Nobody does it better, p.4
Nobody Does it Better, page 4
SIR ROGER MOORE
(actor, “James Bond”)
It’s very difficult to get in touch with the character by reading Fleming, because there’s very little about the person that Bond is, only what he’s doing. I sort of did a quick shifting through all the books to try and find out what he was like. I only found one thing and that was that he had a scar on his cheek and looked like Hoagy Carmichael. The only other key to the character was that he had come back from Mexico, where he had eliminated somebody. He didn’t particularly like killing, but he took pride in doing his job well. That was the only thing I could find out about Bond. That I don’t like killing, but I’m pleased that I do it well.
JOHN CORK
Roger Moore came to Bond with a huge advantage. The world already saw him as a James Bond type. He came with a leading-man persona. Character actors play parts. Leading men play themselves playing a part. Roger Moore made James Bond his own by making James Bond into Roger Moore. And the world was completely ready to see James Bond morph into Roger Moore.
RICHARD SCHENKMAN
Roger was a legendarily charming man; he was so aware of his effect on people that he was perfectly willing—and able—to mock it. He was funny and bright and warm and never took anything seriously.
JOHN LANDIS
I think Roger’s attitude was that being a double-O was a job. He would do what was required. He had that wonderful kind of eyebrow thing, where he was almost too good for it. If there were some fiery pit of hell, he would just eventually step over it. He was so elegant. Connery’s was a muscleman, and he’s dirty and interesting, but not anything like the literary James Bond.
SIR ROGER MOORE
Every time I opened my mouth, someone would ask me what it was like following Sean, and I would just answer, four hundred actors played Hamlet. I always played heroes because I’m six-foot-one-and-a-half, but I never really believed I was a hero, so I always played things tongue in cheek.
PHIL NOBILE, JR.
Even though he’s the Bond I “grew up with,” my adult self didn’t initially take to Moore, and I had to sort of relearn an appreciation of him. Taking him in context, what’s refreshing about Moore is that he embraced the role in a way that no other actor seemed to, enjoying the association long after he’d hung up his Walther.
LISA FUNNELL
(author, For His Eyes Only—The Women of James Bond: Critical Perspectives on Feminism and Femininity in the Bond Franchise)
Roger Moore was the best brand ambassador for James Bond, because he embraced it and he embraced his fans. You always hear don’t meet your heroes, but he was somebody that you would be happy to meet with because he loved being James Bond.
JOHN CORK
I enjoy all the Bond actors, even David Niven [in 1967’s Casino Royale], but Moore needs no carefully lit Connery-style close-ups like Lazenby, no Spielbergian track-in reveals like Dalton, no punch-up introductions like Brosnan or Craig. He is the only Bond, aside from Niven, introduced by his own comic shtick. His performance can best be summed up by his last line in Live and Let Die: “Just being disarming, darling.”
CHARLES “JERRY” JUROE
(director of publicity, Octopussy)
Roger Moore was the prototype of the successful movie actor. He literally wrote the book on how to get along with the public and the press. As long as things were going great, he was great, and he would do almost anything asked of him. He was cooperative to a fault, and he was basically a nice guy, but at heart, he was an actor, and actors aren’t like the rest of us. I spent my life around actors, and there are very few that you can say are basically like regular people. It’s part of being an actor not to be that way. That doesn’t mean they can’t be nice and friendly, and absolutely great, but you never know when they’re going to turn. As long as you pet them right, and rub their tummy, they’re great, but they can turn and snap any minute.
DESMOND LLEWELYN
(actor, “Q”)
Roger Moore had the light Bond touch everyone loved, but I think a great deal of who you liked best had to do with whichever Bond you saw first. That sort of fixes in your mind what Bond is. Luckily, when Roger took it on, he made it a completely different Bond, so you couldn’t really compare them. Even if you didn’t like him, you certainly accepted him and said, “These are bloody good films, but he’s not my idea of Bond.”
SHANE RIMMER
(actor, “Commander Carter,” The Spy Who Loved Me)
Roger loved people. He was a great mixer and he enjoyed the business. He had this face that directors loved.
