This weekend sees the start of The Night Manager, the BBC’s glossily expensive and cinematic adaptation of John le Carré’s 1993 spy novel. It stars Tom Hiddleston as Pine, a former soldier recruited by British intelligence who poses as a hotel manager to infiltrate the arms-dealing business run by the sinister Richard Roper, played by Hugh Laurie.



What hasn’t been talked about much – or at all – is that the new BBC blockbuster has one of Europe’s biggest film-makers at the helm. It is directed by the Danish director Susanne Bier, who made movies such as Brothers, and the English-language pictures Things We Lost In The Fire (with Halle Berry) and Serena (with Jennifer Lawrence). I meet her in Berlin, where The Night Manager is part of a new TV strand at the city’s film festival.

Is she tired of journalists talking about Tom Hiddleston taking his shirt off? “I’m not bored of that,” she laughs. “He looks really good without his top on! There’s always a part of you which is wary about fantastic-looking actors, because it almost becomes too easy. But he’s way more interesting than he is good looking.”

And how about working with Hugh Laurie? “He’s fantastic,” she nods. “Hugh wanted to buy the rights for the novel when it came out in the 90s, and he wanted to play Tom Hiddleston’s part! So he had firm ideas – and he wrote me suggestions for scenes. At times I totally disagreed with him, but it was very honest, very exciting and quite explosive.”

Tom Hiddleston in The Night Manager. Photograph: Des Willie/The Ink Factory/BBC



There was another formidable alpha male on location, incidentally: John le Carré himself. “He has a small cameo in the series,” says Bier. “He stayed for 10 hours, filming in the heat. And he was very naughty!”

So how is it working in TV? That would once have been considered a come-down for a movie director, but with the rise of prestige shows, is it an obvious career move today?



“I think it is changing, actually,” says Bier. “I see my role as a storyteller. That comes out of a theatrical tradition, not movies. You might say TV is more mainstream than my movies, but had my movies not been in Danish, they would have been mainstream.



“I so much enjoy the writing on TV shows,” she continues. “Some weeks I’ll read 25 film scripts and most are really bad. Television has a much higher level of writing. Developing a character over six, seven or eight episodes – it’s fantastic! There is a richness to minor characters, and to the storytelling – getting the audiences to think one thing … and then something else.”

Olivia Colman as Burr: ‘She’s brilliant. She’ll totally get into it.’ Photograph: Des Willie/The Ink Factory/BBC

For this reason, Bier is excited about film festivals starting to showcase TV: “Film festivals are very dusty,” she says. “They’re celebrating how the industry worked 20 years ago and showing inaccessible and at times quite boring movies. I do want to do features again, but I definitely want to do longer stuff on TV.”



And how about this project – did she bring a female sensibility to Le Carré’s work? “In my movies I’ve always thought, I’m going to cast someone different, someone unexpected. So we changed Burr [the intelligence officer who recruits Pine] to a woman. I was so keen to get Olivia Colman, and she is brilliant. She’ll be talking to you about the shopping or her kids, and you say, ‘Ready?’ And she’ll totally get into it. Jennifer Lawrence has the same thing. It’s not necessarily a female thing, but the ability to go from one existence to another. She has an honesty. She’s unpretentious.”

We wind up pondering the life of an international arms dealer, the kind of discreetly classy guy who frequents hotel bars much like the one we are sat in now. “It’s not just about the money,” she says. “It’s about the power, the lifestyle, the proximity to danger. It’s about the freedom that kind of money gives you.”

“Yes,” I say, “all building up to one thing. Finding a way to sell Isis a nuclear bomb!”

There is a pause, when we both find ourselves looking around at the clientele, then Bier says: “Could you not say that out loud?”