Nobody does it better, p.71
Nobody Does it Better, page 71
JEFF KLEEMAN
We were wrestling with the Austin Powers aspect of, “Oh shit, let’s just do what we always do, get a nuclear bomb and threaten the world with nuclear annihilation problem.” With Jonathan Pryce, Bruce, who comes from the media, had said, “Let’s really do a media-based villain and talk about the power, in our own, quiet, entertaining way, of the media and its own bias in world events, when it’s supposed to be objective.” Which we all know it’s not. We felt like, okay, we’re fine then. Yes, he is trying to create World War Three as most Bond villains do, but we’re finding a way to give him some interesting shading. With Sophie Marceau, Robert Carlyle, Baku, and the oil, we were once again trying to walk that line—but we didn’t walk it successfully.
Again, the intentions were good, but it’s also the frustrating thing of being on the two-year production schedule. If we had a lot more time to develop the script, I think we would have figured most of this out. We were in this conundrum, which is either we say we gotta make a movie every other year and therefore let’s just make them cookie cutter and not take any risks at all and not try to push the envelope, but just do yet another version of X. We see some franchises that do that. Or we say, “Gosh, we don’t have as much time as we’d like and we could probably do this even better if we had a lot more time, but how can we not try?” And with each movie—Goldeneye, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough—they all have flaws, but a lot of those flaws come from trying to push the envelope a little bit with time and production constraints that don’t allow for fully cooking the script. And yet, none of us wanted to just turn out the complete formula version.
THE 2000s: BOURNE AGAIN
“You think of women as disposable pleasures, rather than meaningful pursuits. So as charming as you are, Mr. Bond, I will be keeping my eye on our government’s money, and off your perfectly formed arse.”
DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002)
Welcome to the twenty-first century, Mr. Bond.
Although Die Another Day is considered by many to be the worst of the James Bond movies, it’s a somewhat unfair characterization of a film that is more woefully schizophrenic than anything else. For its first hour, Die Another Day, which was conceived as a celebration of four decades of James Bond movies for the franchise’s then 40th anniversary, is filled with a litany of wonderfully satisfying moments. The teaser, in which Bond infiltrates the DMZ on an assassination mission against a rogue North Korean colonel, is crackerjack, and his subsequent incarceration and escape from a North Korean gulag is all first-rate—provided you’re not a representative of Amnesty International. While Madonna’s song has its many detractors, we’re not among them.
In the sensational first hour of the film, Bond is then exchanged in a prisoner swap for his nemesis, Zao, in a suspenseful and stylishly crafted sequence. By the time a rogue 007 enlists the help of the Chinese and Chang (Ho Yi), a Chinese agent moonlighting as a hotel manager, who shares some witty bon mots with Brosnan, the film is firing on all cylinders. A subsequent trip to Cuba accompanied by a terrific David Arnold score keeps things humming, and Emilio Echevarría is marvelous as Raoul, a sleeper agent in Havana, who could have easily become a beloved recurring character. By the time a voluptuous Halle Berry, as NSA agent Giacinta “Jinx” Johnson, emerges from the sea off the coast of Cuba in a barely there orange bikini in an homage to Ursula Andress, we have all the elements in place for a really great Bond movie—which at times feels more Harry Palmer than Bond when Bond finds himself at a mod sci-fi body modification clinic, but that’s all part of the fun.
But all good things come to an end, and by the time Gustav Graves invites Bond to “a little scientific demonstration in Iceland,” the wheels begin to come quickly off the Aston Martin. The film literally self-destructs an hour in after the film’s biggest highlight, a masterful fencing scene in a private club between Bond and the film’s villain, played by a snarling Toby Stephens, which is interrupted by the welcome presence of Rosamund Pike, in one of her first film roles, as the treacherous Miranda Frost. Sadly, beginning with Graves’ aforementioned invitation, the film builds to a succession of escalatingly absurd set pieces culminating in a moronic and embarrassingly executed paragliding scene in Iceland, as Bond narrowly escapes the space laser Icarus’ obliteration of the ice caps near the villain’s secret lair, a palatial ice palace. It truly left the audience wondering if they were watching Bond or an Austin Powers film. Not only does it showcase some rather shoddy looking CG, but director Lee Tamahori also leans on a dated bag of early twentieth-century editing tricks, such as an abundance of speed ramps (rapid zooms to amp up the action) and step dissolves that don’t help the film either. And we haven’t even mentioned the invisible car yet. Or the fact that at one point Graves is wearing an electric power suit that makes him look like a video-game character, and nobody comments on it (and Bond usually comments on everything).
TOBY STEPHENS
(actor, “Gustav Graves”)
You know, I have no idea what that was about. That film was truly one of the strangest audition processes I ever went on. It was a North Korean who is made to look American, and I was asking, “Uh … do you want me to speak in … a … Korean accent?” The whole thing was made with new script pages being slipped under the door during the night.
When Roger Moore derides the film, as he did artfully in The London Times, you know you’re in trouble. Said Moore at the time, “I thought it just went too far—and that’s from me, the first Bond in space! Invisible cars and dodgy CGI footage? Please!” Nobody said it better.
