by Mark Edlitz
WRITING BOND MOVIES
BRUCE FEIRSTEIN
Bruce Feirstein wrote the screenplays for three of the four Pierce Brosnan films: GoldenEye with Jeffrey Caine and Michael France, Tomorrow Never Dies, and The World Is Not Enough (1999) with Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.
Feirstein also wrote the theme park attraction James Bond 007: A License to Thrill (1998), which featured filmed scenes with Judi Dench as M and Desmond Llewelyn as Q. He also wrote the video games James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing (2003) with Brosnan voicing Bond, James Bond 007: From Russia with Love (2005) with Connery voicing Bond, James Bond 007: Blood Stone (2010) with Daniel Craig voicing Bond, GoldenEye 007 (2010) with writers Danny Bilson and Paul Demeo, which places Craig’s Bond into the events of the Brosnan film of the same name, and 007: Legends (2012), which expands on the conceit of GoldenEye and delectably places Craig into the storyline of Bond films from the previous era.
How do you write a Bond film? There are certain beats that the audience expects.
I always used to joke that every Bond movie has to contain the same five or six beats. It goes something like this: “We’re sending you out on a unique mission, Mr. Bond. Pass me the shoe. It’s not just about this diamond, Mr. Bond. Oh, James.” God, I used to be able to riff it right off.
Can you break those down?
“We’re sending you out on a unique mission, Mr. Bond” is the scene with M when he’s given his mission. “Pass me the shoe” is shorthand for the gambling sequence, the tuxedo/casino sequence. “It’s not just about this diamond, Mr. Bond” is about the reveal of the villain’s super plan. And finally, the last beat is always, “Oh, James,” which is the love interest. I used to be able to do it much faster than that.
I love that.
And if you do write this, say that I stumbled over it, because I haven’t done it in so long. That’s the basic arc of the movies.
Did you discover that prior to writing them?
No, as I went through them. Anybody who’s watched the movies knows the basic arc of all the films, which is that Bond gets the mission, there’s always a Bond woman involved, the mission never turns out what it appears to be in the beginning, the villain reveals the actual plan, which is never what it originally seemed to be, and then Bond ends up with a girl. Except in the case with Casino Royale, where the girl dies.
Bond screenwriter Richard Maibaum used to call the villain’s evil plan a “caper” and he said that coming up with a fresh and original caper was the hardest part. Do you agree?
Yes, I remember working on GoldenEye, and working back and forth about the Lienz Cossacks [which was a part of Bond’s friend-turned-adversary’s lineage]. We knew what the caper was. We knew he wanted to set off an EMP [electromagnetic pulse] weapon. But there were all sorts of other questions like, “What does the villain really want?”
In the case of Tomorrow Never Dies, from the very beginning, it was going to be about a media mogul starting a war for his own ratings. It becomes harder and harder today to come up with new capers. You don’t want to do the same old thing—global worldwide domination. But in some ways, the Daniel Craig movies are much more about Bond’s character arc, as opposed to a caper. The movies have changed.
When Golden Eye was released in 1995, there hadn’t been a Bond movie for many years.
Six years.
Licence to Kill, which was the previous one, wasn’t as successful as Eon and MGM hoped, and some people were questioning whether we needed another Bond movie.
That was foremost in our mind.
Talk more about that self-doubt.
The last Dalton movie hadn’t done as well as anyone had hoped. There was a new regime at MGM and they wondered if there was a demand for Bond. Today, we are living in a different world. Today, because of the internet, you can take the pulse of the audience and realize that there is a huge audience waiting for the next Spiderman or the next Batman. You can look at the internet and see that there are millions and millions and millions of people who still crave Star Wars. If, tomorrow morning, we were to announce that there’s going to be a Star Trek convention in Los Angeles, fifty thousand people would show up, and you’d say, “Oh, my god, look at that demand. There’s a huge audience.” But back in 1995, you didn’t have fan conventions. You didn’t have fan sites. You didn’t have this ability for communities to exist around intellectual property. Also, even in 1995, the idea of DVD sales and disc boxed sets, and things like that didn’t exist. They had no benchmarks. So in 1995, operating in the dark, MGM wondered, “Is there still a market for Bond?” That would not be a question today.
