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. You understand?’ And anyone who has read the book, or seen the famous BBC adaptation, surely will understand. Inside the frame is a tale of conspiracy, murder and betrayal. Outside the frame is the labyrinthine spread of the Cold War. Welcome back to Mutually Assured Destruction.

Alfredson is masterminding his operation from an office in the old Inglis Barracks in Mill Hill, north London. A candle smoulders atop an Ikea table where he has arranged some pre-production artwork — but, in spite of these homely touches, the place has a chill that matches le Carré’s text. Some years ago, a local housing programme was postponed because of low-level radiation in the soil. And, in 1988, an IRA bomb detonated at the barracks, killing one soldier and injuring another nine. We don’t mention this to Alfredson.