Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Life with Dad is a thriller
BY LE CARRÉ’S SONS, SIMON & STEPHEN CORNWELL
HAVING A FAMOUS NOVELIST FOR A FATHER
Every child loves listening to stories. We were lucky – our father told them for a living. We travelled around Europe as we were growing up, living for a while in Crete and other places, and Dad told us stories. Sometimes he made them up. Sometimes he took them from books. Occasionally, as we got older, he would read to us from the novel he was working on... It was a very special part of our upbringing. He was always a master of anecdotes. But we weren’t properly aware until we were a bit older that Dad wasn’t only our father, David Cornwell: he was also somebody called John le Carré. That didn’t affect us at the time: le Carré was a remote notion to us, just Dad’s nom de plume. It wasn’t until we were much older that we realised what a deep effect his storytelling had on us and the way we saw the world. That’s how our family communicated, and still does: through stories.
As we were growing up, Dad taught us how to see the narratives that exist in the real world. Stories aren’t just for fiction. There are characters all around us.
And now we have children of our own, we hear them asking him questions – there’s a difference to the questions that grandchildren ask their grandparents – and Dad is open with his answers. It makes us realise how smart and self-aware he actually is. Any reader can guess he’s a clever man, but his emotional intelligence is extraordinary. All of that is crystallised in The Little Drummer Girl.
WHY WE CHOSE THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL
After we had such a success with The Night Manager in 2016, we wanted to make something equally ambitious. The Little Drummer Girl is a big book, about 660 pages, and like The Night Manager it travels all over the place – from West Germany to London, Greece and beyond. It has amazing characters that leap off the page, and in particular – uniquely for a le Carré novel – it has a strong female protagonist at its core.
That gives the story a timely, relevant feel. But at the same time, it’s deeply rooted in the late Seventies, when the novel is set. We updated The Night Manager to the present day, to keep it innovative.
We didn’t actually sit down and discuss the choice with our father. We didn’t have to: we knew that this novel is very close to his heart, and he’s eager to see it brought to new audiences. That could only be done properly through television. A feature film is too short to do it justice.
Like almost all Dad’s writing, The Little Drummer Girl is prescient, and although it’s set 40 years ago it feels contemporary and very relevant to today. That’s because, although he draws on his past experiences, our father lives very much in the present. He’s 87, and he’s constantly surrounded by the day’s papers as well as history books. He has a double perspective, and that enables him to see where things are going.
If you sit down for a conversation with him, you’d better be prepared to talk about what’s happening now. He’s been a hugely successful and influential novelist for more than half a century, and a major reason for that is his constant focus on the here and now. It’s the current choices that humanity faces, the immediate dilemmas we face, that fascinate him and always have done.
WORKING WITH OUR FATHER
Getting a major TV series right is always nerve-wracking... especially when the author is your father. We always want to work closely with authors when we adapt books, and we want to get it right because you only get that one chance. But we wouldn’t be human if extra pressure was not added by the fact these are our dad’s books. It definitely adds an extra dimension. If things went wrong, the next family dinner might be awkward! Luckily, this is a golden age for television drama. Only five years ago, it was rare for major films stars to want to do TV. Now, they all do. We’re able to get great directors – on The Little Drummer Girl, it was the brilliant South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook. He was able to attract a stellar cast, including
Florence Pugh as Charlie, Alexander Skarsgard as the mysterious stranger who lures her into danger, and Michael Shannon as Kurtz the spymaster.
This golden age is the perfect foundation for adaptations of le Carré. A big budget mini-series with high production values enables us to bring out all the subtleties of the characters and the tale-telling. The books deserve it. Spending lots of money isn’t an automatic recipe for success, but it’s such a privilege to be translating our father’s work to the screen that we couldn’t hold back. These books are in our DNA, after all.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Everybody asks whether there’ll be a second series of The Night Manager. The answer is, we don’t know – at the moment. The stars – Tom Hiddleston, Olivia Colman, Hugh Laurie – are all in such demand that scheduling is tricky. And the story has to be a really good one. Of course we’d love to do it though! Meanwhile, we’re also getting excited about the prospect of making The Spy Who Came In From The Cold for television.
That is a challenge, because there is already a film version, starring Richard Burton and Claire Bloom. It came out more than 50 years ago but many still say it’s one of the greatest spy movies ever. The bar is set high.
We love the idea of a TV version, as it comes very close to the start of the George Smiley series that forms the core of le Carré’s work. And if The Spy Who... was a success, we’d inevitably want to continue – and remake The Looking Glass War, Tinker, Tailor and Smiley’s People, as well as tackling the other great books in the series such as The Honourable Schoolboy and A Legacy Of Spies.
The challenge would be to capture the period detail, and retain their relevance to today, just as with The Little Drummer Girl.
To do that, we’d have to find an actor who could match Alec Guinness as Smiley. Who might that be? Suggestions on a postcard please...