Nobody does it better, p.63
Nobody Does it Better, page 63
MARTIN CAMPBELL
The music got criticized a lot, and the thing is that he had worked for Luc Besson. I had asked John Barry to do it, but he didn’t want to. Then I went to Bill Conti or someone like that, and he didn’t want to do it. Then I thought, “You know what? We’re trying to reinvent this thing.” I’d seen Éric Serra’s stuff on Léon: The Professional. It was great stuff. So I said, “Why don’t we get him? Why don’t we just change it? Let’s put something in the ’90s, something completely different.” So everybody agreed, but I thought the score was disappointing. I thought he could have done a better job of it, but that’s what we were stuck with. Now I loved John Barry’s music, and what he did with the “Bond Theme.” It was disappointing that Eric didn’t use it.
JEFF KLEEMAN
Thus began a big discussion about the fact we had to have the “Bond Theme.” Where do we put it? How do we balance this out? How do we make it mesh? Ultimately we did. It may not show up there as much as we would have liked. The score may have pushed a little further away from Bond than would be ideal, but I don’t ultimately think the score is a disaster. I think we did get the “Bond Theme” in there. With David Arnold on Tomorrow Never Dies, we reset the balance and we learned what we needed, which allowed, I think, us to guide David Arnold to the right place in subsequent films. There’s a lot of GoldenEye which benefits from Éric Serra’s score, and future Bond films benefited by being able to see how far you could push and where you needed to pull back.
MARTIN CAMPBELL
And then what happened was that Serra, in his wisdom, had given us a track for the tank chase that was exactly in the same register as the fucking tank—so the music disappeared. So, in desperation, I rang up [re-recording mixer] Graham Hartstone, who was doing the mix, and said, “Oh my God.” He had just done a quick run-through to check the music. He said, “We can’t hear a fucking thing, because the tank is in the same register. There’s no way.” So I rang Serra and said, “Look, there are problems here.” I tried to explain and he said, “Well, take the effects down.” Just didn’t want to know. So I thought, “Fuck you!” and slammed the phone down.
JEFF BOND
(editor, Film Score Monthly)
This was another case of taking a trendy composer and going after something cutting-edge as they started up with a new Bond, and unfortunately Serra just can’t seem to come up with anything memorable in terms of characterizing Bond. The tank chase arrangement of the “Bond Theme” was done by someone else [Serra’s orchestrator John Altman], and the techno stuff that Serra came up with for the rest of the film just doesn’t have much life outside the film.
MARTIN CAMPBELL
Now first of all, Serra was reluctant to ever use the “Bond Theme,” and that’s because he doesn’t get paid royalties on it. I said to his assistant, “This has got to be straight-out Bond. It’s got to be the “Bond Theme,” it has to be percussion, it has to be horns. We just go through all huge effects and everything else.” We went through the sequence and I said, “You’ve got five days to do it.” This was on a Wednesday, and we had to hit the mix on Tuesday. And he did a great job. He came up with it. And Éric Serra has never spoken to me since.
JEFF BOND
The movie is such a good launch for Pierce Brosnan that Serra really can’t hurt it—so it’s definitely superior to Michel Legrand’s Never Say Never Again, but mainly just because it’s unobtrusive and doesn’t make you stop and scratch your head in the middle of the action scenes.
An updating that did work exceptionally well was Daniel Kleinman coming in to take on the main title treatments in the aftermath of the April 9, 1991, death of Maurice Binder. With a background in television commercials and music videos (including Gladys Knight’s main title song for Licence to Kill, which put him on Eon’s Bond radar), he brought a whole new series of techniques to the iconic Bond title sequences, which brought with them a modern sensibility. Born December 23, 1955, in Britain, Kleinman got swept up in Bondmania as a kid, buying bubblegum cards, toy versions of the Aston Martin, and finding himself drawn in by various graphics associated with the series.
