The Many Lives of James Bond

by Mark Edlitz

  But when you’re doing Octopussy, which is kind of a superhero thing, you need for something to go wrong [for your hero]. Now, in my era, I would not have had that plane run out of gas. I would’ve done something else. I’ve never thought about what. But in that era, that was the right choice. And that’s part of the real genius of the producers. Everyone said that you can’t do Daniel Craig; it’s never going to work. Well, guess what? They were wrong. It worked.

  Credit goes to Cubby and then to Barbara and Michael in that they made movies that reflected the time and the feeling of the time and moved the series forward.

  Fashion, as it reveals character, is also changing. John Glen had creative disagreements with Dalton about whether Bond could wear blue jeans. Bond didn’t wear jeans in the Dalton era but does in Craig’s era.

  On one side, Brosnan never wore blue jeans, but Brosnan was always in situations where he wouldn’t. But things change and Daniel Craig is in a different era. Connery is wearing a white dinner jacket in Las Vegas in Diamonds Are Forever (1971), and it looks ridiculous when you are looking at it today.

  But in 1971 that would have been appropriate.

  Yes. Although because the other guys are dressed like slobs you’re wondering, why is he wearing a tuxedo? But that also could be looking at it from today’s perspective.

  How are Bond movies written differently from the way other movies are written?

  In terms of practical screenwriting, all these movies start from a different place than any other project I’ve ever been involved with in Hollywood, which is that we’re making the movie. It’s a huge difference when you start from that point of view. Therefore, you don’t have executives coming in and asking, “Is Bond is likable? And what’s the character arc? What’s M’s character arc? We need to know more about who M is.” So all of the usual development nonsense is pushed to the side. All of the things that kill movies and screw up screenwriting are pushed away.

  And it’s replaced with what?

  It’s replaced with, “Okay, we’re making a movie. We know this character. We know Moneypenny, we know M, and we know Bond. We know these are the players.” You start from a place of, “What is the story we’re going to tell this time?” You are not inventing characters, trying to convince a studio to make it. From the first block, you’ve already left 90 percent of Hollywood behind.

  Let me give you just a quick example. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve turned in scripts, and somebody will say something stupid like, “What’s this character’s arc?” for a character the equivalent of Moneypenny. In other words, a third-tier supporting character. And you then do a rewrite to give that character a story, knowing full well that if you’re actually going to make the movie, all that’s going to get cut. With Bond, you just leap over all that. And you’re into the nuts and bolts of what’s going to be on the next 110 pages. What’s the mission? Who’s the villain? What’s the personal story here?

  Now, because you are dealing with a franchise that’s fifty years old, Barbara, Michael, and Gregg Wilson and David Wilson, who are Michael’s sons and Barbara’s nephews, they know all the dead ends. They know what doesn’t go anywhere.

  If you were to bring in new writers, you find that they will try something immediately that won’t work, like a scene in which Bond saves a little kid. No. There has never been a child in a Bond film. In the Bond universe, there are no children, and that’s just one simple example. Barbara and Michael have a great sense of it. To quote them, “How much do you wanna take the piss out of Bond?” How much do you want to have someone remarking about how absurd what he’s doing is?

  When you begin working on a Bond film, you’re starting off with a bible and a preexisting character, a preexisting notion of who he is and the world you’re operating in, and more so than any other franchise I’ve worked on, the producers are in the room with you. Barbara and Michael are there in the boat, pulling on the oars with you. Sometimes you may not exactly agree on the same direction, but they’re in the room with you. I found them always open to new ideas but with a strong sense of what was wrong and of what doesn’t work in the franchise.

  As we’ve discussed, you’ve written a couple of Bond films where the stakes were personal. But not every mission can be personal, right?

