Thanks Dad, you stole our show!

I HAD always wondered why The Night Manager, the amazingly cinematic novel written by my father, John le Carré, over 20 years ago, had failed to find its way on to the big screen. It wasn’t for want of trying. Oscar-winner Sydney Pollack got Paramount Pictures to buy the book for him soon after it was first published, but failed to make it a reality.

More than a decade later, Brad Pitt took another shot at it. His production company, Plan B, has turned seriously challenging books – The Big Short, Moneyball, 12 Years A Slave – into terrific movies. But it too came up empty-handed.

Dad has said in the past that watching your novel getting made into a film is like seeing a cow being turned into an Oxo cube. And with a story that spans six countries over 500 pages, maybe The Night Manager was never destined to be a great movie.

But my brother Simon and I (we co-founded Ink Factory Films together in 2010) thought it could be great TV if we could make the plot as relevant to today’s audience as the novel was to readers 20 years before.

We cast the remarkable Elizabeth Debicki as a strong 21st Century woman. But there was more to be done to bring the novel’s inherently male world of spies and spymasters up to date.

It was Simon who accepted the brave task of asking Dad how would he feel if we took agent Mr Burr from the novel and turned him into a Mrs?

That Dad not only said ‘Yes’, but quickly embraced the idea tells you a lot about why he has remained so relevant for more than 50 years. And when Olivia Colman accepted the part, she brought another adaptation to her first meeting. Not only had our Mr Burr become a Mrs… she was a pregnant one to boot.

From there everything started to take hape. We moved the action from its original setting in 1990s Central America to the Middle East and Mediterranean.

The Hill Fort in Morocco, which we used for a spectacular explosives demonstration by arms dealer Richard Roper, was perhaps our most ambitious location. We arrived weeks beforehand in a valley with a dirt track winding through it. Over the next few weeks, bulldozers flattened hills and lay the foundations for a camp. Then barbed wire fences were built, tents arrived – and suddenly there we had it.

Arriving to find the camp full of soldiers of all countries (yes, that was a real Latvian you saw, and bona fide Russians, Ethiopians and Americans) it felt eerily real. This could be Roper’s private army.

Dad, meanwhile, was back in England, writing The Pigeon Tunnel, his new book which is out this autumn. But he couldn’t resist checking in to see how things were going.

And we knew that secretly, or not so secretly, he was wondering if there wasn’t a small role for him somewhere. After all, he’d been in 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and in 2014’s A Most Wanted Man.

So Dad flew to the set in Majorca for a cameo in the ‘lobster scene’. He was to be a ‘featured extra’ as it’s known: he’d nod and smile, but it wasn’t a talking part. He’d play a diner who ordered the last lobster salad. The drunken Corky tries to intercept the salad, forcing Tom Hiddleston to apologise.

For several hours, Dad, not always the most patient of souls, sat at his table while we shot the first part, watching with awe as the two Toms [Hiddleston and Hollander, who plays Corky] built towards the climax of the scene. And then the moment came: in the script Hiddleston walks over, apologises, and promises him a new meal.

Across the table came: ‘My dear man, what the hell’s going on?’ That wasn’t in the script. Hiddleston apologises. ‘I think you bloody well should.’ That wasn’t there either. What was going on? An extra was stealing the scene. But Dad was right: it didn’t make sense, if your food had just been stolen, that you’d just smile when the transgressors came to discuss it with you. Dad felt his character had to speak out. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise; the author had just rewritten his own scene – and made it better.