Ken Follett

No, like those were the books I would pluck off my sister's shelf, my parents' shelves.

Ken Follett, you know, who also pivoted from kind of genre spy fiction into historical fiction.

Yeah, right.

and I think what's interesting about now that I think about it is that they were like I think and continued throughout her career to sort of defy expectation.

Yeah.

Number 89, Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett.

Not really a type of author that I have any interest in reading, but I have heard that those series are very addicting.

I think my mom has a copy.

Oh, gosh, there's so many of them out there right now.

I go back to my favorites of those books that I love to reread, like Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, Sharon K. Penman, The Sun in Splendor.

But there are some really good, I don't want to say modern day books,

Yeah, more

What I think they are missing is that thriller element that it sounds like is very present here.

And so for that, I automatically think about Ken Follett or Umberto Eco, but they are, along with Caleb Carr, too old, too big.

So instead, I would look at Robert Harris maybe as a comp or Elizabeth Kostova.

I think they capture that same historical appeal, but they aren't as enormous as the previously mentioned ones and aren't as old.

I did one for a company called BBC Maestro, which is a very interesting, you know, I think Brian Cox did one on acting at the same time.

And Ken Follett and I and Lee Child did them on writing.

And it was, anyway, it was a really interesting experience because I started discovering things about how I do it that I never really understood.

expected, even after all these years.

I can see that we...

I was talking to somebody yesterday about this, because I said, where are the next Geoffrey Archer's? Where are the next Ken Follett's? Where are the next big, you know, sweeping historical novelists? And they said, well, people don't want to read that anymore.

And I thought...

Yeah, exactly.

And in this movie, he plays very careful, like he has moments of emotion, but other times where he's trying to keep things under control.

And it's very, without spoiling it, it's important that he played the role this way, for let's just say his final scene which really is one of the most famous endings in the history of cinema I don't know if it's top 10 but certainly top 25 just amazing but it's because the control of Sutherland's performance the fact that it is not a broad performance he's not giving a performance like he did a few years later in the really good the spy thriller Eye of the Needle the adaptation of the Ken Follett best-selling novel where he is a super spy kind of a a disgusting German James Bond, if you want to put it that way.

But it's a much more, it's a larger performance.

And Donald Sutherland famously with Clint Eastwood in 2000's Space Cowboys and James Garner and Tommy Lee Jones, that's one of the biggest performances he ever gave.