“My first instinct was, no way, I revere the film too much. It cannot be bettered, so there’s no point even going there,” says Carnival’s executive chairman, producer Gareth Neame. “So, I was quite stubborn for a while about that, thinking I’m just not going to pursue this.”
The Day of the Jackal producer Gareth Neame.
But Neame was tempted by the idea of reformatting the story as a weekly episodic series “and leaning into all the strengths of that,” he says. “We have 10 hours, not a movie, we have multiple instalments, nine cliffhangers, nine twists, hopefully. It’s a totally different dramatic form. And I thought, OK, maybe this is too good to resist.”
Neame also had a very personal reason for not wanting to stuff it up: his grandfather, the producer, director and screenwriter Ronald Neame, had directed the film adaptation of another Forsyth book, The Odessa File, starring Jon Voight. “I would have read The Odessa File probably far too young, and I read The Day of the Jackal, and the movie was always on TV, and I absolutely loved it,” Neame says.
Perhaps the most significant shift from the viewer’s (née reader’s) perspective is that the ethical and moral universe of the Jackal reboot is not as certain as it was five decades ago. In the original, that the Jackal was the villain was clear. Here, Redmayne’s innate charm, and the moral uncertainty of his pursuers, draw that line a little more ambiguously.
“I love that these are the questions you’re wrestling with because [the original film] felt binary, and Michael Lonsdale’s character was very much on the side of good,” Redmayne says. “What [screenwriter] Ronan Bennett has created is these two characters who are two sides of the same coin: meticulous, obsessive, deeply talented, but with very dubious morals.
“And yet structurally, they’re on this kind of one-way collision course with each other,” Redmayne adds. “What I loved about the writing was the challenge of making someone who’s doing these horrific things someone who the audience also feels for? That moral ambiguity was really compelling to me. Do I think he’s good? No. Did I fight for my character? Yes.”
There is more moral ambiguity in Eddie Redmayne’s Jackal than there was in the original film. Credit: Marcell Piti
Lynch, who has starred as Maria Rambeau in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Captain Marvel in 2019, and played the warrior Izogie in the historical drama The Woman King, says she revels in the moral uncertainty of the Jackal’s world.
“For that espionage world, it is so much more interesting for there to be a very fine line between good and evil and the truth and a lie,” Lynch says. “One of the first conversations we had was around how we utilise lies in this world, and how that helps us, forces us, or encourages us, as audience members, to question our own morals and where we stand.
“With film there’s just not enough time to dig into the trauma of why someone would become a bad person. You just want to celebrate them being a bad person and sit in that,” Lynch adds. “When it’s long-form TV, and you’ve got the time to do so, you learn more about Jackal’s process, and then you should flip-flop every single episode.”
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Though comparisons to the world of British super-spy James Bond seem glib – in truth, the worlds of Forsyth’s spy novels are much darker and more challenging than the lighter and flightier world in Ian Fleming’s books – there is something inextricable in Britain’s cultural DNA that knits deeply to the genre.
“It’s so embedded in our culture what James Bond is, but Day of the Jackal was the movie that my family watched on repeat,” says Redmayne. “And I suppose it’s the history, whether it’s assassins, but also MI6, MI5, the Olympics and [Bond actor] Daniel Craig and the Queen. Those two things, espionage and Britain, are woven together.”
The British spy tradition “is more literary, but it’s definitely a British tradition,” says Neame, who in an earlier life as head of independent drama commissioning at the BBC, steered the hit espionage drama Spooks into production. (It lasted for 10 seasons, totalling 86 episodes.)
“Yes, it’s Bond, but it’s also John le Carré, and it’s Graham Greene, and it’s Erskine Childers writing in the Edwardian era,” Neame says. “It’s all the different branches of military intelligence, of which there were about a dozen during World War II. There are only two left now in MI5 and MI6, but there are all those other ones. It is absolutely a part of our culture.
“There is a sort of noble calling about it,” Neame adds. “There’s somehow even something sort of romantic about those Cambridge spies, the biggest traitors that Britain ever knew. It’s a huge part of our cultural history. But here, I think we are trying to do something much darker and dirtier.”
The Day of the Jackal premieres Thursday, November 7, on Binge and Foxtel.
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