by Mark Edlitz
What concerns did Craig have in terms of finding and honing the character?
He may have had personal concerns but he never expressed them. He came in absolutely ready to go. There was a lot of criticism about him before we even had shot a foot of film. They said, “He’s a blonde Bond. He doesn’t look like the traditional Bond. He’s not pretty-boy handsome.” There was a lot of rubbish that went on in the press, and Daniel decided just to work his ass off and prove everybody wrong, which he did in spades.
Do you recall what kind of character work he did?
Casino is an emotional story for Bond. Also, he’s not yet the Bond we know, and he hasn’t yet achieved his Double-O status. Emotionally, he’s pretty raw and he thinks with his heart instead of his head. It’s only at the end of the movie, after his experience with Vesper Lynd, that he ultimately becomes the Bond that we know and love. It was quite an arc for him to arrive at that point.
It’s one of the most romantic Bond films. It’s also interesting because most Bond movies traditionally end with a woman in Bond’s arms. But in Casino Royale, the story continues after that moment. We see their relationship develop.
Indeed, Bond actually falls in love with her. What he believes is her betrayal is the thing that tears him apart. The fallout from the betrayal and their relationship causes him to become the Bond we know.
And we don’t get that Bond until the final shot of the film.
No, you don’t. You absolutely don’t. Then he’s setting out on the long road to all those Bond movies. Because he feels betrayed and emotionally torn apart by what happened with Vesper, he has a different attitude toward women. [But the irony is that] he feels betrayed by Vesper when in fact she saved his life.
Do you recall filming that last shot where he says, “My name is Bond, James Bond?”
Oh, yeah, I do recall it. Just to get it perfect, we did many different deliveries. I did seventeen or eighteen takes on it. We picked the one that we felt was the winner but there were a lot of good ones.
When audiences watch Bond movies there’s a list of scenes that they demand. One of the joys of watching them is seeing the different ways those moments play out. But in Casino Royale, you withhold many of those scenes. But rather than frustrating the audience, the film ultimately becomes more rewarding.
You’re right. It was different. The humor was also different from what we’ve seen in the past, and the famous scenes and iconic moments haven’t been introduced yet. But in the subsequent films like Skyfall (2012) and Spectre, those elements are reintroduced. The relationship between Bond and Q (Ben Whishaw) has been expanded. Spectre is fantastic. There’s more humor and Daniel is absolutely terrific in it. I have nothing but the highest of praise for that movie. [Director] Sam Mendes did a marvelous job.
There’s a moment in Casino Royale when Bond kills a man by shooting him in the eye with a nail gun—and here, because we’re conditioned to it, we expect him to say something like, “He got the point.” But this Bond is not ready for that.
You can’t get away with those types of lines in something like Casino; it’s a totally different film. The nearest he went to a line like that was when he comes back to the card table after he was poisoned, he says, “That last hand nearly killed me.” I felt even that was pushing it a bit. Tonally that line was on the edge for me—the film doesn’t suit those wisecracks and groaner lines that we’re all so used to with Bond. But it worked and we got away with it.
Vesper teaches him how to dress properly; she gives him what might be his first tux. In the final shot of Casino, he’s wearing fitted clothes, whereas earlier in the film he was dressed much more casually. It seems like everything he does in the films that follow—meaning from Dr. No to GoldenEye—is a reaction to his relationship with Vesper. So every time he drinks a martini, which we all previously assumed was a sign of sophistication, is actually a way of reminding himself of Vesper and the pain he’s in.
Right, that’s the point. And that’s because the relationship between Daniel and Eva Green really worked in the film. It’s similar to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), with Lazenby, who was probably the worst of all the Bonds. But the story was rather marvelous. Lazenby’s Bond saves a woman’s life, ends up marrying her, and then Blofeld murders her. That film had a similar kind of emotional impact as Casino.