  I have a reaction to that. Look at the early movies or the first fifteen of them. With the exception of the Lazenby movie, none of them had an overriding personal aspect. It was, here’s your mission: There’s this guy named Auric Goldfinger, go chase him down. Or there’s a guy, he’s Dr. No. In From Russia with Love, it was about Bond being vulnerable to a woman but he had no personal connection with her beforehand. Or he faced Red Grant but again there was no personal connection there.

  If you think of them as TV shows, they were each closed-ended stories. And Dalton’s were closed-ending stories. Pierce’s were closed-ending stories. Robbie Coltrane reappeared [as KGB agent turned Russian Mafia boss Valentin Zukovsky], but there was no personal arc, no long arc. Now we’re into the Craig era, when it is much more personal.

  It reflects the period we’re in. I don’t believe that [the long-form telling of] The Sopranos (1999–2007) has had any direct effect at all on Bond. But we all live in the same pop culture soup, where they explore the larger story of a character’s journey, which we see in Breaking Bad (2008–2013), The Sopranos, and in many other shows. Because it’s in the air, it has clearly had some effect, so it’s natural that Bond is part of that. But now Bond reflects that as much as it causes it. None of these things moves along in complete isolation. And we’re in a world where people want these longer stories and want to know more about the characters.

  James Chapman, who wrote a book called License to Thrill (2008), describes the evolution of Bond films as being about continuity and change.

  I call it going forward and back, but that’s right. The first example of going back I made in GoldenEye was to bring back the Aston Martin DB5. The DB5 was not originally in the script and I remember going to [director] Martin Campbell and saying, “We need to make this the DB5 to signal to the audience that we know who it [Bond] is.” And what was funny was that the transport department pushed back and didn’t want to use it, because they said the car’s a piece of shit and it keeps breaking down. Martin rolled his eyes and gave it to me. Martin was a big Bond fan, and Martin also knew about those touchstones and the need to go forward and back.

  The casting of Judi Dench as M was a great way to go forward.

  I was in the studio at 6:30 one morning, and we were talking about how to fix the scenes with M. And Martin looked at me and said, “Why don’t you try it as a woman?” While what you see on the screen is what I wrote, the idea came from Martin. Martin felt that we needed to push it forward there.

  There is a Bond-M arc over the course of the Brosnan movies. She barely tolerates him in GoldenEye, but over the course of a few films, they come to respect each other tremendously.

  Totally unplanned. That just came about fortuitously.

  Bond’s relationship with Q is different in Pierce’s movies than it is in the earlier movies, where Q is eternally frustrated with Connery and Moore. Q seems to have affection for Pierce’s Bond.

  I’ll explain how that happened. I became great friends with Desmond. And Desmond explained that on his first Bond, he was not sure how to play it and the director said to him, “Everyone in the movie likes Bond, but you can’t stand him.”

  It’s interesting to think that at one time Desmond Llewelyn would have had any trouble playing Q.

  He didn’t know how to play him because the words on the page are [extremely technical]. Desmond asked, “What’s my relationship to Bond?” Terence Young said, “Bond thinks he’s better than your equipment. So you don’t like Bond.” So now this comes all the way forward, and by the time Desmond is in GoldenEye, there’s more than a generation between Bond and Q. I also think there was a real affinity between Pierce and Desmond.

  In the firs
t one [GoldenEye], there was obviously a certain amount of warmth between the two of them but there was still an edge to it. At the end of the scene Bond points to a sandwich and says, “What’s that?” And Q says, “Don’t touch that, that’s my lunch.”

  I didn’t plan it or anything, but then in the second one [Tomorrow Never Dies], there was irony about their relationship. For instance, Bond shows up at the airport to rent a car. And then Q appears and says, “Will you need damage, personal injury?”

  Then in the third one [The World Is Not Enough], Desmond knew he wanted to be written out. He and I talked about it. Barbara talked about it. Michael had talked about it. We all talked about it. Barbara always said to him, “I refuse to deal with this. We’re not going to talk about writing him out of the series. It’s not going to happen.” But we all knew that sooner or later it was.

