Directing The Night Manager

Sasha Ingber: Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

When the night manager aired in 2016, it was an instant success based on the 1993 John Le Carré novel of the same name.

The series centered on former British soldier, Jonathan Pine. He's recruited by MI6 to infiltrate the secret network of a notorious arms dealer. 10 years later, this series returns without Le Carré ever having written a sequel before he died. Georgi Banks-Davies, the director of this second season, gives us a behind the scenes look at how the series charts new territory for pine in the world of espionage.

Welcome, Georgi. I know you're in New York for the premier of the second season of Night Manager. Congratulations. 

Georgi Banks-Davies: Thank you so much. Thank you. 

Sasha Ingber: So let's start by talking about why this show, which was received to massive acclaim, why it took 10 years for a second season. 

Georgi Banks-Davies: It's a really good question, Sasha, because of course in television it's like so often that you would go immediately into a next season, especially if something so successful because the audience is craving it.

But the simple answer is there was not another book, and it's based on the le Carré novel of the same title, Night Manager, and he wrote one novel. It was always the intention that the book would be one season, a limited series, six parts, that's it. Otherwise, you may not have killed off some of the great characters that get killed off in the book and in the season if we knew it was coming back.

And Tom Hiddleston, who plays Jonathan Pine in the show, tells a great story about that they, in 2016, when that show came out, they took it to Berlin Film Festival and they sat together afterwards and had dinner with the director of that season, Susanne Bier, and Tom and John le Carré and le Carré lent over to Tom and he said, I think maybe this isn't the end of Jonathan Pine.

He also, at the same time was saying you cannot make another season 'cause there's not another book. So already he was a kind of mischievous character that was already being mischievous with the sense of like what this series would become and how it would, uh, progress. And Tom Hiddleston and John le Carré continued to talk about that.

And he was still quite resistant. And there was a turning point, I think around 2018 where he started to kind of warm up to the idea, winking at the same time to Tom Hiddlestone saying maybe the story's not told. And they decided that maybe it was time and they should try. John le Carré passed away in the end of 2020 after the pandemic.

Um, but he had given blessings to his sons, Simon and Stephen Cornwell, who run the Ink Factory, which is a production company, which is focused mostly on the adaptation of John le Carré’s work. And he had given the blessing to them to continue the story. And the rest is sort of just the time it takes to tell great work and to tell great stories.

And the team and David Farr, who wrote the first season and has come back to return to the second season, who i. the most brilliant le Carré aficionado. Like he knows everything about the tone of voice of le Carré, and he's so well read, and just getting the team back together, it takes time and getting the story right.

It takes time, but suddenly it's 10 years later and here we are. 

Sasha Ingber: It's 10 years later, some of these characters have gone on to have incredibly, incredibly impressive careers. Given the fact that le Carré is not around to see this second season, I, I wanna bring in a quote from Oscar Wilde as one does.

“Biography lends to death, new terror.” And I know we're not talking about biography here, but this is a part of La Carré's legacy. 

Georgi Banks-Davies: It is, yeah. 

Sasha Ingber: Did you, as the director of the second season, have some trepidation that this maybe wouldn't be as strong as what le Carré himself could have written? 

Georgi Banks-Davies: Well, he never wrote screenplay.

He always wrote the most incredible espionage novels. He was a novelist, but he always had his hand, uh, in the adaptation. He always had his approval in the adaptation, but you always bring in a great screenwriter to take the translation and they are not the same. So it becomes from, I suppose, a very solitary pursuit.

Being the author in a room to a very collaborative pursuit takes a lot of people to make a film or to make a television show. The thing that I took sort of comfort and confidence in was that he was extremely used to that, and he understood that, and I know that if he had given it his blessing, which he did, that meant to me that he knew what that entailed.

But to say it's not terrifying would be lying because even if he was alive, to do a John le Carré adaptation comes with so much expectation. It's because of how he resonates and how massive the fan base is and how diverse the fan base is. It's really exciting to go into something and know people are gonna want to watch it, but it's also means that you,

Sasha Ingber: millions of people

Georgi Banks-Davies: millions of people are gonna watch it all over the world.

I mean, that's exciting, but it's also terrifying because you have nowhere to hide. You're incredibly exposed as a filmmaker and as a director personally. That's how I do my best work. I love that because when I’m working my best work is created when the stakes are incredibly high. It's a terrifying legacy to take on, but there's excitement in the danger somehow.

Sasha Ingber: Yeah, and the espionage genre is often also in consultation, either with a spy agency or with former Intel officers who advise on areas where you can be as realistic as possible. 

