92 min | PG-13 | October 20, 2023 | Apple Original Films
John le Carré, the son of a con man turned master of spy fiction, sits down with Errol Morris for one last interview. Two men who built careers on deception circle each other for the truth. The interview is the interrogation.
John le Carré sits across from Errol Morris and tells stories about his father, his time in British intelligence, and the construction of his own myth. He is David Cornwell, the man behind the pen name, and he has spent a lifetime turning betrayal into fiction. The film treats the interview itself as the subject. Every answer is a performance, and the question is whether the man knows it. What emerges is a study of how a son of a con man became a writer who understood that everyone is running a con.
Le Carré performs himself with total control. He is charming and evasive in the same breath. He delivers anecdotes about his father Ronnie, a swindler and fantasist, with the polish of a man who has told them a thousand times. The dramatic reconstructions place actors in the gaps. Garry Cooper plays Ronnie Cornwell as a charismatic crook whose theatrical fraud shaped his son’s worldview. Simon Harrison appears as the traitor Kim Philby, the spy whose defection le Carré never forgave, and the casting underlines how personal the betrayal remained.
Errol Morris directs and writes the interrogation. He builds the film on his Interrotron rig, which lets le Carré stare directly into the lens while answering Morris off camera. The effect is confrontational. The viewer becomes the interviewer, and le Carré’s eyes search for the exit. Morris cuts between the interview, archival footage, and stylized reenactments shot in shallow focus and cold light. The score by Philip Glass loops and circles, refusing resolution, mirroring a man who answers questions by asking better ones.
This is a film about a subject who cannot be caught. Morris spends his career extracting confessions from people who do not know they are confessing. Here he meets a man who has rehearsed every confession in advance. The duel is the point. Two masters of constructed truth sit across from each other, and the film lets the contest stay unresolved because resolution would be a lie.