Nobody does it better, p.50
Nobody Does it Better, page 50
One victim in post-production was that their nail-biting teaser was changed to accommodate a song instead. Out with the ticking clock, in with Lani Hall’s dreadful “Never Say Never Again” title track, incongruously playing against the backdrop of Sean Connery infiltrating the camp of enemy terrorists in the jungles of Latin America in what is eventually revealed as a training exercise.
DICK CLEMENT
Later, in the view of Ian and me, one of the worst post-production decisions ever made was to put the bloody song on it, which completely dissipated the tension. But believe me, when that had a ticking stopwatch over it, it was tense. Then you put the song over it and completely buggered it up, which was a production decision later. It was our sequence that had replaced the bloody black knight against the white knight with tin cans on their heads. It was Sean. There he was. There’s your man. Unfortunately, the main title was a signature of the franchise. There was always a song sung by Shirley Bassey or whoever. In the end, they felt they had to have one, too, and it would’ve been so much better off without it.
One of the signature scenes in the film remains the tango scene in which Connery’s Bond dances with Kim Basinger’s Domino and reveals in the center of the crowded reception that Largo has killed her brother in plain sight of the villain and his henchwoman, Fatima Blush.
DICK CLEMENT
There was a moment where suddenly Sean asks Kim Basinger to dance. Then the first thing he says is, “Your brother’s dead.” We thought this lacks diplomacy, if nothing else. I have a feeling that we ended up even in the cutting room trying to help that moment by saying, “I’m going to tell you something shocking.” I don’t know whether it’s in the movie. I don’t think it is. We were trying to say, “Brace yourself, because I’m going to tell you some bad news. Your brother’s dead.” It’s something to ease us into it. That was later. The tango scene, though, was in danger of being kind of laughable, the wrong sort of laughter. I think in the end, they got away with it.
BARBARA CARRERA
I remember in that scene thinking, “My God, Fatima is the one who should be doing the tango. Not these two.” I was in the mind of Fatima. So I went over to Kersh and I said, “Kershy,” which is what I used to call him when I wanted something. “Kershy, how can Fatima do a tango, huh? Fatima should do a tango.” He said, “Well, yeah. Why not?” He said to Doug Slocombe, our great cinematographer, “What’s Fatima’s next scene?” I said, “Well, she’s coming down these stairs. She’s just been given the order by my boss to go kill Sean’s secretary.” So, she was in her element. She was just very happy. So he said to Dougie, “What can we do for Fatima? How can she do a tango?” I said, “Well, I can dance going down these stairs.” He said, “Yes, yes, yes. Dougie, can we?” And he just got very excited and they figured it out and she danced her way down the stairs and it was brilliant.
Among the writers’ other responsibilities were doing character passes on each of the main roles, including the villainous Largo, played by Brandauer.
DICK CLEMENT
We were all the time trying to breathe some life into the dialog. Klaus Maria Brandauer is a very good actor, but he was resorting to the sort of tricks that actors do when they don’t trust the text. In other words, there were these banal lines. There’s a moment in the final film where Bond comes onboard his yacht and he says, “Welcome, Mr. Bond. Cigarette? A drink?” What he did with those two words was way too much. When I first saw his performance in dailies, I thought he was terrible. I respected him enormously, because I’d seen him in Mephisto and I thought, “This is a seriously good actor,” but actors will fall back on every trick in the world if they don’t trust the text. It was okay in the end, but you’ve still got that video game sequence, which is bizarre, really.
Poor Kim Basinger was not very well served by the script, whereas Barbara Carrera, her part had a lot of pizzazz. She did a lot with it. Poor Kim Basinger had a thankless role, pretty much, actually. I felt sorry for her, because I felt she was really exposed. There wasn’t a lot that we could do to help her part, really. She was beautiful. That was the most she really had going for her. Apparently, she’s someone who still will not talk about that film. She looked unhappy. Even on the plane going out to the Bahamas, she looked unhappy to me.