Despite whatever critical barbs the film received, it was a smash success at the box office, and Halle Berry’s character of Jinx, an NSA agent, was immediately embraced, prompting an attempted spin-off. Eon hired regular Bond stalwarts Neil Purvis and Robert Wade to begin work on the script for MGM, only to see the movie abandoned by the studio, much to the anger of the Bond camp that had put extensive time and resources into developing the project as the first of a series of films that would have extended the Bond cinematic universe.
New Zealander Lee Tamahori, who had previously directed such films as the superb Once Were Warriors (1994), Mulholland Falls (1996), The Edge (1997), and Along Came a Spider (2001), as well as three episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater and a second season episode of HBO’s The Sopranos, was brought on early as director.
LEE TAMAHORI
(director, Die Another Day)
It’s a funny old road. The Sopranos I wanted to do, so I sought that one out, but things like this, the Bond, all come through your agent. Your agent calls and says, “Do you want to do a Bond movie?” I’d never actually thought about it, but it didn’t take me long to decide to take it. I thought it would be a great idea, because I’d been doing kind of hard-edged, dramatic pictures for a while, and I thought it would be nice to do something a little light. It’s not that Bond is light, but it is one of the more enduring genres we’ve ever seen, and I thought it might be nice to do lighthearted big action for once. Also, I wanted to test myself on the size of a movie; it helped me break out of a kind of pre-conceived shoebox that people were going to want to put me into.
PIERCE BROSNAN
(actor, “James Bond”)
He was wise enough to know that if he got all his ducks in the right order, it will take off like gangbusters, and, obviously, that brings in more work.
LEE TAMAHORI
When I was asked, I said to them myself, “Come on, what made you guys choose me?” because I was as surprised as they were. What they said is they’re always looking for someone new and a little different. A lot of people actually call them up and want to do these movies, and a lot of people who are actually in the action genre call them up, but they’re not particularly interested in the action specialists. They always know the action will be taken care of one way or another, perhaps finding someone who has a different take on it, who perhaps might reinvigorate it and see it in a new light. Hence Michael Apted, and certainly Martin Campbell. So it surprised even me that they would even consider me, but they’re very interesting like that. They sit around and look at what people have done, and don’t necessarily analyze it in view of the genre they’re working in. They think ultimately, and you’d have to ask them this, that they either like or dislike the movies that the people make, and if they like something that someone’s made, they’re quite shrewd in their judgment of technical craft versus good storytelling. I think it comes down to something like that. And if you sit and talk to someone in a room for several hours, you do learn a lot just talking to people. And people will either stand up and tell you they’re going to change the entire genre and shoot it all like this, and do it all like that, or you can get stuck in the story elements, and what you like about it and what you think you might change about it, which is kind of what I did.
BARBARA BROCCOLI
(producer, Die Another Day)
We had to find someone who could get their head around the franchise and the expectations. Lee Tamahori’s body of work is amazing. Once Were Warriors is one of the greatest films made in the last fifty years. He has great energy and visual sense. We felt he had a very strong vision for the film and could take it to another level.
PIERCE BROSNAN
When you look at his work—with Once Were Warriors, he came on the scene with that picture and it was so powerful and so distressing and so reality based. That in itself he had going for him. He was not going to pull any punches, and I liked that, because he would be able to bring this “down.” I mean, at that point it had gotten so away from what used to happen back in the days of Connery. I wish I could get the same money and then just keep Connery’s schedule. That would be great, but they had become so fantastic that you could lose a character in there for the guy who is playing the role. And I was playing the role, so I always said to them, “Just what is the character about? Where’s the character? What’s the interaction between them?” Anyway, Lee was a good man for pulling it down, I think, and keeping it a reality-based, character-driven piece. He was hungry for it and he’d made some really fine films. He has an edge to him. It’s like Martin Campbell. They’re not dissimilar; both New Zealanders and both have that kind of ferocious appetite for film.
LEE TAMAHORI
When Barbara, Michael, and I met, we got along famously. They have a unique and different way of dealing with a movie, which I found refreshing. But the way it happened, I came over and met them, and in one weekend I literally arrived, we met on a Sunday, and by Monday evening I was back in New Zealand on a plane and they had already decided that they wanted me to do it. That was a very quick decision, I thought. It was something to do with just meeting and our dialogue. I think they already liked the movies I had done and wanted to reinforce, just for themselves personally, that I wasn’t a maniac and the film would be in good hands. I wouldn’t have hired me. You’ve got to understand the history of this: It’s all very well for Barbara and Michael to want me to make the film, but MGM was very reluctant. Quite wisely, I think, because if this is a “wife-beating” director from New Zealand who may turn our favorite franchise into … who knows? So those things do get discussed. I’m very fond of saying—and I mean it—I would play devil’s advocate, if I had been in their shoes, sitting in Los Angeles, and I would have made the same decision about me, so credit to them, all of them, for giving me this chance, and I appreciate it.
As he explains it, Tamahori has always loved the Bond films, though he did feel that the franchise occasionally tended to become moribund, and there was always the hope of reinvention, in the vein of what Martin Campbell had done on GoldenEye.