  I went back that night to think about it and really try to figure out the relationship between these guys. And then it just came to me—and this is going back to The Sword and the Stone—that Desmond was Merlin to Bond’s Arthur. That’s where the relationship ended up. And that’s one of those [emotionally resonant] scenes that I don’t think you could’ve seen thirty years earlier.

  Q’s exit is a surprisingly touching and tender moment between the two of them.

  Yes, Desmond was beloved.

  Was your office at Pinewood?

  We worked at Pinewood, and we also had offices at Piccadilly.

  What’s a Bond writer room look like?

  It’s just a regular office. No, there are no Bond girls running through it.

  Any remnants of Bond in the offices?

  There are some posters. But there’s nothing that would say to you that this is where this stuff comes from. If you’re wondering if there are props and things like that, the answer is no.

  It’s Universal Exports [the nondescript office, which acts as cover for MI6].

  Yeah, it is Universal Exports.

  In addition to your three Brosnan films, you also wrote Bond video games. It seems unlikely but Connery came back as Bond in a video game.

  He came back and did From Russia with Love as a video game. He did it because his grandchildren liked video games, so he wanted to be a part of it. Meeting him was truly one of the most amazing moments for me. It’s the kind of moment when I’m sitting there and suddenly I think, “Fuck, I’m talking to Sean Connery. How did I get here?” I think back to when I was a little kid in Maplewood, New Jersey, looking up at the screen at Goldfinger, and you just go, “How did this happen?” He was incredibly kind to me. The funny thing is that I’ve never met anyone who worked on the franchise who did not immediately embrace you.

  You’re allbrothers?

  In some way. If you’ve been inside this circus, and you’ve been inside of this machine that’s so big, in some way you have to be brothers. When you meet Sean Connery, you’re not going to ask stupid questions. Because you’ve both been in that branch of the army, you’re not going to ask, “So what was it like?” Yes, you may get to the point of gossiping. You might ask, “Did you have this same problem that I did?”

  I remember once being in London and introducing [former Bond women] Maryam d’Abo to Denise Richards. I watched as they fell on each other like long-lost sisters. Because I don’t think it’s possible for you or me to know what it’s like to be a Bond girl. And it’s like a small fraternity of people who have done this. And you all treat each other as if you’ve been through the wars together.

  What were Connery’s concerns about the video game? Did he have any?

  No. No, he was a gent. He just showed up and did the work. He understood what it was and understood what we had to do. I don’t recall any notes from him.

  Sean Connery’s Bond is gunning for trouble.

  ILLUSTRATION BY PAT CARBAJAL

  Tell me about that encounter.

  I had met him in Los Angeles before that. I knew that he was doing it, and it was a social event. And it was, Oh, I know who you are, and you know who I am, and it’s good to meet you, and let’s gossip a little about this or that and the next thing. And Connery joked, “I hope you’re getting paid.” I said, “Yeah, I hope you’re getting paid.” He talked about how much he looked forward to doing the game.

  I spoke with one of the game producers, and he indicated that Connery was not only great to work with but fondly reminisced about his time as Bond.

  I cannot speak for him but he probably has great affection for the character. I’ve heard the stories of him being somewhat prickly about Bond. I can imagine where that comes from. In my own life, if I get introduced to somebody and they start in with Bond stuff, I smile and say, “Okay, you got three questions. And then we’re going to talk about you.”

  A dinner party must be hell for you.

  No, because nobody does it anymore and you learn how to deal with it. You trot out one great story and then you just say, “Come on, I don’t wanna talk about that. Let’s talk about you.” But you don’t want to be the guy sitting at a dinner party trotting out stories about your days playing college basketball or college football. I can only imagine what it was like for Connery. Here’s a guy who whenever he went into a bar anywhere in the world, somebody probably thought it was cute to send over a vodka martini. But we didn’t start from that point. We didn’t start there.