BARBARA CARRERA
She just had a difficult time, unfortunately. She and Kersh didn’t get along. I stayed out of it. I never got involved with the drama. I found all of these things out after I finished shooting, and all the intrigues that were going on.
DICK CLEMENT
I feel a bit sorry for [producer] Jack Schwartzman in a way. There was a night that [my writing partner] Ian was having dinner with Sean, and Talia [Shire] came over and said, “Why did you decide to sabotage my husband’s movie?” She was really being very ballsy about defending him. Sean is somebody who is nothing if not a pro. He expects everybody else to be a pro, as well. I respect that very much. He felt they had not done their homework in time, which I think was obviously true. It was partly because of the fact that they had three different scripts. I never saw the other scripts, thank God, but I heard about them. In fact, they never even explained why Bond was going to the Bahamas.
Perhaps the worst element of the entire film is the dreadful Michel Legrand score, which enterprising fans later replaced in a re-cut version of the film with classic John Barry tracks and the Shirley Bassey–fronted Propellerheads song “History Repeating” for the main title in the cleverly retitled “Never Say McClory Again” cut.
ROBERT SELLERS
A lot of people talk about the music score wounding the film, and I totally agree. It’s a great example actually of how important a musical score is to a film, how it changes the perception of the person watching it. Someone put up a montage of scenes from Never Say Never Again on YouTube a while back with John Barry music over the top of it, and the whole thing is lifted immeasurably.
JEFF BOND
(editor, Film Score Monthly)
Never Say Never Again, I think, was a case where they went after a songwriter—even though Michel Legrand had written some great movie scores, I think they were thinking less about those and more about what kind of song he could produce. It’s a strange film with some strong moments, but a lot more of a spoof feeling, and Legrand’s music was not effective in pushing the action. For a lot of the espionage/military moments he was harkening back to the approach he took in something like Ice Station Zebra, but where Barry’s spy music could update to the period very well, Legrand’s seemed dated and clumsy at a lot of points, and it’s a rare Bond score that really undermines the film.
Not having the usual Eon tropes forced the filmmakers to depict familiar characters in unexpected ways, including Edward Fox as a disdainful M and Alec McCowen as Algernon, the armorer, who was the film’s equivalent of Q. The writers also introduced a comedic ally for Bond in Nassau played by a bumbling Rowan Atkinson in one of his earliest roles.
DICK CLEMENT
I think one line is definitely ours, where Algernon says, “I hope we can rely on some gratuitous sex and violence.” That was definitely us with a gleam in our eyes. It was definitely a moment when we were acknowledging, “Hey, it’s Sean, and we know what the franchise is about, gratuitous sex and violence.” That was us tipping our hat to the franchise in a way.
DESMOND LLEWELYN
(actor, “Q”)
I was most complimented and very flattered that Alec, who I know quite well, played Q in a totally different way. It was a very funny performance.
DICK CLEMENT
Rowan Atkinson had never been across the Atlantic. We were dangerously near going over the top with his character. It did provide something for Sean to bounce off of, apart from everything else. But it was tense. I remember, we used to go to script meetings at the end of the day, and we were kind of in a neutral corner. There’s Kersh, there’s Sean, there’s Schwartzman. At a certain point, we used to say, “Gosh, is that the time? Why don’t we go and get the table organized for dinner?” You know what I mean? We would go off, organize the table for dinner not knowing how many people or who they would be and if they would turn up. It was enormous fun for us; not for everybody, but we were in the middle of this maelstrom that needed any help we could give it. Nobody saw us as the bad guys in that.
BARBARA CARRERA
Sean and I both had never scuba dived before and so we were a bit apprehensive. We didn’t know what to expect. They tried to get us to practice with the underwater cinematographer, but we never made ourselves available, because we were afraid. So when we got to the Bahamas, we had not learned how to scuba dive. And we had a lot of our scenes in the water and we had to learn how to do it. The love scene was so bland but, you know, it was what it was. That’s Kersh. He likes to find humor in everything. All the humor, the subtle humor that’s in Never Say Never Again, is Kershner’s idea.
