“I want to learn,” the photographer and filmmaker Anton Corbijn told me, humbly. “It’s an adventure for me making films.”
We were sitting in an office in Midtown Manhattan discussing his new film, “A Most Wanted Man,” which arrives in theaters on July 25. Based on the book of the same name by master spy novelist John le Carre, the ensemble thriller — headed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the last complete role he filmed before his death, and featuring Willem Dafoe, Rachel McAdams, Robin Wright, and the German actress Nina Hoss — represents a departure for Corbijn, best known for his stark black-and-white photographs of musicians and accompanying music videos, and whose previous two films — “Control” (2007) and “The American” (2010) — were internal portraits of isolated men increasingly shut off from the world.
“I don’t want my films to look like a photographer made a movie,” Corbijn said, referencing a common criticism of his first film, “Control,” a biopic about the final days of Joy Division signer Ian Curtis. “A Most Wanted Man” posed a challenge and offered an opportunity to try something different. He was conscious of moving away from the meticulous compositions of his previous films and made an effort to use more handheld cameras to loosen the film up and give it a sense of urgency. He understands that, as a photographer, there are compositional modes that are easy to fall back on, and he sees his films as offering a way to break those habits.
“I’m very much trying to have the visual part of it play a more secondary role,” he admitted, noting that John le Carre’s story is told through a twisting structure and relies on dialogue to push the narrative. “After ‘The American,’ which was fiction, I wanted to do something based on facts,” he said. Le Carre’s book was of interest to the filmmaker in that it deals with the intertwined interests of international spy agencies in the post-9/11 landscape of Hamburg, Germany, presents a critique of American foreign policy, and asks questions about how far governments are willing to go in the name of fighting international terrorism.
Corbijn’s shift in style also represents his desire to scale down. “I’ve photographed a lot of painters in the last 10 years and it’s always just me,” he said. “I like to visit somebody and take a picture without being hindered by other people around. Photography’s a very simple thing. I don’t need much.” Corbijn is interested in documentary as a genre and as a way of working, he said, for these same reasons, even though he is beginning to find comfort in collaborating with a large group of people who you can trust to take care of their specific roles in a production.
One of those collaborators is Benoit Delhomme, the director of photography. Like John le Carre’s more famous narratives of Cold War disillusionment — most notably the George Smiley trilogy of books — “A Most Wanted Man” requires a melancholy tone, and Delhomme casts the film with muted colors and the glow of streetlights and desk lamps. The film was supposed to shoot over the summer, Corbijn said, but he convinced the producers to push it to the fall to capture some of the natural seasonal colors.
“I felt that it was an optimal tale to tell in that time of year,” he said. “For mankind, it’s definitely autumn year round.”
A bleak view, but one that is fitting for the film at hand. The closest we get to heroes in le Carre’s work are disheveled, chain-smoking spies, broken down by years of bureaucratic pressure and institutional deception with little prospects of any kind of domestic life. And Corbijn, in his film and photographic work, displays an attraction to loner figures. Instead of outcasts, he sees this type of character as something more relatable.
His next, already completed film, “Life,” is about the Magnum Photos photographer Dennis Stock’s relationship with the screen icon James Dean, one of popular culture’s most celebrated loners. In person, Corbijn is soft-spoken, almost shy, and mentions his familiarity, especially at a young age, with spending time alone. Does he see a connection between his characters and the role of an artist?
“I get the sense we’re all loners in the end,” he replied quietly. “We quite often pretend not to be because it makes it more comfortable, mentally.”
As our conversation came to a close, I asked Corbijn if the film is somehow different now, altered in some way that is out of his control, due to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s tragic death. He paused for a moment, staring at the ground. “I don’t know how to respond to that yet,” he said. “I myself find it much harder to watch it.”
“I’m very happy that we finished the film before Philip died so we didn’t have any awkward choices to make,” he added. “We only now have to deal with the effect of how people watch the film. But you know, his performance is everything. You can just look at the film and look at the performance, that’s reason enough to see the film.”
