 Director Béla Tarr and novelist @-@ screenwriter László <unk> had been collaborators since making the acclaimed epic <unk> in 1985 . With The Man from London , they sought to adapt the 1934 French language novel L 'Homme de Londres by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . The novel had been twice adapted for film previously ; as The London Man by Henri <unk> in 1943 , and as Temptation Harbour by Lance Comfort in 1947 with William Hartnell , Robert Newton , and Simone Simon in the lead roles . The Man from London was something of a departure from the social realism of the collaborators ' preceding films , as the characters exemplify no social classes and the film focuses on their internal and <unk> dynamics rather than their environment . Tarr explained that he had been drawn to adapt the novel because " it deals with the eternal and the everyday at one and the same time . It deals with the cosmic and the realistic , the divine and the human , and to my mind , contains the totality of nature and man , just as it contains their pettiness . " It was the first of the director 's films not to feature the Hungarian language or an Eastern European setting . The ensemble cast of the film included Czech Miroslav Krobot , Briton Tilda Swinton , and the Hungarians János Derzsi and István Lénárt . Tarr shared directorial credit with Ágnes <unk> – the film 's editor and his long @-@ time collaborator . 
