John le Carré is the subject of the next documentary from celebrated filmmaker Errol Morris, Deadline reports.
Apple Original Films and the Ink Factory will release Morris’ The Pigeon Tunnel this fall. According to a news release quoted by Deadline, the documentary “spans six decades as le Carré delivers his final and most candid interview, punctuated with rare archival footage and dramatized vignettes.”
Apple says that The Pigeon Tunnel draws on le Carré’s 2016 memoir of the same name. The score for the film is composed by Philip Glass, in collaboration with Paul Leonard-Morgan.
Le Carré, the former British spy whose real name was David Cornwell, is considered one of the world’s greatest espionage novelists. Known for bestselling novels including The Spy Who Came in From the Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and The Constant Gardener; he died in 2020 at 89.
Morris is the director of several acclaimed documentaries including The Thin Blue Line; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control; and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. He is also the author of three books, Believing Is Seeing, A Wilderness of Error, and The Ashtray.
Two of le Carré’s sons, Ink Factory co-founders Simon and Stephen Cornwell, said, “Full of deep insight, and surprising, amusing and often profoundly moving anecdotes, The Pigeon Tunnel charts a conversation between two great minds, both consummate storytellers; one who wove extraordinary fiction from the events he experienced; the other whose interrogation of those events has led so often to a greater truth.”
The Pigeon Tunnel will be released on Apple TV+ on Oct. 20.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