DANIEL KLEINMAN
(title sequence designer, GoldenEye)
I was always interested in art and my mother was an artist. With Maurice Binder’s titles, there was an element of fantasy and excitement and sexiness and humor that are in a lot of the early Bond titles. One kind of forgets how fresh that was at the time; now it’s quite ubiquitous when it’s used to suggest a spy thriller or something of the like. And it’s kind of become a cliché. In one of the first meetings I had with Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, Michael asked me whether I thought it was a good idea to keep the women and the guns, or just to lose them altogether. I said I thought it would be a big mistake to lose them, because in my view there are certain things within the title sequence that make you know you’re seeing a Bond film. You take all those things away, then there’s a certain expectation that you might well disappoint people. But the challenge is to try and reinvent those tropes or themes and make them be relevant to the film, but also tonally work with the age, the style, or whatever, and not make them feel gratuitous. And luckily I came in to doing them just at a transition point in the technology of creating film graphics. I was able to jump on the back of new technology, which certainly helps give it a different look and feel.
But the other thing I was very keen on is to lose any kind of gratuitous sexiness and to bring a narrative to the sequence, so that rather than just sitting and watching a kaleidoscope of vaguely sexy, interesting images, and a load of names, you’re actually learning something about the film. Or at least it’s giving you a sense of what’s going to happen: the first few reels of the movie, before the titles, were set in one time period, and the second, when you come out of the titles, it was in another time period. It was an opportunity for me doing a sequence which sort of says in an abstract sort of way, time is passing, and also suggests what politically might’ve been happening, and how the world had changed from the opening of the film to the next part of the film.
As a result, it wasn’t necessary to have some subtitle saying what had happened, but in the titles you’ve seen Communist icons being smashed up and falling, and you get the sense that, okay, after these events, then the Soviet Union split up, and things changed and Western values became more prevalent. In my mind I kind of felt the idea of having girls in lingerie smashing up the statues and whatnot actually made it even better, because that was sort of saying that Western values—things like jeans and underwear and sexy Western exuberance—was part of what undermined the Cold War Soviet milieu, or whatever was happening at the time. And people in the East wanted what they saw in the West, they wanted bubble gum, they wanted jeans, and that was why, in the end, the whole regime fell to bits. And being able to do it with these girls doing it, I got both things in, I got a bit of the political message, if anyone wanted to see it, and also we’ve got a bit of sexiness in there, which was part of the trope and the language that Maurice had set up.
The first glimpse that the audience got of Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye came in the form of the teaser trailer, which began with Brosnan approaching the camera and asking, “You expecting somebody else?” The crowds went insane.
JEFF KLEEMAN
Again, going completely contrary to all the data, Joe Nimziki had this idea for the “You know the name, you know the number” teaser trailer. There were a lot of people who doubted him at MGM and really questioned the wisdom of that. As far as I know, the whole idea of that trailer was his. He came in and he directed it. He was really hands-on, and when that trailer went out, the response was enormous. It was beyond anything anybody could have hoped for. Certainly anything anybody believed possible. It was the moment when both internally at MGM and externally in terms of the industry, everybody suddenly said, “Wait a minute. Maybe GoldenEye is going to do business,” which was great, because we were on the verge of going over budget and we needed a few extra dollars.
What we were trying to do with GoldenEye was re-launch Bond with a studio that didn’t initially believe Bond was viable. Pierce had never been Bond. Martin had never directed a Bond. None of our writers had ever written a Bond. Barbara and Michael, who really became the lead producers, had been there for many Bonds, but they had never been the lead producers without their father really highly present. John Calley had been involved with Never Say Never Again, which was certainly a Bond movie, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of Bond movie we were trying to make. And I had been an ardent fan, but I had never worked on a Bond film before.
