Salon.com > Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Oscar-nominated Oldman still feels Globe snub

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:45:00 +0000

A woman in the audience gets up to ask Gary Oldman a question. He's finally been nominated for an Academy Award, 26 years after his breakthrough performance in "Sid and Nancy," she says, but it's for the quietest and most subdued role of his entire career. He has played Beethoven and Dracula and Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as Sid Vicious; does he regret that "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" didn't allow him to show more emotional range?

Oldman is a reflective, soft-spoken fellow who considers questions carefully before answering them, but he doesn't have to think about this one. "It was greatly liberating, powerfully liberating, to play George Smiley," he says. If he plays a character who's called upon to cry, Oldman explains, "Those are Gary's tears. They have to be real. I've had to feel that grief or that anger, and then the performance is contaminated by that emotion." With Smiley, he goes on, he didn't have to display that emotion on the outside; the character is a profoundly melancholy, even tragic figure, but all that emotion is bottled up inside, in the classic English style.

The state of the post-Cold War spy novel

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:15:00 +0000

How did the end of the Cold War change the modern spy novel? Why is it that Cold War tales still seem to resonate so deeply with international audiences? How is our sense of who our enemy is reflected in contemporary spy fiction?

As "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," based on the classic John le Carré novel, hits theaters today, Salon asked a round table of bestselling thriller writers, intelligence specialists and historians to share their thoughts.

We want to know what you think, too. Post your thoughts about the future of spy stories in our Comments section, or blog it on Open Salon (tag it: FutureSpy) and we'll add the best thinking to the list below.

Jeffery Deaver, bestselling thriller writer and author of "Carte Blanche"

Pick of the week: Bleak and brilliant “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000

"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" takes place long ago in a kingdom far, far away -- the economically depressed and socially divided Britain of the early 1970s, during an especially dank and stagnant portion of the Cold War. Swedish director Tomas Alfredson (who also made the vampire cult hit "Let the Right One In") fills in just enough background detail to let us know that this era is ancestral to our own, showing the back streets of London populated with pot-smoking hippies and multicultural recent immigrants. But the story of John le Carré's legendary espionage novel (adapted here by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan) is largely about a group of aging men who are already out of place in post-swinging, pre-punk London, intelligence officers fighting a clandestine war whose moral coordinates, if it ever had any, have long since become obscured.