There is a danger in knowing too much about Bond. However, his past is cleverly revealed in Casino Royale. On the train, Vesper speculates about his personal life. She says that maybe he had a bad childhood, maybe he was an orphan, and maybe someone paid his way through school. Although we get insight into Bond’s character, it’s not definitive and there’s room for latitude.3
There is latitude, but what’s interesting about Spectre is that there’s a lot of connective tissue with the previous Daniel Craig movies. It’s very interesting; it connects [Casino Royale’s villain] Le Chiffre and Skyfall’s [villain as indirect and direct agents of SPECTRE]. It’s all cleverly interwoven together. SPECTRE is the organization that Blofeld runs and that’s cleverly integrated into the movie. The emotional spine
James Bond (Daniel Craig) enjoys a “Vesper Martini” in Casino Royale.
ILLUSTRATION BY PAT CARBAJAL
of the book and movie of Casino is what was so fascinating to me. They continued that in Spectre.
It’s risky to reveal too much about his personal character. It’s important to maintain some of the mystery.
Look at the box office numbers for Skyfall and Spectre, two movies that go into his personal life, and you’ll see that it obviously works. Huge box office. [With worldwide grosses of $1.1 billion and nearly $900 million, Skyfall and Spectre are respectively the highest grossing films in the series.]
Before GoldenEye, Brosnan was already sort of the people’s Bond. We, the public, cast him because we saw his Bondian qualities in his series Remington Steele (1982–1987). Was he officially cast when you joined?
No, he wasn’t but he obviously was going to be cast. He was really the only one in contention. We saw other actors just to be sure, but he was always the front-runner. Of course, he was going to play Bond earlier, but he lost it because the Remington Steele producers wouldn’t let him out of his contract.
I wanted him to play Bond at the time, but he was probably too young.
You’re absolutely right. He was. Ultimately, he came in at the right time.
Brosnan wanted to do the type of Bond film that Craig is doing, but he had his foot or perhaps his leg firmly in the Roger Moore camp.
I think we all have our leg in the Moore and Connery camp. Our thinking at the time of GoldenEye was to make it perhaps a little more grounded than the Roger Moore ones. I thought Pierce was a terrific Bond. I thought he was absolutely great. Of all the various Bonds—with the exception of Connery, who is always remembered with great affection because of how bloody good he was—Pierce was the best. Before Daniel, when Pierce came on after Connery, he was the best of all the Bonds.
How did Pierce find the character? What was his process for finding Bond?
There are certain Bond characteristics that we all discuss and talk about—his misogynist attitude, the way he walks, the way he takes off his coat, the way he takes off his gun, and the way he fights. The man is totally and utterly grounded. He is comfortable in his own skin. Even during the action, he is always calm and focused. All that was developed during the Connery days and it has subsequently bled into all the other Bonds.
The trailer for GoldenEye reassured, “When the world is the target and the threat is real, you can still depend on one man.”
ILLUSTRATION BY PAT CARBAJAL
Was there something that you thought was the most important part of Pierce’s persona that you wanted to convey or establish in the new Bond?
No, all these guys bring their own baggage to Bond. Both Pierce and Daniel were prepared when they came in. They both had worked hard. They both had obviously thought deeply about Bond, and clearly about the
humor in Pierce’s case. He’s obviously not as dark as Daniel Craig’s Bond but he was much in the tone of all the previous Bonds. Especially in terms of the humor and his attitude toward women. The look of the film had the established Bond signature stamped all over it. Whereas with Daniel, it was a big change of gear, and it became something different.
Do you think that the Bond in GoldenEye is the same Bond in Casino Royale?
I don’t. I see them as different characters. Largely because of Bond’s flaws, I see Craig as a much more interesting and complex character. One of the things that I liked in the books is that when Bond is killing somebody, he has great difficulty with it if it’s messy. At the beginning of Casino, he strangles the guy and tries to drown him in the basin. It’s an ugly fight. It’s awful and he doesn’t like it. Once he killed the guy, there’s a close-up of Bond and you see that he’s not at all at ease with it. Putting a bullet in a guy’s head is simple and fine and he’s perfectly okay with it. But not this.
