I’ve always been envious of anybody who had any chance of touching John le Carré. I always thought of you as a director of less plot-driven films-character films. I was surprised when I learned that you’d be directing The Night Manager. She’s never directed anything quite like The Night Manager, which may be the finest work of her career. Known as a brilliant director of actors, this Danish director has worked both in her home country-her film In a Better World won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2011-and in Hollywood, where she last made Serena with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. But one has to make sure one is in the right ballpark. And do it instinctively, because the best acting is instinctive, not intellectual or academic. It’s their architecture-Le Carré’s architecture or Ballard’s architecture-and once it’s solid, I can attach a rope to my waist and swing freely. The image in my mind is of building a scaffolding that is very, very tightly and rigorously constructed. I don’t know where that sense of responsibility comes from, but I’ve always felt it. I also wanted fans of Ballard to appreciate that what we’re trying to do in High-Rise was in line with what Ballard was trying to do. Of course, I bring my own interpretation to each role because that’s what acting is, but before that, I feel an academic responsibility to align myself with their creative language so that I’m behaving with my own instinctive freedom within their parameters. I recently felt that quite acutely with Le Carré, Ballard, and Hank Williams. It comes from a sense of duty to the people who generated the material. Le Carré’s targets have become hypocrisy and corruption, lack of transparency and lack of accountability. He has used his privileges to do the worst things imaginable in spite of his charm.

I think his rage toward Richard Roper-his accusation is that Roper has abdicated his responsibility to uphold a moral duty as the inheritor of all the freedoms of British society. I think the way it’s contained in The Night Manager is fascinating. I feel as though his rage has become sharper the older he’s gotten, and the more specifically directed it’s become. I think he would be the first to admit this. We talked about the show, their characters, and whatever else happened to pop into our heads during all of our madness at popping from interview to interview. I wound up chatting with Hiddleston, Laurie, Debicki, Colman, and the show’s director, Susanne Bier. It’s so good that I raced to the show’s press day at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills to talk to all of the principals I could get my hands on. Jetting from the Cairo streets to posh Alpine hotels to cliffside villas in Mallorca, The Night Manager is the best and most exciting Le Carré adaptation in more than 30 years. Given that his every move is monitored by Roper’s paranoid security man, Corcoran (Tom Hollander), you keep wondering when he’ll give himself away. If that isn’t tricky enough, Pine starts developing feelings for Roper’s mistress, Jed (Elizabeth Debicki), who, like virtually all Le Carré heroines, needs to be rescued. But when a woman is murdered there, he’s recruited by an intelligence agent, Angela Burr (Olivia Colman), to infiltrate the inner circle of “the worst man in the world”: Richard Onslow Roper (Hugh Laurie), a billionaire British arms dealer with disturbingly close ties to Her Majesty’s government. It stars Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine, the night manager at a luxury hotel in Cairo. The Night Manager is AMC’s sensational six-part thriller based on the best seller by John le Carré.

The night manager