LEE TAMAHORI
Here we were making this very big deal about Die Another Day being the 20th movie in time for the 40th anniversary. But I always felt these movies used to be great thrillers, and then they became big event pictures with special effects during the Roger Moore years. But when it was the Connery era—From Russia with Love—they started off always as little excellent B grade thrillers that became something else. So I got to this movie and I said what we should endeavor at all cost is to make this a damn good thriller, and then all the rest of the stuff would be pasted on top of it: big action, girls, gadgets, and all that stuff. Now that may sound like what you should do anyway, but sometimes I have the feeling that things can get a little lost, and these things can turn into giant event movies in and of themselves, full of pyrotechnics and explosions, and then you can lose your way.
Returning from The World Is Not Enough to write the screenplay for Die Another Day was the team of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, only this time there wouldn’t be a Bruce Feirstein in the mix. This film, insofar as they were concerned, would be their only Bond they would get sole credit on (despite their names being attached to each subsequent film of the next two decades) becoming the “Richard Maibaums” of Bond’s most recent era of films.
MICHAEL G. WILSON
(producer, Die Another Day)
Working with the writers is a group effort. We brainstorm for weeks kicking around ideas until we come up with some kind of plot.
BARBARA BROCCOLI
We always start off with the topical aspect. What is the world worried about now or in the next couple of years? And what is James Bond’s position in that arena? With Die Another Day, we talked about the places in the world that still had an aura of mystery and intrigue. And North Korea is one of those places. Then we discussed how a villain could be introduced into this scenario and what journey could we take Bond on that he hasn’t been on before. What challenges could we greet him with? It was quite a long process.
PIERCE BROSNAN
When you get the script in advance—which I did six months before we started shooting—they were so busy just trying to flesh out the story that in that version there is not much character there. There’s not much of a rapport between the characters. It’s an impressionist script, so to speak. As you get closer to it, and as they get more comfortable with the structure of the story, then you come to what’s the character and how does the character really move within it, and what is at stake for the character. That’s when you make suggestions. That’s when you speak up. At least that is the way I have done it.
LEE TAMAHORI
I thought the concept was a great idea, but I could see it had some kind of fundamental problems in telling the story, so we needed to work on that—I was just throwing out some ideas. But it’s a funny thing, because you come into it and you go, “I wonder if I can actually comment on this, because this has been written over a period of two years.” One presumes that the producers and the writers have gone into this in great detail, but while that is true, it’s never gone into with that much detail. They’re always waiting to attach a director before they really go in, like any script, and pull it apart and fine tune it. It used to be a mystery to me before I started making movies as to what point a script is turned over to a director and it changes. It’s a writer’s worst nightmare, but the public doesn’t seem to be well educated in that. They all think we’re a bunch of madmen who just want to put our own idiosyncratic brand on a script and call it our own and steal the credit. And certainly my few years then of working in America had been kind of a self-taught exercise. What you found was that your job was to tune these movies up. And I now see I have an ability and an instinct to look at a script and see what needs to happen to make it better.
MICHAEL G. WILSON
We decided that with Die Another Day Bond would be captured and thrown into military prison. Pierce really responded to that. He was always looking for some new aspect of the character to explore. There are two aspects to Fleming. One is character—James Bond and the people in his world—and the other is story. When we’re preparing a Bond film, we always look back to the novels and the Fleming material for that.
BARBARA BROCCOLI
Character is most important. Bond is so complex and multi-faceted that you can always tap in to some new aspect, particularly with Pierce. He had such humanity and vulnerability, and we could go into areas we hadn’t been. In Die Another Day, he’s captured and tortured, and yet survives to fight another day.
LEE TAMAHORI
We were pushing Bond into a range he’s never been in before. Half the script is Bond outside MI6, operating on his own. There’s betrayal and double-crossing going on. Pierce and I worked on pushing the envelope and trying new things without running too far from Bond’s essence. We wanted the series shaken up, but not at the expense of what people inherently like about the character.
ROBERT WADE
(writer, Die Another Day)
Our key task was to make Bond a character rather than a caricature. We were trying to draw out his darker side. We consider Pierce the perfect actor to draw out the complex combination of emotion and cold blood.
NEAL PURVIS
(writer, Die Another Day)
He’s vulnerable without being weak. You want to push him, put him through a journey. We wanted the action and scale to flow naturally from the story and the characters.
LEE TAMAHORI
Once we started pulling the script apart and putting it back together again—and remarkably it survived very intact—we kept tuning up everything for seven months, even while we were shooting, just to make sure. I just hate these movies where they have logic holes and big plot holes and people just say, “That’s okay, the audience will understand.” I’ve never underestimated the intelligence of an audience, because I think they’re far too smart, and these pictures should be no different. And if you do make one of these and people say just cut to the explosion and everyone will be fine, that’s just so lazy. So in some ways I wanted to get back into that kind of old-fashioned tough thriller, and then in the back end of it I wanted to drive it into the twenty-first century with a kind of new aggressive post-production and cutting and technique.
