On the website of the production company the Ink Factory, there is a note about its focus: adapting books by John le Carré, “with whom we enjoy a close relationship.”  Quite close. Nowhere does the site mention that the company’s founders, Simon Cornwell and Stephen Cornwell, are Mr. le Carre’s sons.  “That’s a little Freudian thing which I’ll go and look at,” Simon Cornwell joked about the veiled reference to his Dad, whose real name is David Cornwell.“It was written to be a bit of British tongue-in-cheek.” The Ink Factory has other projects, but it is proudly a le Carré family business, approved by the author himself.  So far, the company has taken on four adaptations. The most ambitious and daring is “The Night Manager,” a miniseries based on the 1993 novel. (The series begins on AMC on April 19.) While true to the outlines of the novel, the new incarnation updates the story to the present and changes a main character’s gender.  The miniseries aired this winter in the U.K. There, critics gushed and the series routinely drew more than 6 million viewers, plus another 2 million who time-shifted to watch later in the week, trouncing Julian Fellowes’s Trollope adaptation, “Doctor Thorne.” In no time the success led to speculation that the show’s star, Tom Hiddleston, might be the next James Bond.  Mr. Hiddleston plays Jonathan Pine, a hotel manager recruited by British intelligence to help bring down Richard Roper, a high-living arms dealer ( Hugh Laurie). Susanne Bier, who directed the Oscar-winning Danish film “In a Better World,” directed the entire series, in which Pine chases Roper through lavish settings in Egypt, Switzerland and Mallorca. (Richly budgeted at $30 million, the series was produced by AMC and the BBC.)  Simon Cornwell, 59, had spent most of his career as a venture capitalist before the brothers started the Ink Factory in 2010. Stephen Cornwell, 56, has long been a screenwriter in Los Angeles. From his years in Hollywood, he had observed of other production companies, “When they’re successful they have a core identity and grow from that.”  So building a business around their father’s novels was an obvious choice. “We’re lucky enough to have le Carré’s work at our fingertips. We’d be nuts not to focus on it,” Simon Cornwell said.  Their father agreed to the plan, and the 2014 adaptation “A Most Wanted Man” became the company’s first release. The thriller “Our Kind of Traitor” arrives in July, and “A Delicate Truth,” based on le Carré’s most recent novel, is in the works. The company’s non-le Carré projects include the new Ang Lee film, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” from the novel by Ben Fountain.  Getting “The Night Manager” to the screen followed 20 years of false starts from major Hollywood players. In the early ’90s, Paramount bought the rights for the director Sydney Pollack. Robert Towne, the writer of “Chinatown,” did a screenplay that went nowhere. In 2009, Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, tried and failed to create a viable script. When the Ink Factory took over, the producers decided that the novel couldn’t be crammed into a two-hour movie. The project took off when they conceived it as a six-hour series.  Le Carré, who is an executive producer and has a one-scene cameo, signed off on the changes from the novel. The book involves Colombian drug lords and has echoes of the then-topical Iran-Contra arms deal. The television version, written by David Farr (“Hanna”), begins in 2011, in Cairo during the Arab Spring. Roper is still, as Mr. le Carré has it, “the worst man in the world,” but now he sells rocket launchers and other deadly weapons to terrorists in the Middle East.  Pine is still a romantic, who is dangerously attracted to Roper’s glamorous young girlfriend. But the MI-6 agent who recruits him, originally the middle-aged Leonard Burr, is now the pregnant Angela Burr, played by Olivia Colman. The updated version needed a strong woman, Stephen Cornwell said. Also: “There was a danger of men in suits in rooms talking.”  Ms. Colman’s real-life pregnancy was written into the character, who is obsessed with bringing Roper in and defies the intelligence establishment trying to do it.  “She’s the moral heart of the piece,” Simon Cornwell said. “Having her as a pregnant woman with all the metaphorical significance of the next generation was very powerful.”  Mr. le Carré read the scripts and was especially helpful in reminding the filmmakers of the subtle interplay between a recruited spy like Pine and his handler (a trademark of le Carré novels).  Simon Cornwell said of Burr’s connection to Pine, “It’s maternal, it’s wistful, and it has a tough, uncompromising edge.” Unlike typical movie spies, “She’s ruthless not with threats or violence,” but by shrewdly pulling Pine’s strings.  As in most le Carré stories, moral questions are as crucial as the labyrinthine plot twists. “It was important to depict Roper’s world as incredibly sexy,” Ms. Bier said. “How can we trust that Pine, who is placed in this world that is so evil but so attractive, will not be corrupted?”  There are rumors of a second season, even though Mr. le Carré never wrote a sequel to the novel. Stephen Cornwell said the possibility is being discussed seriously, but will happen only if a follow-up promises to be at least as good as the original.  “We would have to be convinced that we would be making ‘Godfather II,’ so to speak, not ‘Godfather III,’ ” he said.
Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie star in John le Carré’s ‘The Night Manager,’ a miniseries on AMC which was a hit in the U.K.