TANYA ROBERTS
(actress, “Stacey Sutton,” A View to a Kill)
Roger was great at what he did. He really had the Bond character down and he was lovely and always had a joke. He was always in a good mood. I have to say he was one of those kinds of people who was really a total pro and always very positive.
JOHN GLEN
Humor is a great thing about those films, and it’s really been the humor that sustained the series over the years, because the spy situation with the Cold War as we knew it was ending.
JOHN CORK
Unlike Connery, one never gets the sense that sex is an animal passion for Moore. It is, instead, a sport that he casually enjoys more for the amusement than the physical pleasure. If Moore’s Bond were asked to rank the perks of his job, one could imagine that “I get to have casual sex with numerous beautiful women” would fall somewhat lower than “I get to be a smart-ass.”
PHIL NOBILE, JR.
In an era when successfully recasting an iconic role was not a foregone conclusion, Moore’s assumption and transformation of the character was indeed an accomplishment, and his mischievous, easygoing manner helped cement the “unflappable playboy” trademark of the cinematic Bond for an entire generation.
RICHARD MAIBAUM
Roger’s personality made us take a lighter touch to it. It couldn’t have been any other way. That was very good from a commercial standpoint, because Roger’s pictures did better than Sean’s financially. People in the world loved them, but, as I say, the joke was growing a little tired and it was time to look for other values in the “Bond saga.”
CAREY LOWELL
(actress, “Pam Bouvier,” Licence to Kill)
I thought Timothy Dalton was refreshing after Roger Moore because he brought a new humanity to Bond—this is a real person who could have been. Roger was a bit more stylized, he was more of a cartoon character, because he was playing Bond as somebody who could always skate through these dangerous spots unscathed. The situations Dalton’s Bond faced are more probable than somebody who wanted to blow up the Earth or wants to stimulate the San Andreas fault and destroy Silicon Valley. It’s more realistic and that’s more appealing, because the suspension of disbelief doesn’t have to be so broad. I think audiences want to go to the movies to be entertained, but they also want to be entertained by a realistic point of view.
MARYAM D’ABO
(actress, “Kara Milovy,” The Living Daylights)
The books are quite serious. Timothy Dalton wanted to go back to the books. Be a more serious Bond. I think Tim came at a wrong time, since the audience was expecting much more of the humor.
MICHAEL G. WILSON
(cowriter, The Living Daylights)
You always want to do something where there will be some surprise. The problem with any sequel or series is meeting that criterion. Roger Moore’s talents and abilities worked better in the more humorous and fantastic style. Timothy Dalton’s talent worked best in a different style.
JOHN CORK
Timothy Dalton brought 007 back to Fleming. He understood the literary Bond very well, and having met Dalton on a couple of occasions, he is an immensely charming man. That charm does not follow him on-screen in his two Bond films. Whether through his own acting choices or via John Glen’s directing, he becomes the world’s angriest secret agent. At a time where Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were creating these hypermasculine heroes, Dalton brought a needed physicality to the role. You believed his Bond didn’t need a stunt double.
JOHN GLEN
Timothy Dalton is quite a historian on the Bonds. He goes into great depth with the character—which a great actor always does. He doesn’t take anything for granted in a sense, and he does question certain things and one has to give a good explanation of why you have them in the film. He tries to remain true to the Fleming tradition.
TIMOTHY DALTON
One is constantly reminded by Fleming, both from Bond himself and through the mouth of other characters, that Bond really is as bad as the bad guys. He is a killer, but he does have a moral sense of what good is. That throws him into conflict, because of his self-knowledge of who he is and what he does. He knows what he does … he’s a killer.
RICHARD SCHENKMAN
I loved Timothy Dalton’s serious, studied approach to the movies and I’ll defend his films to the end, although again, if a “real” director had made them, they’d have been better movies. I deeply respected the way he dove into the source material and tried to play the Bond he found in the pages of Fleming’s books.
PHIL NOBILE, JR.
Timothy Dalton is the best Bond actor to never get a great Bond film.