Georgi Banks-Davies: What was very important to me in the understanding of of the security service and the understanding of MI6 is what it actually looks like behind the closed door.

And by that I mean what the representation of a spy looks like. Like who are the people that work there? Because I wanna cast it correctly. And I think so often we are conditioned in this genre to expect the sort of very upper class, private school educated, um, Oxbridge older white man. That's the way that the genre has always been presented to us on screen, that becomes your sort of stereotypical image of what a particular a British spy is.

So what was very, very important to me is like, what really does a MI6 agent look like? Who are they? How do they work? You have to take leaps of course. I think ultimately if it's we are making entertainment, we're making television. If you were to really go into the details of as fascinating and incredible as it is, 

Sasha Ingber: the workings of like an MI6 agent, the day-to-day for these intel officers can be grueling, boring. I mean, there's a lot of sitting waiting. Yeah. I would love to see that as reality TV show with an audience of like four people. 

Georgi Banks-Davies: Yeah, exactly. So we take leaps, we take. We take creative leaps and then David kind of looks after the workings, I would say, and that's how we almost like divide the work as well as a creative pair and the writer and the director, is that he's really looking at the workings and really making sure that the story tracks and that it's authentic.

And I'm really making sure that the representation of that and the humanity of that and the characterization of that really lands and is empathic and, and the story's told in a way that resonates. 

Sasha Ingber: You had mentioned le Carré's sons, this really, in some ways was also a family affair. Can you tell us more about those interactions?

Georgi Banks-Davies: Steven and Simon Cornwell run the Ink Factory they have done for many, many years and they've been at the helm of so many great adaptations for le Carré. They did the first season and you can't get a sort of closer expertise to the source material than the sons of the, of the man himself. I was working mostly with Simon Cornwell.

He was the person who brought the project to fruition along with partners at Amazon MGM and at the BBC and fifth season. And really like. Got it. Put it together. It takes a lot to get something together and really like put it together in the most brilliant way to bring it back to the world through script development.

We talk about ideas together along with Steven Cornwell and we talk about casting ideas in every part of the process. And one thing that I always love and really makes me smile is when he talks about Dad, you know, we'll have dinner and he'll say, dad would've loved this. And the sort of warmth in which he tells the story about dad and how he refers to him.

And I think that it's so clear that this is a family and including Nick, who is now writing under the le Carré sort of penmanship. This is a family. You are so passionate and steeped in the heritage of what they have inherited and they're so precious about how they continue that story. 

Sasha Ingber: Yeah. Families also fight.Families also have disagreements. 

Georgi Banks-Davies: We're very different creatively, like all of us. That's why I think it works because we come from such different walks of life and and such different experiences, and I think that you then can challenge and hopefully elevate each other. That's when work gets interesting.

And you only do that from like being with people who've seen the world in different ways. 

Sasha Ingber: You had also mentioned Columbia and the second season was filmed in many exotic locations outside of the UK, from Spain to France, but largely in Columbia. Where Jonathan Pines infiltrates an arms cartel. Right now we are seeing a lot of covert activity coming out of Venezuela from the United States side. It has connections to Columbia when it comes to narco trafficking. Was this just a case of good timing and being relevant to the current moment, Georgi? 

Georgi Banks-Davies: Well, yeah, we certainly couldn't predict, like I said, the scripts were conceived from 2020, so there's no way that we could have predicted that this timing, if we look at like what's happening currently in in South America.

The time is relevant. So the show, the show was perceived in 2020. The show is politically about a post Brexit, Britain, and it's about a superpower. And, and le Carré himself, he took Irish citizenship because he was so, so aggrieved by Britain leaving the European Union. And we're so strongly against that and I'm certainly not an expert on it, but Britain post 2016 is an economically a very different place.

And these sort of superpowers when we talk about Britain or we talk about America, it's like how you keep status, how you keep economic power, but how you also serve your people and the show. And what David's done so cleverly in the writing of the show is he really examines like what is happening to the UK post Brexit.

I'm really fascinated by it and I think Brexit showed us that their referendum that there is a sort of sense of arrogance in the sense of like, we will always be okay, we are great, we have great, we have great support system in the world, um, and we don't need any help. We don't need anyone. It is a mess economically after Brexit and the show is trying to question.

Okay, so if you are then up in the echelons of government or security services, how do you fix that? And it's so dark and it's so tragic and it makes me feel sort of sick to think about it. But ultimately it's let's go and create false conflict so that we can reap the reward. And when everybody's looking left, let's turn right and basically pillage from the land.

