What does the man do?

W: [1] Today Mr. Boorman is invited here to talk with us, about his latest film, his tactics of pushing the audience to the limit. The story of The Tailor of Panama feels like the underside of the Grail myth; it felt like Uncle Benny (Harold Pinter) was a rascal Merlin.
M: Yes. I always have one of those.
W: [2] Are you always looking at the mythological dimension of a story?
M: [2] [5D] Yes, that’s like a security blanket for me. I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing — all those archetypes are there to play with.
W: Is there a specific process you employ when working with actors?
M: [1] [3] My method is to do quite a lot of rehearsal — finding the characters and figuring out the scenes with the actors. Before I start shooting I have all the actors know where we are going with every scene, what the intention is and where we are trying to get to. [3] [5CD] I don’t shoot a lot of takes — very few takes and very little film altogether — but what I do is create an environment — a context in which they feel safe and are able to take risks. It’s an atmosphere of trust, really: when actors are being defensive and defending their position, that is when you get less than good acting. It’s when they feel that they can go beyond themselves and take risks and that they are in safe hands. That is really what it comes down to.
W: Do you do any storyboarding?
M: [1] I only storyboard scenes that require special effects, where it is necessary to communicate through pictures.
W: How precise do you get with the design of your films?
M: The design of the sets and the choosing of locations are vital to me. Sometimes I don’t know how to play a scene until I’ve found the setting because, obviously, there’s always a relationship — a kind of tension between the setting and the foreground. Case in point, people often ask me if it was difficult to do the rape scene in Deliverance. But in fact the difficult thing was to find the location, for me. And I searched and searched until I found this place — which was sort of undulating with these very twisted laurels and with this sort of acid green light coming through these laurel leaves. Once I found that, I knew how to do the scene.
W: What about the design of The Tailor of Panama?
M: [4] There were these contrasts in Panama itself, of wealth and poverty, and I wanted to try to get that sort of sweaty, sickly quality. That’s not very specific, but that’s what we went for.
W: Did you have a sense of the style you were going for with the camera?
M: First of all, I wanted to-work in anamorphic, which is the format I’ve shot many of my films in. The reason being that, because many of the scenes were between Osnard and Pendel, played by Geoffrey Rush, I wanted to have them in the same frame, and it allows you to use the space between them — either to bring them close to each other or to separate them, depending on the emotion involved.
W: Do you have any preferences as far as lenses are concerned?
M: It has to do with whatever the scene is and what you’re trying to achieve. For instance, in Point Blank — which was also anamorphic — Panavision had just produced this 40mm lens, which is a wide angle lens. It was the first one they made and, with it, I shot perhaps 70 or 80 percent of the picture because it was wide and [4] I was trying to get this spatial feeling of bleakness, of emptiness.
W: What was the writing process like on The Tailor of Panama?
M: [5A] This was rather unusual for me because Columbia had a script written before I came into the picture. They bought the rights to this piece and they had a script done by a man called Andrew Davies, and no one was terribly happy with it, least of all the studio. Le Carre certainly wasn’t. Then Le Carre went and wrote a script himself, which were about 180 pages. It was sort of halfway between a novel and a film script really, but it was wonderful — it had all kinds of fascinating things in it. I then talked to Le Carre; we talked about the whole thing. He was just then writing a new novel so he couldn’t really be involved, but he said "You do the script and just call on me whenever you need me," and that’s what I did. I wrote and faxed the scenes to him as I went along and he’d write notes on them and sometimes he’d just rewrite the scene completely himself or he would come up with another idea. That’s how we went along.