DESMOND LLEWELYN
He is a magnificent stage actor and a very good film actor. Every Bond is different, not an imitation of the other, and they are all excellent in their own way.
JEREMY DUNS
Part of the clever thing about them changing actors is that people get high on Bond again, everything becomes a huge success, and then, after a while, people tend to get a bit bored of it. And that definitely happened with the Sean era, Roger Moore, and then Dalton, and then you just got a sense that people were kind of losing interest in Bond and it was just a bit old-fashioned and a bit old hat.
ROBERT CAPLEN
(author, Shaken & Stirred: The Feminism of James Bond)
Timothy Dalton’s serious, no-nonsense portrayal of Bond was refreshing after A View to a Kill, and I would have liked to see him in more films. But Pierce Brosnan, in my view, imbued the character with both Dalton-esque and Moore-esque qualities. Brosnan’s whimsy was not as pronounced as Moore’s, but he was much more subtle than Sean Connery.
JEFF KLEEMAN
[Writer] Bruce Feirstein and [director] Martin Campbell had a fantastic mind meld in the way they tailored this role to Pierce Brosnan. How do we really make it Pierce’s in a way that’s distinctive from Lazenby, from Dalton, from Connery, but still hopefully giving everybody a Bond that they say, “This is not Jason Bourne. This is James Bond”?
CHARLES “JERRY” JUROE
It turned out to Pierce’s benefit that he didn’t do The Living Daylights because of Remington Steele being renewed. I talked with Pierce about it at the premiere of GoldenEye, and he more or less smirked and agreed. He shrugged and said, “Yeah, you’re right.” He was still very young in 1986. A big difference between 1986 and 1994.
JEFF KLEEMAN
Martin Campbell actually had a list of mannerisms that he’d seen Pierce perfect during Remington Steele and in some of his feature work, that he decided he was going to make sure he eliminated, so that you never felt like you were watching the Remington Steele version of Pierce Brosnan.
JOHN CORK
Pierce Brosnan was an actor who was already seen as a James Bond–type figure by audiences. That was an important element that he brought, just like Roger Moore. His absolutely stunning good looks attracted a lot of female fans back to Bond. I enjoyed his Bond, but my favorite performance as Bond by him was when he wasn’t playing James Bond at all. It was when he was playing a character inspired by Bond: Osnard in The Tailor of Panama.
MATT GOURLEY
I like Pierce Brosnan as an actor quite a bit, but I knew him as Remington Steele in the same way that people probably knew Roger Moore as The Saint. For me personally, the films after GoldenEye just weren’t for me. They seemed like too much of a rehash without bringing anything new. For me, the reason I take issue with the Brosnan run is not all that much to do with Brosnan. It’s more to do with them kind of trying to strike a tone balance between Connery and Moore. But those things, those are oil and water to me. They don’t work. The way they’d go campy and then ask you to believe in the sincerity of the darker moments were nose-bleedy to me. They would just jar me.
RICHARD SCHENKMAN
The Pierce Brosnan movies are such a mixed bag. The first few are great for an hour or so, and then they fall to hell. The later ones are pretty lousy from the beginning, but he’s hardly the weak link, so it’s unfair to blame him. He has charm to burn, he’s intelligent, funny, and dexterous. If they had made a series of movies as good as the first hour of GoldenEye, they’d have really had something. As a piece of casting, I think he was actually a fine compromise between Connery and Moore, and just needed some better scripts and directors to support him.
JEFF KLEEMAN
[Writer] Bruce Feirstein gave Pierce a certain kind of elegance, wit, sophistication, and more self-awareness, to some degree, than previous Bonds had had. He had more willingness to occasionally call himself out. There was an exchange at one point in Tomorrow Never Dies where Michelle Yeoh was talking about having grown up in a tough neighborhood. And Bond’s response was, “I never grew up at all.”
MARYAM D’ABO
After 9/11, the world changed. And [producer] Barbara Broccoli was very clever, because she knew that. She knew she had to bring in a completely different Bond.
JOHN CORK
Daniel Craig reinvented Bond. He understands that it is much more important to play the façade of Bond than the emotion behind the dialogue in the script. He is physical, charming, driven, and a damn fine actor.