But it’s also Bond’s impetuousness—thinking with his heart instead of his head. He never should have gone after that guy [the bomb maker] and shot him in the opening sequence. A cooler head would never have gone into that embassy. A cooler head would wait. But Bond is fired up and reckless. His sense of injustice took over and he was just determined to get the guy no matter what the circumstances. In doing so he creates an international incident and he kills the guy when M needed Bond to take him alive.
What do you think motivates Craig’s Bond? Is it a sense of injustice?
I think so. It’s his sense of right and wrong. There is a sense of king and country and a sense of England but in Casino Royale, he’s a rough diamond. He fucks up and makes mistakes. He’s just a much more complex character. In terms of his personality, he’s a much darker character.
Can you pick a moment from the film that helps reveal that character?
Do you remember the big fight down the stairway? [With Bond against the guerrilla leader Steven Obanno. Obanno’s] got the machete and they’re fighting like crazy. At the end of the scene, Bond is strangling the guy, but the guy just won’t lie down. I remember in my original cut I had that a minute and a half or two minutes longer than it was in the final cut because I was thinking of the tense fight in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966). [Paul Newman and Carolyn Conwell attempt to kill a spy but] he just won’t die. He just won’t go down. That’s what I wanted. The guy just will not die. It’s ugly, it’s horrible, and Bond is thrown by it. It really affects him.
With Roger Moore’s Bond—whom I enjoyed immeasurably—I never got a sense that he was doing it for king and country. I always felt that there was something about the job and the perks of the job that appealed to him. Bond’s joy in his work was part of the appeal of Moore’s Bond.
I enjoyed Moore’s Bond movies, too. Sometimes the humor was so awful and on the nose, but I enjoyed the sheer comic-strip quality to them. They were less grounded. What’s the one that goes up into space?
Moonraker (1979).
How ridiculous is it when you’ve got Jaws with the stainless-steel teeth and you’ve got Dolly [Jaws’s girlfriend] with the bloody blonde hair done up in pigtails in the space station? Well, that just about tells you everything. It’s entertaining as hell. I used to love [the more outlandish Bond films]; I used to thoroughly enjoy them.
What do you think motivates Brosnan’s Bond? It’s different than what motivates Craig’s Bond; it’s not the injustice.
For Pierce’s Bond, I think it’s probably more about king and country. It’s about loyalty. It’s about right and wrong. It’s a strong sense of fair play. That’s what motivates him more than anything. Pierce’s Bond is a little more sophisticated than Roger Moore and perhaps the others, but I think it’s more to do with king and country with him.
I hope when Craig is ready to hang up his holster you come back and reintroduce the world to one more Bond.
Well, we’ll see.
Keep that in your back pocket.
[Laughs.] I will.
ROGER SPOTTISWOODE
Roger Spottiswoode directed Pierce Brosnan’s second James Bond outing, Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), which starred Teri Hatcher as Bond’s former flame Paris Carver, Michelle Yeoh as Chinese operative Wai Lin, and Jonathan Pryce as the evil media magnate Elliot Carver.
Spottiswoode has made a career directing both escapist entertainment, including Shoot to Kill (1988), a tense thriller starring Sidney Poitier and the futuristic actioner The 6th Day (2000) with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and socially conscious dramas, including Under Fire (1983) with Nick Nolte and Gene Hackman as war correspondents who become involved in the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution, And the Band Played On (1993), the Emmy Award–winning HBO docudrama that examined the early days of the AIDS epidemic, The Matthew Shepard Story (2002), which told the story of the twenty-one-year-old gay student who was beaten to death by two homophobes, and Noriega: God’s Favorite (2000) with Bob Hoskins as the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
As an editor, Spottiswoode worked with maverick director and visual poet Sam Peckinpah on Straw Dogs (1971), The Getaway (1972), and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) and with Karel Reisz on The Gambler (1975), starring James Caan.
How did you get involved with the Bond films?
Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, who do things very much together, asked me if I was interested. They tend to come to people who are English but also have experience making films in Los Angeles. I fit that mold and they offered it to me.
We talked about what I liked about the Bond films and what I didn’t like. Pretty much like everyone else, I like the Connery films. I had differing responses to some of the more recent ones. I thought GoldenEye was very good and I thought Pierce was very good in it. He is probably the best Bond since Connery. I thought some of the recent films strayed away from the original films too much. Some of them had too much action, but there’s nothing you can do about that; the audience has an endless desire for action. So like everyone else, they’re trapped into making films that rely heavily on it. The early Bond films were better because they had less action. They were more about suspense and the stories were stronger.
What else did you want to do with your Bond film?
I also wanted to have one strong ending instead of three or four endings. I thought Bond films might be better off with fewer endings. I also thought there was more creative casting to be done amongst the leading ladies. We wanted to find a leading lady who was good at the physical stuff but also seemed genuinely cerebral. We wanted to avoid the previous overly shapely ladies, who were all wonderful but
Pierce Brosnan as James Bond.
ILLUSTRATION BY PAT CARBAJAL
worked better for a different time. This thinking led to the casting of Michelle Yeoh. I thought Michelle would be a more contemporary and interesting casting against Bond. Michelle was a thoughtful leading lady who is up to date.
Were the Bond producers also thinking about going back to the early Bond style?
No, they felt that that would be nice but, in this contemporary world, one has to deliver a remarkable amount of action. That was certainly true of the studio. Not that the studio had the final word, but the studio did feel that strongly because whenever they suggested that the budget was getting rather higher than they wished, we would offer to remove one of the action scenes, because the only way you can do it is to take some big item out. They cost around anywhere between six and ten million dollars apiece. Of course, nobody wants to take any of them out.
I remember the old Aston Martin car chase in Goldfinger (1964), and I thought the previous Bond film GoldenEye had a wonderful tank chase. We couldn’t do a better tank chase, but I thought we could have a good car chase. I also didn’t want the Bond theme and score to get sidelined.
How about finding the right balance of humor?
I enjoyed the dry English humor and the irony of the Connery films, and I thought Pierce handled the humor really well. The Dani
el Craig films are more consistently dark, so there’s a little less room for that kind of humor.
How would you describe your relationship with Brosnan?
He and I were in sync on what he was doing, and he did it tremendously.
This is one of the first Bond films in which he has a personal stake in his mission. Bond had a past relationship with Teri Hatcher’s character, but she gets killed while trying to help him.
Right. They’re doing that more now. That was something that we all wanted to try to do and Barbara and Michael particularly wanted to try to do. And it seemed like a good idea. But it was a new approach to a Bond film. They’ve managed to develop it further in the Craig films.
Is there something you wanted to try but didn’t have a chance to?
I thought that a Bond who had a more complex and perhaps more political view of the world might be interesting. I felt that the British secret service was evolving, was becoming more irrelevant in a way—just as England is somehow not quite at the center of things as it was fifty years ago. I thought one could make more of Bond being aware of how difficult it was to operate on the fringes of the world and what a complicated relationship he has with both the United States and all these other emerging countries. To some extent they might be going in that direction, but there’s a limit to what one can do. This is not a political film. I happen to have an interest in political films but that doesn’t mean to say that Bond has to go that way.
The film looks great. There’s a lot of gorgeous cinematography. Particularly in the party scene where a tuxedo-clad Bond sees Pamela Carver for the first time in years and where he first encounters Elliot Carver.
I do remember a lot about working with Robert Elswit who was a wonderful cameraman [and a longtime Paul Thomas Anderson collaborator, who would serve as the director of photography on films in the Mission: Impossible and Jason Bourne franchises.]. I was fortunate to have him with us. Robert has a clear knowledge of what to add to complement the set, so you could shoot in natural light and have an extremely controlled grip of what the camera was going to see. We could shoot in many directions, sometimes with multiple cameras, and always be within the same palette of light and color.