So, in a way, it was a movie where the odds were stacked against us. And the real question wasn’t could we make a perfect Bond movie, if that even exists. But could we make a Bond movie that could prove that there was a contemporary audience for James Bond, and he was still a viable hero for our world and franchise for our industry? And to that end, we succeeded. So, it is a success. Are there things that, as we were doing it and after we had done it, we felt we could’ve done better? Or not could have done better, but we wished we had been able to do better? And are there lessons learned? Absolutely. I’m a big believer that it’s really easy to attack someone for a bad movie or a flop. But sometimes you have to make the bad movie or the flop to learn what you need to learn, to then make the great movie that everybody loves next. And you see that with Bond movies throughout. I can’t claim that all Bond movies are equally good. There’re, for me, peaks and valleys.
MARTIN CAMPBELL
The time you get a bit nervous is when you finish the film, put it all together, and preview it. It had a good preview, not a great preview, but one of our problems was that there was no digital in those days. Now, after a preview, you can quickly put in background and it’s not perfect, but it’s enough. In those days, you couldn’t. So there is Bond on the top of the needle, fighting 006, and he’s got a bloody green rope and all sorts of safety lines, and the audience laughed. Of course they laughed. There’s all these safety devices on green screen and the audience hoots. The movie was also ten minutes too long, and I knew exactly what to take out.
RIC MEYERS
For this first Brosnan Bond, at least, the series was running on all cylinders, because they had a captain who knew what he was doing, what he wanted, and how to get it from his cast and crew. Campbell was on duty when Judi Dench became M, and also oversaw the return of Ian Fleming–esque character names, as well as the spot-on casting of Famke Janssen as Xenia Onatopp. And there has rarely been as independent, competent, and believable a Bond Girl as Izabella Scorupco as Natalya Simonova; nor as formidable and effective a villain as Sean Bean as Alec Trevelyan … that is, until the next Martin Campbell–directed Bond.
The action throughout snapped, crackled, and popped—from Bond’s memorable, well-structured tussle with Xenia in a steam room, through the awesome tank chase through Russian streets, to the climatic confrontation in a satellite dish’s engine room. That fight between “00” agents was the best, most professional, most authentic mixed martial arts so far in the series, and both Brosnan and Bean went above and beyond realizing it—only being doubled twice during the multi-minute fight. And it was a fight that actually served a distinct purpose to further the plot and characters—an extremely rare occurrence in action films in general and the Bond series in particular—evidenced by Bean’s concluding comment: “You know, James … I was always better.”
JEFF KLEEMAN
With GoldenEye, it certainly isn’t a valley. I think it’s a peak. But I know there were certain things, that when we finished GoldenEye, we said, “Wow. Um, wouldn’t it be nice if we can take this further?” Some of them were obvious. Like, with GoldenEye, there are what I would call Bond accoutrements. And what I mean by that is, Bond is first and foremost a spy. And if Bond didn’t have to deal with some kind of international espionage, there would be no Bond story. But what makes Bond distinctive are all the things around him. And some of those are his attitude, some of them are how he dresses or the situations he’s in, some of them are the villains. Some of them just having M and Moneypenny and Q and gadgets.
GLEN OLIVER
(pop culture commentator)
At face value, there’s nothing hugely remarkable about GoldenEye. It is, in essence, a straight-up Bond film, its most notable deviation being that one of the big bads was a former double-0 agent. But the filmmakers took those tried and true formulas and simply gave them all … heft. The story was Bond all the way, but felt more “real world” in its aesthetic and vibe. Little moments, like Gottfried John’s Ourumov flashing a smile of respect, amazement, bewilderment, and frustration as Bond escapes, very simply, and smartly, humanizes a character which might otherwise have been a cardboard cliché.
