Espionage novels and movies were beginning to seem about as redundant as Cold War tales until the hightech US surveillance plane, the EP-3E Aries II, collided with a Chinese jet last Sunday and reminded the world of the lengths and expense to which some countries will go to keep tabs on each other. The timing may well benefit The Tailor of Panama, John Boorman's sophisticated, deeply cynical and highly entertaining spy movie based on the novel by John Le Carre, which had opened in the US two days earlier.
However, Boorman's film was already enjoying a bigger opening than any of his films since the award-winning, autobiographical Hope and Glory in 1987. "They [Columbia Pictures] are very happy with its opening," Boorman noted in Dublin on Tuesday morning. "On a platform release of 200 screens, it took an average of over $10,000 per screen. I'm particularly pleased for the Irish crew: Derek Wallace, the production designer; Shaun Davey, who did the music; Kevan Barker, the line producer; and Maeve Patterson, the costume designer.
"We took the crew out from here and then came back and did all the interiors at Ardmore Studios. I'm particularly impressed with Derek's work - it's seamless when you move between indoors and outdoors, even though those scenes were shot on different continents."
John Le Carre's stories generally work better on television (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley's People) than in the cinema (George Roy Hill's plodding The Little Drummer Girl with Diane Keaton; Fred Schepisi's glossy The Russia House with Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer; even the paranoia-steeped The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, in which Richard Burton played the title role and Dublin doubled for Berlin).
"Television gives them the longer spread they need," says Boorman. "In fact, this is the first cinema film of his work that Le Carre himself has been happy with. He actually didn't like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. I wanted to make a film of The Little Drummer Girl, but I couldn't get the rights. It's a marvellous book, a wonderful insight into the Arab-Israeli conflict, and he shows it from both sides. It could have been a great movie, but it was deeply disappointing."
The screenplay for The Tailor of Panama - jointly credited to Boorman, Le Carre and Andrew Davies - updates Le Carre's 1996 novel to set the drama in the aftermath of the 1999 US handover of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians.
Nobody is quite what they seem in the film. In a richly ironic piece of casting that overturns his James Bond image, Pierce Brosnan plays a self-obsessed MI6 spy, Andy Osnard, whose sexual excesses in Madrid lead to him being banished to Panama. Geoffrey Rush plays the eponymous tailor, Harry Pendel, a Cockney ex-convict who has reinvented himself in South America and has the ability to manufacture stories as skilfully as suits. Unwittingly drawn into this circle of deception are two emotionally and physically scarred opponents of the Noriega regime, played by Brendan Gleeson and Leonor Varela.
"Harry is one of Le Carre's great liars," says Boorman. "Of course, his spies - and he himself was a spy, as you know - were all licensed liars. This spy, Osnard, is a spy without a purpose, a spy without any loyalty except to himself and his own ends. It's kind of like the end of the line, whereas Harry is a liar as well as an artist - he makes suits like he makes up stories, he can't help himself. "The whole idea which appealed to me was this place, Panama, this artificially invented country with its skin-deep democracy and no history and everyone pretending to be a proper country and all these people pretending to be something that they're not. Even the British ambassador, who seems to be the usual old twit, turns out to be different in the end. It's Panama, but you can extend it to a lot of modern society."
The film depicts Panama as a country rife with corruption, where the 85 banks are called launderettes, where there are extremes of wealth and poverty. It seems about as inviting as Gibraltar with its bizarre combination of Barbary apes and a displaced English high street, like Planet of the Apes set in Dublin's Jervis Centre.
"You've got exactly that in Panama," says Boorman. "You go across an invisible line and you're in America. It's all changing now because they've taken it over. We tried to catch all those elements that are in the novel - the black humour, the farce, the drama and all the lies and subterfuge he has in the book - which is not easy." This frankness led to problems with the Panamanian authorities, who were familiar with the Le Carre novel.