GLEN OLIVER
(pop culture commentator)
Never Say Never Again is a high-class knock-off. It’s reasonably well made, but … at the end of the day … it’s a dispensable rehash of Thunderball. Which, in itself, wasn’t exactly top-shelf Bond. And, due to legal constraints, that’s all it could ever truly be—a retread with not much deviation—which made the whole affair feel a bit limited, constrained, and pointless. It was enjoyable in a “back for one night only” nostalgic sort of way, but its overall purpose felt more like a money grab than anything else.
ROBERT SELLERS
My main criticism with Never Say Never Again is that apart from the presence of Connery, it just doesn’t really feel like a Bond film. I think the reason is the choice of director. Kershner was all wrong. He said he was approaching the film as if there had never been another Bond movie before. That was the wrong attitude. I think they should have stuck with their first choice of Richard Donner. For me, despite all the globe-trotting and action, Never Say Never Again just doesn’t have the visual splendour and scope of an Eon Bond movie; too often it resembles a made-for-TV movie, quite shocking when one remembers how much the damn thing cost. Connery is by far the best thing in it, Carrera is brilliant, as is Brandauer, and the whole thing is enjoyable to watch, but it could and should have been much better.
BARBARA CARRERA
Sean and I took it around the world. I wanted to do everything possible that I could do, you know? So I dedicated another two years of my life after that to promoting it wherever it was opening.
FRED DEKKER
I’ve never given it its due, because it’s not the real deal. It’s like when you go to the supermarket: there’s Sugar Pops and Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops and then if you look on another shelf, there’s the generic brand, which may actually have the exact same product in it, but it’s got a bad cartoon panda bear. It’s the same cereal, but it just doesn’t have the brand name on it. Even though Connery plays Bond, I never gave it its due. I was really bothered by the winking. “I hope we’re going to have some gratuitous sex and violence.” What? You’re ammunitions, you’re an armorer. Have you seen movies? Any time a Bond movie acknowledges the Bond movies it drives me crazy. I don’t mind the dwarf whistling Goldfinger in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, because it’s sly. I have nothing really to say about Never Say Never Again. Video games with Largo? The truth is, Thunderball is a relatively generic story. It’s not uniquely Bond really at all, but it was all Kevin McClory.
JOHN CORK
Octopussy won the Battle of the Bonds. It was the better film on every level, and it was just a mediocre Bond film.
JOHN GLEN
The thing is, quite a few of my friends were working on that film, and one day their rushes came to us by mistake. They were filming at Owl Street and we were filming at Pinewood, and the rushes, their rushes, came to us. I honestly didn’t look at them. I had no interest in looking at them. We even paid for the car to take them over to Owl Street for them. That was magnanimous of us, I think. The editor I knew, and we were good friends. There wasn’t a problem.
RAYMOND BENSON
(author, Zero Minus Ten)
I mean no disrespect to Roger Moore, but I was very happy to see Sean Connery back. I just remember the excitement of having two Bonds in one year, right before the publication of The James Bond Bedside Companion. It was all good!
DICK CLEMENT
What came out of Never Say Never Again for us, leading in a different direction, was that when Jerry Bruckheimer was trying to cast The Rock, and Sean [Connery] was basically holding back from signing because he didn’t like his dialogue, there was a conversation where they suddenly said, “Oh, let’s get Dick and Ian to come in and do that,” so we worked on The Rock. Whatever we wrote persuaded Sean to sign on, which I think was worth quite a lot of money to Jerry. That was more of a polish; they didn’t want us to touch the action sequences. We were thrilled, because, to be honest, it’s not a lot of fun writing an action scene. I’ve heard that with Jackie Chan movies, they just used to say in the script “Jackie kicks ass!” and leave it to him. They didn’t even attempt to say who did what to whom with what.
