Like the tropical nightmares of Joseph Conrad, the films of John Boorman lead us down rivers-real and imagined-into the heart of what ails us, and the quest for a remedy. Hell In The Pacific, Point Blank, Deliverance, Excalibur, The Emerald Forest, Hope and Glory, Beyond Rangoon, The General: in one form or another, Boorman's films are about the quest: for restitution, identity and, most importantly, redemption. In his timeless, mythic universe, to go against nature is to court disaster; all attempts to subvert the natural order amount to living a lie. Man against man, man against nature, man against himself: these are the roads to hell. His characters are looking for a way out. Boorman's latest picture, The Tailor of Panama, adapted from the novel by John Le Carré, takes us back to the wasteland-this one of the tropical, urban variety-where Geoffrey Rush, a bumbling, middle-aged Perceval, is sleepwalking into a tragedy mostly of his own making, taking career advice from a ghost and churning out lies faster than he can possibly defend them. Slay the truth, and the gods will have their revenge. Co-starring Pierce Brosnan as the anti-James Bond, The Tailor of Panama returns Boorman to the multiplex with a rip-roaring yarn that dishes up spy games and wry, political commentary with equal finesse. In a conversation with MM, Boorman talks about his latest film, his directorial tactics and pushing the audience to the limit.

Phillip Williams (MM): 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.

John Boorman (JB): Yes [laughs]. I always have one of those.

MM: Are you always looking at the mythological dimension of a story?

JB: Yes, that's like a security blanket for me [laughs]. 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.

MM: Is there a specific process you employ when working with actors?

JB: 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. 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.

MM: Do you do any storyboarding?

JB: I only storyboard scenes that require special effects, where it is necessary to communicate through pictures.

MM: How precise do you get with the design of your films?

JB: 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.

MM: What about the design of The Tailor of Panama?

JB: 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.

MM: Did you have a sense of the style you were going for with the camera?

JB: 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.

MM: Do you have any preferences as far as lenses are concerned?

JB: 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 I was trying to get this spatial feeling of bleakness, of emptiness.

MM: What was the writing process like on The Tailor of Panama?

JB: 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 Carré certainly wasn't. Then Le Carré went and wrote a script himself, which was 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 Carré; 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.

MM: The image of the mentor keeps coming back in your films.

JB: You're talking about, in this case, Uncle Benny. Well, that sort of Merlin character-who is always the advisor, who is at the elbow, who himself is not able to do anything but knows more than anyone else and gives advice, which is what Merlin always did-that was his role.

MM: Who were your mentors?

JB: I did years and years of documentaries at the BBC and [worked with] Hugh Welm, who was an extraordinarily brilliant man and I learned a lot from him. Then I suppose the two people I learned a lot from in film were, first of all, Conrad Hall, the cameraman. I did Hell in the Pacific with him and he taught me an awful lot about the camera and its possibilities. The other one who taught me about film-about the use of the metaphor-was Lee Marvin, because Marvin had this extraordinary ability to find a metaphor for any given scene. The gesture: he would be always searching for the gesture.

MM: Can you cite a typical Lee Marvin gesture?

JB: I will give you an example: when we met-a producer gave me the script [for Point Blank] and [also] gave it to Lee. Lee asked 'What do you think of script?' I said 'It's not good, but the character is fascinating.' We met a number of times and one night in his apartment, which was on the sixth floor. it was summer and the windows were open and we had a few drinks. and he said to me, 'I will do this movie with you on one condition.' And he picked up the script and threw it out the window. That was a Marvin gesture.

MM: Going back to Hell in the Pacific: that film is kind of a dream for a moviemaker-to make a film with essentially no dialogue.

JB: Well, it was also immensely difficult. Not only because of the absence of dialogue-but with just two characters, you are subtracting so many of the elements that make film interesting. I was in Japan, and my assistant director had worked with Kurosawa. I used quite of number of Kurosawa's crew. Well, we were still struggling with the script at this point, so I asked 'Are you going to see [Kurosawa] while we're here?' and he said yes. So I said 'Tell him the situation and see if he's got any ideas.' So he went to see Kurosawa and he spoke about these two men on a ship who get marooned on an island, and they're enemies. He told him the rest of the story and [Kurosawa)] thought long and hard and then he said: 'Ah, they meet a girl...' [laughs]. I probably should have taken his advice.

MM: How far do you want to push your audience? What can you afford to subject them to without losing them?

JB: Well, what they always said in Hollywood was get close to the love scenes, and give the audience a little cover for the violence-always shoot through something so that the audience can feel they are protected. (laughs).

MM: But you don't always want to do that.

JB: No, no, it all depends on what you want, what effect you're trying to get from it. Also, it's so easy to manipulate an audience, but it's nearly always clear that you are being manipulated. I think even people that are not critically attuned are aware of cynical manipulation in film.