When you were writing it, you had to figure out how much of the classic Bond to embrace and how much to modify for today’s market.
Everyone was thinking about that. We knew there was a pent-up demand for Pierce as Bond. At the same time, it was, how do you make this thing new? Michael France, Jeffrey Caine, and I all addressed that problem in different ways. Michael France brought in the EMP weapon. Jeffrey Caine knitted in a lot of the fall of the Soviet Union. And I brought to it an idea that the world had changed but Bond hadn’t.
When I worked on the script, every scene was changed to reflect that. Mind you, nothing I did could’ve been done without France and Caine. The question became, how do we show that the world has changed but Bond hasn’t? Well, you make M a woman. Then you plant a flag on it and have M say, “You’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur.” And because this was a period of analysts versus field agents, he says to her, “Yes, and you’re the queen of numbers.”
After the opening sequence, the first shot you see is of the Aston Martin DB5, which is to say to the audience, “We know where we came from. We know what our roots are.” And then you’re in a casino. The idea was to bridge the past, to acknowledge what Bond was, and then to move Bond into the post–Cold War era.
There’s a scene in which Bond pulls a gun on Famke Janssen [who plays Xenia Onatopp] and she says, “You don’t need the gun, Commander Bond.” And Bond says, “Well, that depends on your definition of safe sex.” This was a nod to the world that we were living in then. In 1995, AIDS was very much the zeitgeist. We wanted to acknowledge these things, while at the same time going back to the touchstones that made Bond.
At that point, did you know what kind of Bond Pierce would be?
No. So you go back to who your first Bond was. For me, it was Connery. As a child, Connery was my first Bond. That was the voice I heard. And then once Pierce came into the role, it was Pierce.
Before Pierce Brosnan, Bond’s personal life isn’t really explored.
Pierce was very much an advocate of that. Pierce kept saying, “I want to peel back the onion and see what makes him tick and why.” And so we tried to touch on that. But the syntax and grammar [of what it means to be a hero] had changed at that point. It was necessary and correct not to have him be a lone warrior out there trying to save England but to also to give explanations for who he is and to get underneath the skin of a guy with a license to kill.
What happened in his life that turned Bond into the man we know?
We went back to the books for that. We knew about him being an orphan. We wondered what it was like to be someone who travels with a tuxedo. We wondered what it was like to be a guy who kills people like that. I think I got it in Tomorrow Never Dies, when he meets Elliot Carver’s wife, who he’s had an affair with before. She slaps him, and Bond says, “Was it something I said?” She says, “Yeah, I’ll be right back.” And then she says, “You slept with a gun under your pillow.” We were trying to show more of the character behind all this.
Tomorrow Never Dies was the second film in a row in which his personal life was relevant to the mission. In GoldenEye, he was avenging the death of his colleague and friend 006.
Yes, in GoldenEye, it was his peer. In Tomorrow Never Dies, he had an affair with the villain’s wife. I don’t think we weaved anything into The World Is Not Enough. I did only three of them, and at that p
oint Neil [Purvis] and Rob [Wade] took the ball and ran with it. [Purvis and Wade wrote Die Another Day and, along with other screen-writers, co-wrote all of the Daniel Craig films.]
In the pre-title sequence of The World Is Not Enough, Bond fails to capture the assassin and gets injured. His failure was a departure from the formula.
That was an enormously long pre-title sequence.
It’s also an instance where Bond arguably fails in his mission. There are more departures from Roger Moore’s Bond. He also shoots and kills his love interest Elektra later in that film.
Yeah, he kills her and says the line, “I never miss.” That was also one of those things in which we were feeling that we needed to show more of the character. And Pierce was pushing to show more of the character.
Are you a big Richard Maibaum fan?
