A new slant on spy movies
SOVIET UNION’S ‘SPARROWS’ SEDUCE TARGETS FOR BLACKMAIL
When Red Sparrow author Jason Matthews completed his 33-year tenure with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he was not content with retirement.
Flush with time, Matthews took up writing. “The career was so experiential. There was a great gap to fill,” Matthews says of his adjustment to post-CIA life. “It was as much therapy as anything else, starting to write.”
The longtime fan of John le Carré and Ian Fleming began work on Red Sparrow, which was published in 2013 and became a bestseller and the foundation for a trilogy: Palace of Treason was the second in the series and the upcoming third is The Kremlin’s Candidate.
While the world of Red Sparrow was familiar to Matthews, the novel’s central character was a product of invention. Following a terrible accident, Dominika Egorova, played in the film by Jennifer Lawrence, leaves her career with the Bolshoi Ballet Company and is forced into a state-run school that trains her in sexual manipulation.
“Unlike the other characters in the book, Dominika was primarily imaginary,” Matthews says. “I wish I had met someone like Dominika. She had a career in ballet, until it was taken away from her. And then she was forced to go to Sparrow School.”
Matthews may not have encountered a real-life Dominika in his work with the CIA, but “honeypot” school was indeed part of Soviet intelligence training.
“In the Soviet Union, they had a school that taught young women the art of entrapment, the art of seduction, for blackmailing intelligence targets,” Matthews explains. “They had a Sparrow School in the city of Kazan, on the banks of the Volga River, where young women were taught how to be courtesans. They were called ‘Sparrows’.”
Dominika’s training leads her to CIA operative Nate Nash, portrayed in the film by Joel Edgerton. Matthews explains the unusual courtship between Nate and Dominika: “Inevitably, they fall in love, which is dangerous and forbidden for him. Like Romeo and Juliet, it’s a love affair that can’t end well.”
The manuscript for Red Sparrow found its way to the offices of Chernin Entertainment. Pro- ducers Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping and David Ready all took to the novel and they snapped up the rights to develop a screenplay based on the book.
“The first draw was Jason’s background as a CIA operative coupled with the fact that this was his debut novel,” says Chernin.
“We quickly knew it was one of the freshest, most unique spy stories we’d seen. We also loved seeing a spy story about a character who is not a Bourne, not a Bond, not a le Carré character,” adds Topping. “Dominika is a civilian who is forced into a spy plot, and whose training in spycraft is a means to survive, and to protect her mother.”
Francis Lawrence received the book as he added the finishing touches on The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2. Associate producer Cameron MacConomy remembers: “We were both reading it at the same time. Every day we would come in and find ourselves more and more excited about what we had read the night before.”
“I fell in love with the book immediately,” says Lawrence. “It just felt really fresh in terms of spy stories, and I fell in love with the character of Dominika Egorova and her personal journey, her personal story and her dilemma in the story.”
Red Sparrow opens in cinema today. – Citizen reporter