And that's what our show is doing in Columbia. Not to give any spoilers away 'cause it's not out yet. But ultimately that's what is being orchestrated in our, in our fictional story, rather than creating, I would say enabling conflict to then reap the rewards. And it comes back to this moral question is if you are running security service or if you're running a nation, what are you looking after? How is one human more important than another human because of a borderline, because of like privilege, because of power. Ultimately, that's what it politically is about. We are in a really unique time in history politically. I'm trying to constantly sort of question and look at the world in a way and question through the work, like what actually unites us.

I'm much more interested in what brings us together and how we see each other and how we start to have communication and conversation going forward together than like the divisive nature of kind of these walls that are continually being metaphorically put up to like push us apart. 

Sasha Ingber: Fascinating that, that it was a overarching goal for you for an espionage show where so much of espionage is about exploiting vulnerability, getting people to betray their country.

Can you give us a good behind the scenes story? I know you shot in a, you, you had estimated to me that it was about 78 locations. So yeah, give us a, give us a good story. 

Georgi Banks-Davies: There's so many, such like being put on the spotlight that it's like, that's so, but we did, you're right. We went across multiple countries.

We were in London and Wales and we were in France and Spain and the Canary Islands and Columbia and within Columbia we're in three different cities. A good behind the scenes story. Well, I would say actually what I found really, 'cause we shot the entire show on location, which is of such a feat, but I'm a big believer in that like, like I said when we started that I want the stakes to be high and I want us to feel and go through the experience that the characters go through.

So we were in Cartagena in the Caribbean coast. For, um, a week, and we had the most amazing time there. We took a very small crew and unit there, but there was a lot of fun things that happened. I mean, I learned the lesson. I, and I think you won't mind me telling you this, but one of our stars, um, Diego Calva, who plays Teddy Dos Santos, um, 

Sasha Ingber: the villain?

Georgi Banks-Davies: the villain. Well, I, I never say anything as binary as that, the co-star. So I'm a big realist. And so, and again, this is extremely rare, but I will always ask actors to, to drive. We've got lots of driving on in our show, and I'm please drive like, um, because it, it's real. And you know, people, you'll see it on screen.

People normally are driving and talking like this on like looking, which is not real. Real. Drives me. 

Sasha Ingber: That drives me nuts. 

Georgi Banks-Davies: Yes, nuts, right? Because it's not real. So in the show. Or you do a thing where you pull the car technically, but they're in it, but they're on the road, but it's being pulled well, in our show, they are driving.

They're driving every shop. There is a drone shot in the first episode where the car is shot from above and it's tiny, and Tom Hiddleston is even driving that car. It's not a stunt guy, which is so sort of ludicrous even when I say it now. But, um, Diego assured me that he could drive and everything is fine.

So I put him in a very beautiful vintage Porsche, which the character would drive in a 1960s, 911, uh, with a huge camera rig strapped to the side of the car. Um, with Tom next to him and we were driving through the city in what it turns out to be, which I hadn't quite anticipated. Rush hour. Um, and Diego can't really drive.

He definitely can't drive a stick shift and he definitely can't drive a vintage Porsche. And there is a moment when you see, it's a very brief moment in the third episode, um, where there is so much sweat on the side of his face. It's very hot there anyway, but, um, it's all real because he is, um, excuses the phrase and the language, but he's really s***ing himself because he has one of the world's greatest actors next to him in the car.

He has one of the most beautiful cars in the world and he is got a very, very, very hundreds of thousands dollars camera rig on the side, and he is in rush hour traffic in Cartegna. But the performance is beautiful, like. Uh, but we did some crazy stuff. We did some. You're gonna see them helicopters, you're gonna see them in lots of cars. You're gonna see them on horses, and that's all the actors 

Sasha Ingber: when we come back, Georgi shares some of the biggest influences on her journey as a director. 

You are one of few female directors in the spy entertainment industry, and it's depressing that I even have to describe you that way because there are so few of them. Mm-hmm. Because gender should not have to be part of the conversation. The work should stand for itself. But because of this scarcity, I just wanted to spend a moment here talking about why you think this is that women are not at the helm of these spy TV shows and movies.

Things like James Bond and Jason Bourne. Why? 

Georgi Banks-Davies: I don't know. I honestly don't know. Because why not? I mean, it's again, probably speaks to unconscious bias, right? And so many of the stories often are about men, but. That doesn't matter. I mean, we tell stories about different, that's, that's literally the sort of role of the filmmaker is to put yourself in other world, in other shoes and otherwise it'd be really boring.