Maibaum is a god. We all stand on Maibaum’s shoulders. I love when I read about people saying, “You’ve gotta go back to the books. You’ve gotta go back to the books.” And yet one of the untold stories was that Fleming showed up on the set of, I think, Goldfinger, and Fleming told Maibaum that he liked Maibaum’s Bond better than his own.
When you read the books, the wit is not there. Maibaum brought the wit. The Bond of Dr. No, “You’ve had your six” and then shoots the guy. Or the Bond in Thunderball (1965) who says that she’s dead tired. Or Goldfinger’s line, “Choose your next witticism very carefully, Mr. Bond. It may be your last.” That stuff is Dick Maibaum. When you read back on the history of it, Maibaum found so much of it over the top that the only way it would be possible for us to accept a character running through this world of guys petting cats and hollowing out volcanoes and filling them with big-breasted women would be to somehow comment on it. So, Maibaum brought the wit to it.
He wrote so many.
I ended up talking to Maibaum’s wife Sylvia about this endlessly because I wanted to know everything about what it was like and how he worked with those guys. Maibaum had been a journalist and a playwright; he brought a worldview to it. Though credit always goes to Connery, to Cubby, to the directors, and to Fleming, Maibaum never gets the acknowledgment that he deserves. I don’t mean to diminish anyone here. What I’m saying is that if you’re going to do the Mount Rushmore of Bond, you’re going to have Cubby up there but you should also have Maibaum up there.
He wrote thirteen Bond films. It’s incredible.
And he was always good at them, and he managed the shifts with the times. Having spent thousands of hours on the films and the games, you end up with certain theories. And one theory I have is that every Bond reflects the period that it was made. To Michael and Barbara’s credit, to Cubby’s credit, and to everyone else’s credit, every Bond manages to reflect the period that it’s part of.
Connery was the brilliant cold warrior. Taking out Lazenby for a second because he only did one, you go into Roger Moore. Imagine what Roger Moore was faced with. He’s replacing a guy who’s not only the sexiest man alive but he’s taking over in the ’70s, an era of bell-bottoms, and then he’s in the Reagan era. These are weird times. But he was the great Bond for the Reagan era. Then you get into Tim Dalton, which is when the Berlin Wall falls. Pierce is post-USSR, and Daniel Craig is post-9/11. And each one of them reflects the ethos of the time. And the feelings of the time. Daniel Craig is the perfect Bond for right now. I don’t think Roger Moore could do today’s Bond. But I also don’t think Daniel Craig would’ve worked in Roger’s time.
Sean Connery as James Bond.
ILLUSTRATION BY PAT CARBAJAL
Before GoldenEye, there was only Connery and Moore. While Lazenby and Dalton both brought a lot to the part, they didn’t take hold like Connery and Moore. For GoldenEye, a new Bond had to take over from those two giants.
Yeah, at that point it was the usual things you were reading about: Does the world need Bond today? Is there any interest in Bond? Is this your grandfather’s Bond? Is anyone interested in this anymore? One of the things the American press didn’t understand was how infused Bond is in popular culture.
When you begin to work on the series, on the franchise, because you’re attuned to it, you can’t believe how many times in an average week you will read that something is “Bond-like.” Within the last twenty-four hours, I was reading some real estate site that was describing something as a “Bond-like villain’s lair.” It’s ingrained into popular culture.
One of the funny things that I’ve always wanted to use in another movie—but not in a Bond movie—is that the third or fourth most popular password in the world is “007Bond.” When you try to hack into an account, there are all sorts of things you try. But if you’re doing a brute-force attack on someone’s bank account, in the top tier of combinations you try, you append “007” to the name of the person whose account you want to break into. And if that doesn’t work, then the first password you try is “Bond007” or “007Bond.” Of course, when you’re doing a brute-force attack, you’re trying millions of combinations, but that’s rather high up in the hierarchy.
For many men, Bond represents wish fulfillment. By channeling him, it helps to boost their self-confidence.
