Interview – Tomas Alfredson: outside the frame

Without warning, Tomas Alfredson jumps up and starts wading about the room like a water bird treading over lily pads. ‘There’s a famous sketch by a Swedish comedian,’ he explains by way of a voiceover, ‘in which he’s walking through a meadow of tall grass. He’s walking, struggling through this grass that reaches up above his waist.’ Alfredson pushes out at imaginary foliage around his midriff. ‘Then he steps out into a road and you realise that — all that time — he wasn’t wearing any trousers. Completely naked from the waist down.’ The mime stops as suddenly as it started. ‘That is the cinema of paranoia!’

And that is also the sensibility that Alfredson hopes to bring to his forthcoming film of John le Carré’s classic spy thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Worry not, though. This Swedish director isn’t planning to inject trouserless high jinks into the plot. Instead, he clarifies himself by tracing rectangles in the air: ‘It’s all about what you don’t see, what’s outside the frame.