That's the thing, Osnard is a totally reprehensible character, and yet, you kind of like him. He's got a certain charm. That's largely due to Pierce himself. Both Osnard and Harry are strangers in a strange land. Le Carré says these spies, particularly British espionage -- which has a long history because the British Empire was controlled by spying -- have nothing left to spy on. Even the Cold War's gone. They're just treading water. So they produce that sort of self-involved character like Osnard, who's out for whatever he can get. And he's delighted to find out some information, true or not, that he can impress his superiors with. They want something good enough to earn a seat at the table with the Americans.

Le Carré was himself a spy, and he was recruited very young. He said it destroyed his relationships because he couldn't confide in anybody. These spies are posted to these places, and they become isolated and disassociated. So here's this spy that's lost. And then here's this other guy who's reinvented himself and living a lie. What Harry can do is weave these stories and invent things. They become very dependent on each other. Their relationship becomes kind of important to them because they have this secret knowledge. It's almost like a seduction, like they're having an affair.

What was it like working with le Carré on the screenplay?

He wrote a first draft of the screenplay, which was full of vitality and fascinating things, and I did subsequent drafts and worked from the book. We only met a couple of times. He's a marvelous man. Tremendous mind. Very witty. A great raconteur. We had a terrific fax relationship. I would write a scene and send it to him, and he'd scribble notes on it and send it back. That's how we proceeded. He's been unhappy with previous film adaptations of his books, and they're not easy to adapt. Very complex. Great galleries of characters. Subplots. They work by an accumulation of details. Tough stuff to put on film.

When we were at the Berlin Film Festival with the film, at the press conference, he was asked, "What's the process of adapting a book into a film?" And he said, "It's like turning a cow into a bouillon cube." I thought it was a great metaphor because in a sense, the bouillon cube does contain the essence of a cow.

That said, how faithful is the film adaptation to the novel?

I think it's faithful to the characters and the basic situations, but the ending is very different. The book came out before the Canal was handed over to the Panamanians. It postulated a situation where the Americans did what they did to Noriega -- took over the Canal to prevent it from being given away. They bomb Panama. And at the end, Harry's so filled with shame and self-disgust at what he's wrought, that he walks into the flames and immolates himself. I felt I couldn't get to that point in the film. It was too apocalyptic. So I pulled back and had Harry shooting Osnard. We actually filmed that. And when I put it together, even that seemed too heavy a solution.

It trivialized that big scene where Harry confesses to his wife, because he's just killed somebody. So I reshot it so Osnard escapes. The tone of the film is that the bad guys get away with the money. For me the turning point for Harry, and the film, is the death of his friend Mickey. Harry feels responsible for Mickey's death. And that's the point at which he says, OK, I'm going to tell the truth now. He tries to tell the truth, but no one wants to listen to him. His life is in ruins, which is more interesting than having Panama in ruins. And when he tells the truth to his wife, it redeems him.

Was that a decision you made as the director?

Yeah. I felt that I'd gotten to a false point there. The other thing I changed had to do with an audience preview we had out in the San Fernando Valley -- the "killing fields" of movies. They recruited people by asking, "Do you want to see Pierce Brosnan playing a spy?" They were expecting a quasi-Bond film, and it colored the whole way they looked at the film. It didn't get great scores. That's when I realized that I was going to have to make it clear at the beginning of this film that he was a bad guy. Then I shot that scene at the beginning where he's sent off to Panama. You get the notion that he's this disgrace. That solved that problem along with a few tongue-in-cheek references to the whole Bond thing.

Is that a humbling process -- having your film test-screened?

It was horrible, just ghastly. Then they get a focus group together to tell you all the things you did wrong in making the picture. I do think it's dangerous the way studios slavishly follow whatever the scores are. But previews can be helpful. In this case, it defined a problem, and we solved it. In Berlin, we showed it on a big screen to an audience of 2000 people, and they embraced it. Everything was fine, but a lot of films have been completely abandoned after not doing well enough in previews. In a way, it gets the executives off the hook because they don't have to make a decision or commit to a film. They just think, "It didn't score well; let's dump it."

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