Britain’s John Madden, whose Shakespeare in Love won seven Oscars in 1999, broaches a starkly different world with his new movie The Debt, a spy thriller plumbing deep psychological depths.

The film, which hit US cinemas this week, stars Helen Mirren in a tale about three Mossad agents who capture a Nazi in the 1960s, before zooming forward to depict their reflections on their own past actions.

Sixty-two year-old Mr Madden, who made 2001’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin before moving into more action-movie territory with Proof in 2005 and Killshot in 2008, says his latest picture combines two passions.

“At one level it’s a chamber piece and on another level it’s an action movie.

“And I think that those two things are a very interesting combination to me and gives the movie a particular spring, a particular tension,” he remarked.

“Technically, a thriller is an exciting and challenging form to work in, and something that is so purely cinematic. It’s a form that works better in the cinema than it does in literary form, I think,” he added.

A Hollywood remake of a 2007 Israeli film of the same name by director Assaf Bernstein, The Debt shifts between action in two different times. In the first, the Mossad trio capture a Nazi war criminal in Berlin in the mid-1960s, but are forced to go to ground and hold him captive in an apartment after an operation to transfer him to Israel fails.

In the second, the movie follows the three agents in Tel Aviv in the 1990s as sixty-somethings linked by the secret of their past actions, which weigh heavily on their consciences.