If like I was just telling stories about my life, everyone would be so bored. Like, 

Sasha Ingber: um, oh, we're gonna get there. Georgi, we're getting there in this convo. 

Georgi Banks-Davies: So I actually, it's been quite, it's been quite fun in the last couple of years, but I, um, I don't know. And, and actually the economics don't speak to it either.

You know, this is a business, but women have historically made hits. They make hits in the same way men make hits. Um. So I think it's just probably one of those things that classically, it's always been a very male dominated storytelling. Like if you look like the things you just talked about, it's about Jason Bourne, it's about James Bond, you know, and we haven't had necessarily women at the heart of those in terms of character, but even so.

I mean, the story I'm telling about is about Jonathan Pine. I think the more people you can bring into a project with different perceptions and different ways that they've seen the world, the better the project gets. Like always, because then you're really questioning things in different ways. So I, there should be more of it. There should be way more of it. 

Sasha Ingber: Do you think that the perceptions of the spy world get distorted when we're really only seeing it through the lens of a man. I mean, I think about the bond girls. 

Georgi Banks-Davies: Oh, Xenia Onatopp! Do you remember Xenia Onatopp she killed people with her thighs. It's like ridiculous. 

Sasha Ingber: Wait, you can't do that?

Georgi Banks-Davies:Right? It's, yeah. I mean, I dunno. Yeah. I, I, yeah. It's, there's different, there's always different ways in which people wanna sort of present and, and there's always, if there's an audience, then it will continue to be presented. So, but I think it's really fun to play with that. So I've got, there is a, we have another lead actor in our show called Camilla Morrone, who is the most incredible actor.

She is brilliant. And we had a lot of fun playing with that. How she uses herself as a woman, like essentially using her identity again as something that brings her. A weapon brings her power, but equally is very dangerous in the world in which she inhabits. But it's like how she uses the tools to not only like navigate the world she's in, but for us together navigate what the audience is expecting, but it's like just questioning those things and the more that you make something more, more authentic and feel more authentic and more nuanced and more deep in in how it's representing, I just think the better it is and the more diversity in filmmaking and filmmakers and directors that goes outside the norm, the kind of more exciting the stories become, I think.

And we just need more of it. And one of the greatest, greatest political espionage movies of the last year is like  made by Kathryn Bigelow, like A House of Dynamite. You know, what a complicated, brilliant thriller.

Sasha Ingber: Susanne Bier who directed season one of the Night Manager. Mm-hmm. I know that she passed off the work to you. She came from a family that survived the Holocaust. This informed some of her work, and I'm wondering if you can tell me about some of your own background and how that has informed the work that you do. 

Georgi Banks-Davies: Yeah, I mean, I suppose I am sort of unusual in the makeup of director in that I'm a woman like you've pointed out.

And also I'm, I come from the working class like my mother's Irish. Like it's not a mistake in a sense that I am interested in like this idea of who we are because I'm constantly being sort of told by half of my family and half of myself that I'm Irish, but I also sound and live and feel very English.

'cause I grew up there and it's like, who am I? What does that mean? What do I? I'm really intrigued by this idea of nature versus nurture and what have I inherited and the older I become, the more I've sort of start to feel the differences in that. So I've always been compelled by that idea of like who we are and and where we belong.

And I think particularly. I feel very passionate in the UK as a British person at the moment, like how we maintain an openness to the country and maintain an openness to what makes us great. And I feel that what I'm sort of very passionate about and what really drives me is that how I'm a child of an immigrant, but I'm okay because I'm white, but my friend who is a child of an immigrant is not okay because they're not.

Like what's the difference? Where's the line? Because then that's a different conversation. That's not about immigration. That's about a very different bias. So I think the things that drive me are those questions are like, I feel very strongly passionate as a child of an immigrant, but that doesn't belong anyway.

Really? Like, and so what does that mean? If I belong nowhere, then what does that make me? And one of the characters that Diego Calva, Teddy Dos Santos character has a very similar thing going on with him. He has so many parts of him that he doesn't really belong anywhere. He can't go to his mother in the show is Mexican, but when he is in Mexico, he doesn't belong.

They call him Colombian. Even though he lived there his whole life, his father, um, he. Like his stepfather's Columbia, it, it's like he doesn't, he can't find his place. And I think that's what I find really compelling in people is like, what does that mean? Where is home and what does it mean and who are we?

Sasha Ingber: So I don't normally talk to film directors or you know, so yeah, I'm finding it very interesting. To think about and how that plays into the second season. And Jonathan Pine himself. I mean, he's a very different kind of spy than James Bond. 

