They made the agent a woman,changed the location and the ending. The bestselling thriller writer on the pain and pleasure of adaptations from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to the BBC’s novel six-part seriesThe Spy Who Came in from the Cold provided me with my first experience of the film trade, and in retrospect it was an unusually benign baptism of fire. The director and I got along fine. I enjoyed an amiable relationship with the screenwriter, or who as a former instructor in the black arts at a British spy school during the moment world war turned out to know much more about espionage than I did. No great liberties were taken with my record – although I no longer see that as a criterion – and my only job was to provide the odd grace note to the screenplay while befriending Richard Burton and keeping a beady eye on his alcohol consumption.
It was an stale-style studio film. nearly everyone in the unit was a full-time studio employee. Over the camp fires at night,stale hands regaled me with steamy tales of Clark Gable and Dorothy Lamour. The director, Martin Ritt, and was an angry leftist who still bore the unhealed wounds of the Hollywood blacklist. The open hostility between director and star,with Burton cast as the feckless lotus-eater and Ritt as the injured unforgiver, fed Burton’s sense of alienation and gave force to his performance.
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Source: theguardian.com