  You also were a writer on the 007 Legends game. It takes Daniel Craig and puts him in non–Daniel Craig movies. It’s a great idea.

  Well, that was Barbara and Michael. And David Wilson supervised that. It was never a question that it was going to be anybody but Daniel Craig because Daniel Craig was Bond at that particular time. And they wanted to do it for the fiftieth anniversary, and so it was a question of, can you do this to reflect the current Bond? And the writing had to follow. Let me give you an example. With Pierce, I would write more witticisms, more wry remarks. But that’s not Daniel’s character, so you don’t write that in. In fact, it was a learning curve as I was doing it. Because Daniel is a man of fewer words than Pierce, I had to adjust the writing.

  What did you have to do to make Craig’s Bond into Connery’s, or were they closer?

  No, that one was closer. This was just keeping the dialogue short. And it turned out, in the end, Daniel didn’t do the voices for that game.

  I didn’t know that until after I played it. I thought it was Craig until I started researchingthis book. [Note: Timothy Watson performed a pitch-perfect imitation of Craig.]

  No, it was a sound-alike, because Craig was busy making the movie.

  The Daniel Craig Bond films delved into the spy’s psyche.

  ILLUSTRATION BY PAT CARBAJAL

  Bond games introduced me to the world of gaming.

  Probably GoldenEye [the acclaimed video game].

  No, it was Blood Stone.

  It’s funny you played Blood Stone. Blood Stone is my favorite of all the games.

  What do you like about it?

  Well, I liked it because it’s a Bond adventure. It’s entirely new. There was nothing in it that had been used before. And I liked the female character [Nicole Hunter]. I thought about her as an ex-supermodel, kind of like Jerry Hall, who was married to Mick Jagger. I thought of her as a Jerry Hall-ish character, a former “It girl” who was in this situation. She was a jewelry designer, and I loved the character. I thought it was great to have a former “It girl” who had fallen into this spy world. I liked that part of it, and I thought it was a great story. Gregg Wilson and David Wilson worked on the story, and I just thought it was a fun romp.

  Teaming up with a jewelry designer isn’t a mission that they would use in an actual Bond movie. It’s almost a spinoff mission. But the game felt like an actual Bond movie and it hit all the beats you want in a Bond film.

  Yes, but we weren’t adapting a Bond movie. We got to make up everything. It begins with an attack on the Acropolis. It felt fresh. We weren’t working from anything. It was just, Go have a good time and tell us a B
ond story.

  Do the games take a long time to develop and write?

  The Bond games took a lot of time, particularly Legends. That one was the most fun to work on. From Russia with Love was just a straight adaptation, taking out things that didn’t make sense today and updating it. It was interesting because it was the first time I realized that there had been an entire generation of kids who fell in love with Bond through the [original 1997 version of] GoldenEye game, which I did not work on. I would’ve never expected that.

  You made some structural changes to the From Russia with Love game. In the movie, Red Grant is killed about halfway through. In the game, his death is moved to the end.

  Yes. Because there was no bigger baddie.

  Do you know why From Russia with Love was chosen and not another title?

  No, I don’t. Certain decisions take place above your pay grade. It’s funny though. I remember reading some of the online criticisms in the fan community about the game, about why they didn’t get this actor, why they didn’t get that actor. “Surely this actress would’ve just been delighted to have been part of this. These people clearly would’ve worked for free.” No, they wouldn’t have worked for free. It’s a billion-dollar franchise and the actor and the agent and everyone else wants a piece of it. They’re not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts for the fan community.

  Shocking, positively shocking.

  Yeah, shocking, exactly. Again, that’s Maibaum. There’s a perfect example of his contribution. That line doesn’t appear in the book Goldfinger (1959).

  Your point is that people should go back to Maibaum, not the books. His papers and screenplays are preserved at the University of Iowa. Even then, you never know whose ideas are reflected in the various drafts of the script.