Georgi Banks-Davies: Um, he is a very different spy. I think I, I, now, I'm not gonna quote this correctly, but at the end of the Pigeon Tunnel, the documentary about John le Carré, he says something along the lines of, so, please, this is.

This is not verbatim. Not verbatim. So something along the lines of that. If you look at Fleming and James Bond, the idea was like, oh, I want that life. Really, when le Carré is the complete opposite is that you look at a character like Jonathan Pine or George Smiley and you go, oh God, I don't want that life.

And that is the most sort of art best articulation of the two worlds and the two characters. So tonally different. Like you were talking about the bond girls who've never really had that in a John Le Carré. There's so few women in John La Carré's worlds anyway, you know, and I think those representations are sometimes quite often as well and quite sketchy.

But then, but they're not in the same way as James Bond, which is like hypersexualized. They're sort of more underestimated, I would argue in John le Carré worlds, they are extremely different, but they come from this same, I suppose, the same very British legacy of like something that's really compelling.

The thing that James Bond and, and, um, and Jonathan Pines share, which. Very little actually. It's extremely little. I think what they share is that it just, it looks really interesting, like people wanna lean into the story. It's kind of ultimate escapism really. It's like watching people in situations that are so far from our own lives and kind of going on the ride. And I think when you can do that, but then, and I'd argue that what Jonathan Pine does and is that then takes you on that, but does it in a way that you really understand the character and the decisions. But he has this burning fire in him, moral sort of dilemma constantly. 

Sasha Ingber: Okay. Speaking of rides, you also told me that your dad built the first Bond car head engineer of Aston Martin?

Georgi Banks-Davies: Yes. Hugh Banks-Davis. He was the head, so it's always been in my like, uh, family history, I guess the, the espionage genre and the most famous of all in James Bond and probably the most famous car ever on screen, I would say, and definitely the most famous Bond car, which the DB4, it's often mistaken as a DB5. It's an Aston Martin DB four, and it was built in the early sixties for Goldfinger. Um, yeah, my dad was the head engineer, the head mechanic at Aston Martin. So Ken Adam, very famous production designer who came in and said, I want the car to work like, and my dad was the, was literally the, he, he knew the car's better than anyone, so he made that car and everything worked. The number plate span, the guns came out. It didn't shoot real, real bullets of course, but the guns came out, the ejector seat worked, the roof came off. Like he was the person who figured out and did it.

And I have the most amazing photograph, which is a black and white, um, picture of the third scale model preview of that car, and you can tell that of its size because there's a desk next to it, which kind of makes you realize it's tiny. It's a tiny version of this car. But I, we had it always around when I was a kid.

My, my dad had me a little older in life, so I, um. I never saw that car, but we always had the toys like growing up. Like he would have like little toy versions of it and tell, retell the story and, and as slightly as a kid. I loved the movies. I was fascinated by cinema from first time I went to the cinema when I was like, you know, four and then was trying to make them when I was like six and I.

And I think it was probably in part, I’ve been thinking about it recently that he was very much like he'd made something really magical for the movies, but he also did what he loved. And he would always say to me, you know, my dad really passionately loved cars. And he would always say to me, if you love movies, make movies.

And again, that's not something that happened from the background that I came from or from the world it came from. He grew up as a mechanic. It's not what you do, but he did what he loved and he was like, do what you love. And um, so yeah, it's, I've always had, there is this sort of life slight Bond legacy in what I've done.

It's no secret that I'd love to direct a Bond movie. I think it is time a woman directed a Bond movie. And I think that it would be amazing. There is nothing more fun, but it's very different. One does not plug and play into the other. Believe me, tonally, they are so different. And as author they were so different, but the worlds are like fascinating.

Sasha Ingber: Well, I hope you do get to direct a Bond movie. 

Georgi Banks-Davies: Me too. 

Sasha Ingber: I mean, I, my saying that is really gonna influence the Bond franchise, by the way. 

Georgi Banks-Davies: Well, we never know. 

Sasha Ingber: Georgi, thank you for taking the time to speak. I know it was a very intense period shooting across the world. But yeah, appreciate you coming on SpyCast.

Georgi Banks-Davies:Thank you so much and, uh, thank you again for having me. It's been a pleasure to chat. 

Sasha Ingber: Thanks for listening to this episode of SpyCast. If you like the episode, give us a follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a rating or review. It really helps. If you have any feedback or you wanna hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email at spycast@spymuseum.org.

I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and the show is brought to you by N2K Networks, Goat Rodeo, and the International Spy Museum in Washington DC.