"There was quite a bit of hostility there when I arrived because the book had been translated into Spanish and had been read there, and it presents a very critical picture of corruption in the country," says Boorman. "That hostility was hard to break down. They were very excited by the idea of the film being made there, but they didn't much like the idea of what it might contain. I was struggling with them - until I cast Pierce in the picture. When they heard Pierce Brosnan was going to be in it, suddenly all the doors were thrown open. He was mobbed everywhere. He couldn't move while we were there. It's extraordinary how powerful that 007 image can be. And there's something about Pierce, too, because he's so beautiful. Timothy Dalton didn't have it, and nor did Roger Moore. Pierce is the first actor to play Bond since Sean Connery who has that true star quality.
"I remember way back when Sean and I had finished shooting Zardoz here and we went to a soccer match in Dublin - I think Ireland was playing Brazil - and we were coming out at the end and people spotted Sean. It was terrifying, this huge surge of people pressing in on us. Sean just said: `Stand aside!' " - here Boorman's booming voice is a perfect imitation of Connery's - "And spread out his arms like Moses, and we just sailed through."
BROSNAN'S casting was not the only time the star system came to Boorman's rescue in Panama. "Shooting there was fine, except that it was very hot and sticky, which always slows people down," he says. "But we had lots of co-operation in the end of the day, thanks to Pierce.
"Then there was a house which I wanted to use as the home of the tailor and his wife. It belonged to the vice-president of the country and I went to see him. He said he didn't want us to use it, for any number of reasons. We chatted on about the picture and he asked me who else would be in it. When I mentioned Jamie Lee Curtis would be playing the tailor's wife, he said: `Jamie Lee Curtis will be in my house?' I said yes, and he said: `Maybe we can work something out.' And we did." When it came to shooting the film, the wealthier Panamanians proved intrusive.
"There's a really unpleasant rich strata in Panama," says Boorman. "Very well-off people who are living under siege, as it were, because kidnapping is such a big industry there, and, as a result, so is security and protection. A lot of ex-Mossad people are there working as bodyguards. "The rich people are spoiled, surrounded by guards and extremely wealthy but with nothing much to do, and when we were shooting in their area they were simply unbelievable. They just trampled the police down to the ground to get near Pierce. Down in the old city, in the slums of the port area - where we had been warned we would be robbed and stabbed - we met nothing but charming, polite people."
One memorable tracking shot observes them, house by house, in contrast to the vulgar excesses shown beforehand. "It was all set up," says Boorman. "But set up with the people, as a picture of that place, especially going straight from the club to there perfectly illustrates the extreme contrasts of life in Panama."
It's not just Panama which comes under fire in the movie.
"George Bush was head of the CIA and he virtually invented Noriega," Boorman chuckles. "And backed him with vast sums of money for opposing a non-existent Communist movement in Panama - which Noriega himself invented. It was almost like our story, the way Noriega invented an enemy so that the CIA would support him against it. And then Bush was president and was very upset with this wimp factor - and he went in and invaded Panama, a country he already occupied, where there was a vast American military presence."
The ending of the movie, which pointedly invokes Casablanca, is much more upbeat than in Le Carre's book.
"The book was written before the canal was handed over to the Panamanians, and the big issue was whether that would happen or not," Boorman notes. "The Republicans were furious that the Democrats would do that. George W, in his campaign, said if there was the slightest risk of any threat to the canal he would take it back. The book has a very apocalyptic ending with Panama in flames after an American attack - it was firebombed when they took Noriega out - and Harry is so full of shame he walks into the flames to immolate himself.
"I couldn't get to that point in terms of the movie. I actually re-shot the ending because it seemed too heavy when I put it together and it trivialised the final scene in the film, I felt. So I shot the new ending, which seemed to suit the picture much better, at Dublin Airport, rounding up every dark-skinned immigrant and asylum-seeker we could find."
Finally, one minor grating point: Why do people in movies always answer the phone in the middle of passionate sex scenes, especially when they are as avidly sexually active as Brosnan's character?
"It's true!" Boorman laughs. "They do, don't they? I suppose it's a way of getting out of the sex scene. In some ways it would be uncharacteristic of Osnard, but there is this thing that spies have always been available, can always be contacted by their bosses."
The Tailor of Panama will be released on April 20th.