Everyone who’s ever put on a tuxedo thinks he’s James Bond. I spent a lot of time on the series and going around the world with this thing and I came to realize that Bond is an archetype that exists in every society. Going back to year zero, every culture has a myth in which the emperor sends out a lone warrior to save a vanquished nation. If you look at the [ninja] Japanese Koga stories, if you look at Japanese warrior stories, it’s always there. When the empire’s threatened, the emperor calls in the one warrior he can trust and sends the warrior out on a mission to save the nation. That same story exists in every culture. It exists in Greek mythology; it exists in Roman stories. It clearly exists in England, going back to The Canterbury Tales. It exists in the Mayan culture. This idea of the lone warrior out to save the nation. The one man who can do it.
You’re already starting with something that is buried deep in our DNA. The same way to think of this is that—and this is slightly off on a different tangent—Americans think we invented the sensitive singer/songwriter girl who’s been spurned and wants revenge. Whether it’s Alanis Morissette, Taylor Swift, or Joni Mitchell. Well, no. That character exists, that archetype exists in every culture. You can find that woman singer in Spain, in Greece, in Israel, and in China. There are these archetypes that Bond taps deeply into but on a subconscious level.
Though what I’ve always thought that made Bond work in a larger sense was that Bond was British and represented the end of colonialism. It became possible for this thing to travel in Malaysia, into Thailand, into China, Japan, all over the world, because it wasn’t about American imperialism.
You’re saying that Bond being English is critical to the success of the franchise.
Yes, it’s totally necessary that he’s English. It’s why it works so well. In the history of the series, there’s never been a scene in the prime minister’s office. And yet every time you do an American movie, there’s always a scene where you’re in the Oval Office. Bond doesn’t bring any of that baggage to it. Bond doesn’t come with the trappings that an American character comes with. It’s more palatable that you’re not dealing with a superpower, and Bond is often at odds with his American counterparts.
In England, it became such a big thing on Christmas that everybody sat down and watched Bond. Or around the world, a father could take his son to see Bond, and it was the extraordinary toys, the women, the travelogue of it all, and it didn’t bring the baggage of America, of Vietnam and B-52s.
I don’t think this was a conscious choice. It’s something you realize and you reflect on after your turn, and you think, “How did this work? How did this become so deeply embedded in worldwide culture? Part of it was that it was British, not American.
Part of it was that the archetype had already been buried deep in our psyche. And it all lined up. And you had the great looking women and the wit and a
ll of those elements. Look at the rest of the franchises. Bourne and Mission: Impossible are nowhere near as beloved. None of them has its hooks as deep into the culture as Bond.
Where does class come into all this?
I don’t think it’s part of it in a premeditated way. There is the idea, due to the accent, that Brits are more sophisticated than the rest of us. And the fact that he was particular about what he drank and he drove a cool car. But I don’t think class was at the forefront of it.
What were your thoughts on Tom Mankiewicz’s Bond?
Mankiewicz was Hollywood royalty. When I talked to him, the fanboy in me came out. And it was, “What was it like?” When doing the Moore stuff, the jokes he made were fairly broad. And when we talked about it, he said it’s a different era and he realized that some of that stuff doesn’t work anymore. And I asked him about the line in For Your Eyes Only when Bond is about to kill Blofeld, who is bargaining for his life and offers to buy Bond a stainless-steel delicatessen. I just didn’t get it and I asked him about it. He just rolled his eyes and said, “Let’s talk about something else.”
But I also think in a way that was the period and there were a lot of different writers. In the pre-credit scene in Octopussy, Moore is in this tiny little jet, and he flies through an airplane hangar and then runs out of gas. I remember talking to Cubby about that. I said, “Cubby, Bond doesn’t run out of gas. What was that about?” Cubby kind of glared at me, and we went on to talk about something else. Looking back, I was stupid and impertinent. [Note:Octopussy was written by George MacDonald Fraser, Maibaum, and Michael Wilson. Christopher Wood, the writer of The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, came up with the out-of-gas gag. In his autobiography James Bond, the Spy I Loved (2006), Wood reveals that he originally wrote the scene for The Spy Who Loved Me but Eon repurposed it two films later.]