JOHN GLEN
We [Octopussy] opened in the summer with intense competition, Spielberg and everyone, but they decided not to and they opened late in the year, but they didn’t do as well as us, anywhere near. They had Sean, which was a great attraction, but I’m not sure his heart was in it. He did it for the money, I expect.
DICK CLEMENT
I’m delighted we did it, because it was fascinating at the time to be in the middle of that whole mishmash. It’s like, to be a fly on the wall with all this whirling around you. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
ROBERT SELLERS
It became an obsession for McClory and he allowed it to totally dominate his life. He was given this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and he fucked it up royally. That’s my view, anyway. He made an absolute personal fortune from Thunderball and could have gone on to do pretty much anything in the film world. He could have become an independent producer making films that he was passionate about and wanted to make. He could have helped set up a film studio in his beloved Ireland. No, none of that. He wasted his fortune on lawyers’ fees and this absurd quixotic quest to prove that the James Bond movie blueprint started with him. I think he went to his grave a bitter and defeated man. His life could have been so very different.
A VIEW TO A KILL (1985)
After years of threatening that each Bond movie would be his last, usually as a negotiating tactic, Roger Moore’s decade-spanning embodiment of 007 was finally, really coming to an end with this 1985 film, whose title derived from the Fleming short story “From a View to a Kill.” Unfortunately, the 58-year old actor’s swan song in the role was, sadly, a fairly pedestrian entry in the James Bond film series. But after the touch-and-go negotiations of Octopussy, there was a period of time when even the producers thought that might have been his final film in the series.
JOHN GLEN
(director, A View to a Kill)
He was such a pro, and he made the best of it, but it was a hard one. I really thought we weren’t going to have him on that one. It was touch and go right to the last minute, and I think it was MGM in the end who had the casting vote and said, “Sign Roger—even if it is a lot of money,” because he was pushing it at that stage. I’m glad he did. He was looking a bit old in the film, but he pulled it off, and the actual storyline was good. We had this business of Silicon Valley flooding and I think Christopher Walken was fantastic in the film.
RIC MEYERS
(author, For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films)
It’s no secret that Moore himself thought this was his weakest Bond, and that much is clear in that the crew didn’t have to disguise him in clown face to diminish him. His creaking limbs and face-lifted skin accomplished that instead. It’s a shame that this had to be his, Lois Maxwell’s, stunt master Bob Simmons, and nine pseudo-Moore stunt doubles’ 007 swan song.
JOHN GLEN
Roger knew it was his last one. It was inevitable. I think we’d forestalled it on the last three films, considering I’d done three films with him over six years, when my instruction was to find a new Bond on For Your Eyes Only. We did pretty well to get through three films with him.
FRED DEKKER
(cowriter, The Predator)
Roger was getting on in years and it shows.
TOM MANKIEWICZ
(writer, Live and Let Die)
Audiences never accepted him the way they did Sean, because Sean was the first and Sean was wonderful. But Roger had his own strengths, too. Roger was much closer to Fleming’s idea. The Bond in Fleming’s books is very English. Not Scottish. I’ve always thought that the ideal bond for Fleming would have been a young David Niven.
FRED DEKKER
Has time been kind to Roger Moore as Bond? I don’t think he holds a candle to my top three, but I have great affection for him and I like him in the role. It’s a pleasant time watching him play it, but my favorite Roger Moore moments are the ones where he’s knocked off course. When he gets out of the centrifuge in Moonraker and he’s like, “Oh shit, I almost died.” In The Spy Who Loved Me when he says, “This is the job we do and I killed your boyfriend.” The moments when he actually plays the role as Fleming would have written it, he’s great. I wish that the movies had serviced that a little bit more.
RIC MEYERS
By almost any criteria, Octopussy should have been Moore’s last James Bond movie. Just as On Her Majesty’s Secret Service probably would’ve been better with Sean Connery, A View to a Kill probably would’ve been better with Timothy Dalton, or Pierce Brosnan—or pretty much anyone who was younger than Roger at the time.
