Q&A with Bond’s Producers
James Bond has been having a bumper year. There has been the centenary of his creator Ian Fleming, a bestselling new novel (Sebastian Faulks’s “Devil May Care”), and an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (continuing to March 1st).
The new Bond franchise film, “Quantum of Solace”, the second to star the convincingly brutal Daniel Craig takes up where “Casino Royale” left off and so becomes the first sequel in the series.
Thus, in true Bond tradition Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming’s biographer, talks shop with the producers of “Quantum of Solace,” Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael Wilson.
I sometimes get a sense of two competing Bond franchises–the films and the books. Do they see eye to eye?
Barbara Broccoli: Oh definitely. We have a common interest. The root of everything is Fleming, so of course we work together to keep his name alive. People are still very interested in the books. Look at the success of Sebastian Faulks’s book.
Would you take on Faulks’s book as a movie project?
BB: It’s set in the 1960s. Our films are set in the present day. But if we ever decided to do period films, yes, it’s a bloody good yarn.
How do you explain Bond’s enduring appeal? Is he a mythic character, fighting for good against evil?
Michael Wilson: Bond is incorruptible, I think that’s part of him, his integrity. He has become mythic in the sense that, though fictitious, hardly a day goes by without some kind of reference to him. I was watching the TV news this morning and they were describing the nuclear submarine pen in China as a James Bond type of place. It’s become part of our language.
BB: And our popular culture. He’s very real too. I think that’s part of his appeal, he has a hedonistic quality, he can bleed and his heart can get broken. He’s so many contradictions. He’s a romantic: in the middle of some crisis, he’ll succumb to a beautiful woman who’s in jeopardy, and he’ll suddenly over-complicate his mission by having to drag her along. And yet he’s cold, detached and can’t commit–so he’s all these contradictions, and I think that’s why people like him.
What did your father [Cubby Broccoli, whose centenary falls in 2009] bring to the mix?
BB: If it had been a strict British interpretation of the character, it would have had much more limited appeal. The fact that an American [Broccoli] and a Canadian [his partner Harry Saltzman] put their spin on it, that opened it up. And they cast someone who Fleming thought totally inappropriate: not a David Niven type but a milkman from Scotland who’d been in the chorus of “South Pacific” [Sean Connery]. You couldn’t think of anything more kind of unusual.
Bond’s the most successful modern British cultural export these days. People have almost forgotten about the Beatles.
BB: Oh I do hope not. [Link]
~ by Errant Aesthete on 11/28/08.
Posted in Entertainment, New & Notable
Tags: barbarabroccoli, bondfranchise, interview, JamesBond, michaelwilson, QuantumofSolace