ROAR UTHAUG
I appreciate what they did with Casino Royale when they kind of rebooted the series. It’s the same thing that [writer-director] Christopher Nolan did with the Batman movies. It took kind of this dark and more edgy turn.
RICHARD SCHENKMAN
I thought Casino Royale was spectacular—a brave and powerful reboot when, at least from a financial standpoint, the series was doing just fine. I really admired Barbara [Broccoli] and Michael’s [G. Wilson’s] choice to chuck it all out and start over, with a real actor, a real director, and a real screenplay.
JEREMY DUNS
No one was expecting it. People thought Casino Royale was just going to be another James Bond film with some blond guy they’d never heard of. They weren’t expecting it to take James Bond to some places that you haven’t seen James Bond before.
RONALD D. MOORE
Prior to this, you had to measure the other actors against Sean Connery. But Daniel Craig literally reinvented the role. Suddenly it was a different game, a different Bond, a different universe. I totally accepted him as Bond and didn’t feel like it was a competition with Sean Connery anymore. He has a different vibe to him. He’s a little more blue-collar than Sean was. He’s more vulnerable in a lot of ways. He can be hurt. Daniel Craig definitely gets hurt. You feel his pain.
It’s a similar thing to what Harrison Ford does. When Harrison Ford gets hurt on screen, you kind of feel it. Daniel Craig has that ability, too. It was the first time that Bond seemed vulnerable and could actually be hurt or killed. It was a very different take on the character and I really like it. To me, Connery and Craig are my two favorites, and they’re just so different. But I can really accept them both and really love them both.
TANYA ROBERTS
I love Daniel Craig. He’s my favorite Bond ever. I used to love Sean Connery, but Daniel Craig is my favorite. I love his looks, his craggy face; he’s just terrific, and his body—he’s really in outrageous shape. Unfortunately, Stacey Sutton could be his grandmother at this point.
MATT GOURLEY
Casino Royale is when Bond became truly interesting for me. Bond is not a role model. He’s a psychopath, and he’s a fascinating character to watch. When I say I’m a fan of the Bond films, I’m not a person who wants to dress like Bond and live like Bond. Actually that lifestyle kind of grosses me out a little bit, to be honest. But I want to watch this guy succeed, and I want to watch him fail. I want to watch him make mistakes. Daniel Craig has brought mistakes to this role that really reawaken the franchise, especially for me.
YAPHET KOTTO
There are some moments Daniel Craig has had that were good, but to me I don’t see him as Bond. And the 60-year-olds and 70-year-olds are not crazy with the new style because they miss the humor.
MARYAM D’ABO
Everybody has their favorite James Bond. It’s a generational thing that goes on, the ones that like Daniel Craig, don’t like Roger Moore, for instance. But everybody brings something. Pierce brought his own lightness. And Daniel is very interesting, because the younger generation loves Daniel Craig. Daniel actually said in an interview that he wanted to go back to what Timothy had started as Bond.
RAYMOND BENSON
Most fans cite the first actor they ever saw on-screen as their favorite. That said, I felt Timothy Dalton encapsulated Fleming’s literary Bond. You could say Daniel Craig is doing the same thing. The difference is that Dalton resembles Fleming’s physical description of Bond. The literary character is cold, ruthless, hard, and mostly humorless. The humor of the novels is in the writing, in the omniscient observations by the author—not in the Bond character. Bond is a bit of a brooder. Dalton did that, and Craig, too.
JEFF KLEEMAN
[Director] Martin Campbell recognized that Daniel needed to be a very different kind of Bond, with a different kind of voice and a different kind of physicality. And so, there again, you see how the actor, in conjunction with a good director and good writing, can define a Bond.
FRED DEKKER
Here’s my litmus test for Bonds: “Who do you think is the best Bond?” For me, if you put those guys in a room, who’s going to be on the floor and who’s going to walk out the door? Connery, Lazenby, and Craig are going to walk out the door. Those other guys are all going to be on the floor. Those are my three favorite Bonds.
