence operative named Osnard who is sent to Panama as his last chance to redeem himself. (Boorman and Andrew Davies adapted the author’s screenplay for the film.) Looking for someone with access to the country’s elite, Osnard (Pierce Brosnan) settles on Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), Panama’s most exclusive tailor.

Up to his eyeballs in debt after spending an inheritance on a failing farm, Harry needs the money Osnard can funnel his way. And Osnard is happy to use the bits of insignificant information Harry gleans from his tony clients to ensure his own future. Spurred by self-interest and Harry’s tidbits, Osnard concocts news of a “silent opposition,” a group that plans to clean up the layers of corruption the United States left behind after snatching Manuel Noriega.

Osnard has leverage to get Harry’s cooperation. The spy knows that Harry’s tales of being descended from Savile Row tailors is a lie, and that his late revered partner, who has the WASP-y name Arthur Braithwaite, was actually Harry’s late Jewish Uncle Benny (played amusingly, in flashback, by Harold Pinter). Benny taught Harry the trade, and Harry did five years in prison for burning down a shop so Benny could collect the insurance. It’s something he has never told his wife, Louisa (Jamie Lee Curtis in a warm, believable performance), and since he worships her he’s determined to keep the information from her.

“The Tailor of Panama” is a charade of two men using each other for their own ends, one of them (Harry) more likable than the other, but neither of them exactly innocent. The film is what Greene classified as an “entertainment,” though the tone (dramatic as well as moral) is considerably trickier than what that word might imply. The potential for real danger isn’t extricable from the tone of sophisticated irony, and since neither Harry’s nor Osnard’s motives are pure, “The Tailor of Panama” may throw audiences who want their reactions clean-cut. The fun of the picture is in the slyness the actors bring to the ever-shifting situation (there are good bits from Jon Polito as a swindling banker and Dylan Baker as a gung-ho U.S. general), and in the palpable pleasure Boorman takes in his own ability to juggle tones. Remember those funhouse sidewalks that moved up and down and back and forth as you attempted to walk them? Boorman directs the movie like a man who has learned to tap-dance on one of the contraptions without ever missing a step.

The movie straightforwardly, almost offhandedly, paints Noriega as a Frankenstein’s monster created by George Bush when he was head of the CIA and then dispatched when the general’s rampant greed made him an embarrassment. It’s typical of the movie’s casual bluntness, its certainty that adults can take a cold-eyed, witty entertainment without having to be coddled. Boorman uses Panama as a sort of petting zoo for the moneyed corrupt. Noriega’s gone but the wealthy are still getting rich from the schemes he presided over. These people know they’re dirty, but their money and Harry’s clothes, not to mention their own thimble-deep consciences, help them ignore the stench. But these are also the people whom Harry has to court and flatter in order to do his business. Any thoughts that this is going to be a story about reawakened ideals in the midst of corruption is given the kibosh early on. And in case we have any doubts, Boorman provides a juicy kicker: Brosnan’s Osnard quotes the final line of “Casablanca” with a coolly cynical flip. The only beautiful friendships here are of the quid pro quo variety.

“The Tailor of Panama” doesn’t have the coiled force of Boorman’s last movie, “The General.” It’s a relaxed, dapper piece of gamesmanship and, as with every movie Boorman has made since “Hope and Glory,” it reveals new talents while extending the themes that have always concerned him. Boorman has been skeptical for so long about the moral refinements Western civilization pretends to that he’s way beyond being shocked by the corruption of the Panamanian ruling class.

There’s a sly amusement, tinged with a faint repulsion, that Boorman hasn’t shown before. He regards Harry’s clients in something of the same way Luis Buñuel regarded the rich in his final films. And Boorman escapes the clichés that usually bedevil Western directors shooting in foreign locales — he doesn’t romanticize or judge. Where most directors would present beggars winding their way through stalled traffic, or people living in rooms that are practically on the sidewalk as Third World squalor, Boorman and his cinematographer, Philippe Rousselot, see teeming, and not necessarily hopeless, life.

Boorman must have been attracted to this material because it’s a story about storytellers. The “artists” in his films, the people who set about bringing their visions to life, have been dreamers, wizards, thugs, bullshit artists. Harry Pendel’s whole life is a story — Cockney Jewish apprentice/arsonist posing as Savile Row expatriate. And he does something of the same for his clients with his flattery, helping them create the vision of themselves that they want to see. Harry is creating out of whole cloth in more ways than one.

And it’s his yarn spinning, his flattering descriptions, that inspire Osnard to, in his reports, transform Mickie Abraxas (Brendan Gleeson, the star of “The General,” in a sweaty, passionate, bearishly untidy performance) from a drunken former resident of Noriega’s prisons to the leader of the silent opposition. Gleeson, along with Curtis and Leonor Varela, as Harry’s right-hand woman Marta, give the movie some human weight. They’re a reminder of the cost of the games Harry and Osnard are playing; the movie might seem too cynical without them.

At times “The Tailor of Panama” could use some more narrative drive, but Boorman’s work with his cast couldn’t be better. Brosnan so gleefully defaces his James Bond image that his performance is something of a shock. (At one point at the screening I saw, he uttered a crude euphemism for the female anatomy and you could feel the temperature in the room drop.) Osnard is a vulgarian opportunist at heart, and Brosnan embraces the character’s grossness. He seems to be having a good time teasing the audience into waiting for a glimpse of Bond’s suavity or sense of duty. It never comes and the self-satisfied smile on his face, the one that invites us to complicity in Bond movies, starts to feel like an affront, even dangerous.

Rush would seem to be all wrong for playing an ordinary man. Guinness was so good in “Our Man in Havana” precisely because he excelled at the madness of ordinary men. He conveyed it delicately, subtly. You get the feeling that had it been possible for Guinness to whittle down his acting to nothing more than the gleam in his eye he would have. Rush, on the other hand, is a showman. (That’s why he was so good as the Marquis de Sade in “Quills.”)

Rush makes that work for the part because Harry’s job calls for him to be a showman, cajoling his clients. The poignancy of Rush’s performance is in the way Harry sloughs off his willingness to please and begins to reckon the consequences of his actions, how he replaces false bonhomie with real heart. (The scenes between Rush and Curtis are some of the most authentic marital duets in recent memory.) Rush looks wonderful in his impeccably tailored suits, every crease and bend just right. “The Tailor of Panama” is about how Harry’s surface elegance works its way inward. Rush makes it a perfect fit.