JEFF KLEEMAN
There’s always calibrations on the things that are a part of Bond’s world. We knew we wanted to give Bond a car that did stuff as part of the gadget list. We knew that was one of the things that, if previous Bond fans watched the movie, they would be hoping for, expecting. So, we gave him a car that did stuff, but in the process of getting the script and the budget to where it needed to be, everything the car did was essentially eliminated. Which left us with a conundrum. We’ve given Bond this car, it does all these cool things, and we want that, but we have no space for it to actually do anything. So we created, pretty last minute, that moment when Joe Don Baker shoots off the missile accidentally from the car. Which doesn’t really have a plot function, or function in an action sequence, but it’s just to say, “Yes, we know, the car does stuff, and at least let’s get a little beat out of it.” But we always had on our checklist: Next movie? We’ve got to make good on that. If there is a next movie, we have to deliver on it.
So going into Tomorrow Never Dies, one of the things at the top of our list was let’s have a car that does something. And to that end, it was really [director] Roger Spottiswoode who came up with the idea of that car chase, which happened in the parking garage. It’s one of my favorite things in the movie for many reasons. Two of which being that it breaks the rules. And these were things that were argued about vehemently. One was having it in a contained, not particularly geographically interesting space, a parking garage. It’s not a traditional Bond car chase. Usually it’s, you know, in a moon buggy going across Las Vegas. Or it’s jumping over crocodiles in Live and Let Die. Here, we didn’t have any restaurants for it to run through, any people to hilariously disturb. We were in what was probably the least conventional choice for a Bond car chase.
And then, we went even a step further. Bond didn’t drive the car from the driver’s seat. He sat in the back with a little remote control game board. And today I think that wouldn’t be so crazy, but back in 1995, gaming was not in the place it is today and there were a lot of people who felt, “You can’t have Bond be passive. He’s going to seem really passive here. It’s, in some ways, emasculating, to have him do it this way.” This is why it’s helpful that the idea came from the director, because the director had in his mind a way of shooting it and a way of executing it, that I think, when you watch the car chase now, you never think, “what a boring landscape” or “what an emasculated Bond.”
GLEN OLIVER
Phil Méheux’s photography had grit and depth and that distinctive “big budget film of the era” style, but also very clearly evoked the Bonds which had come before. There was so much … balance … evidenced throughout this movie. So much awareness of formula. Acknowledgement of a need to tweak, of the need to address “X” and “Y” factors, but a measured restraint and pointed effort not to take a re-jiggering too far.
RIC MEYERS
This was the Bond I had been waiting for, and of course I kept my fingers (and toes and eyes) crossed that the fine style would continue—little knowing that the next installment would be the start of seven years of bad luck for the new 007, and the saddest secret fustercluck in Bond series history.
FRED DEKKER
It’s the definition of a reboot. Let’s shake it up, let’s start again and make it cool. There’s something fresh about GoldenEye. There’s something to me really kind of special about it, because it’s doing the tropes, but it’s not doing them by rote. I think Campbell is a very gifted director. He made some great choices.
PIERCE BROSNAN
It’s a lovely feeling to have people’s warmth come at you, but it makes you very responsible for getting it right. There was a lot of pressure when we began, but that pressure alleviated. Everyone felt good, that we had come through the other end of it.
RAY MORTON
The screenplay of GoldenEye is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it does a terrific job of re-introducing the Bond character and repositioning and contextualizing him for the post–Cold War era. The script also has a great pre-credit sequence, it reimagines M as a woman, and it features one of the better henchmen—or in this case henchwoman—in Xena Onnatop. On the other hand, the story doesn’t make much sense (006 puts his plan to avenge his people by setting off an EMP over England in motion by getting captured, faking his own death, and then spending nine years becoming a black-market arms dealer?). It is also poorly structured (the first act has Bond accidentally stumbling across the villain’s plan through pure coincidence, which is seriously poor screenwriting. Coincidence is the opposite of drama). The script also has an oddly self-conscious tone and spends far too much time apologizing for Bond.
GLEN OLIVER
At the end of the day, the vibe I got from GoldenEye was … love. The filmmakers seemed to be clearly saying, “We love you, James Bond! We’d love to take you to the salon for a makeover, but you’ll always be just who you are to me.”
