by Mark Edlitz
Yeah, you never know. Only the writer knows. Let me give you an example. There’s a scene in GoldenEye where Pierce is on the beach with Izabella Scorupco [who plays Bond girl Natalya Simonova.] Natalya asks, “How can you be so cold?” Bond says, “It’s what keeps me alive.” She says, “No, it’s what keeps you alone.” That scene came about because Izabella and Pierce separately went to Martin Campbell and said that they felt there wasn’t enough of their relationship. Martin Campbell agreed, and he called me and said, “Come to London and write this scene on the beach. Write a scene.” And that’s where that “boys with toys” thing came from. [When Natalya finally has had it with the verbal jousting between Bond and his interrogator, Defense Minister Dimitri Mishkin, she cries out, “Oh, stop it, both of you! Stop it! You’re like… boys with toys!”]
Now I don’t know this for certain but I’m pretty sure that Barbara and Michael are probably somewhere in the gears of all of that. I can’t say that it came from Iza-bella. I can’t say that it came from Pierce. I can’t say that it came from Martin. It came from the five of them. It’s interlocking.
There are a lot of people with a lot of different ideas, and the writer needs to find a valid reason to include something in the script.
Yeah, and so stuff comes from many different places. Clearly, a lot of it comes from the writers. But I remember in GoldenEye that the Zukovsky character, who was Robbie Coltrane, had not really been written. There was a character named Zukovsky who was a former KGB agent but it wasn’t fully developed yet. I remember sitting in our offices at Leavesden, which is now Warner Brothers London, and a former Rolls-Royce jet engine manufacturing plant. I had met Robbie Coltrane once before when he was making the movie Nuns on the Run (1990), so I kind of knew him, but not really.
Martin walked into my office with Coltrane and said, “He’s going to play Zukovsky.” And Robbie made fun of me and said, “You better write a good role for me.” Of course, it was already written, but you better [flesh it out]. And I thought, “Who do I steal from? What am I going to do here?” I thought back to Casablanca (1942) and took the Sydney Greenstreet character. Sydney Greenstreet is doing all sorts of illegal things in Casablanca. So then it became an homage to that character. His first lines are, “The free-market economy. I swear it will be the end of me.” That’s very much Sydney Greenstreet-ish. But Robbie made the character his own.
And there’s a hilarious line, which is completely ad-libbed and is not in the script. Robbie’s character is complaining about his knee, which Bond had shot in an earlier episode. And Robbie goes, “My knee hurts every day, Mr. Bond. It hurts in the winters, and it hurts in the cold, and the winters are long here.” And he turns to somebody in the back and he goes, “How long are the winters?” And the guy just goes, “It depends.” That line was completely ad-libbed.
IMDb trivia made a connection about that scene. In The World Is Not Enough, Bond is tied up and Robbie Coltrane shoots him free with his cane. If Bond hadn’t shot Coltrane in an earlier episode, which is referenced in GoldenEye, Coltrane wouldn’t have been able to save Bond in The World Is Not Enough, because he wouldn’t have had a cane that shoots bullets.
Exactly. It was all fortuitous. And then you take stuff from real life. I was getting per-diem money in London. Every Friday they would give me this wad of cash, which I would then hand to my wife. And there’s a line in The World Is Not Enough where Bond holds out a wad of cash and says, “Here, take an inch.” That had to do with my per diem.
What is your proudest Bond moment?
Desmond’s good-bye.
What else comes to mind?
When you walk onto a Bond set, you’re working on something that’s much larger than life. You feel lucky to be a part of it. Everyone is part of it for a short period of time. And in the years that followed, how wonderfully gracious and loyal Barbara and Michael have been. And how incredibly lucky I am to have gotten a chance to be part of what is the largest franchise in motion picture history.
TOM MANKIEWICZ
Tom Mankiewicz was a widely respected craftsman whose wit was the trademark of his writing. Mankiewicz wrote the screenplay to Sean Connery’s last Eon-produced Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever, with Richard Maibaum. Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman were so impressed by the work he did on Diamonds Are Forever that they hired him to pen the next Bond film, Live and Let Die, while Diamonds was still in production. For Live and Let Die, Mankiewicz met another challenge: he tailored the script to accommodate the flair for playing light comedy of the new James Bond actor, Roger Moore.
For The Man with the Golden Gun, Moore’s second Bond film, Mankiewicz devised Roger Moore’s favorite one-liner. As Bond trains a rifle at the crotch of a hostile weapons maker from whom he has to extract information, he demands, “Speak now or forever hold your piece.”
The celebrated screenwriter also performed uncredited work on the next two Bond movies. Mankiewicz rewrote The Spy Who Loved Me5 and wrote an early treatment for Moonraker.6 He also co-wrote the screenplays for Superman (1978) and Super-man II (1980).
Mankiewicz died at the age of sixty-eight on July 31, 2010. His father was writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz (All About Eve) and his uncle was screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane).
When people go see a Bond film, they go because they personally like the character and want to spend some time with him. The plot is almost irrelevant to them.
Absolutely. You’re absolutely right. It’s the character of Bond that makes the movie. After George Lazenby played Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Sean came back with Diamonds Are Forever. One night he said to me, “I couldn’t understand the fucking script. Could you? You wrote it.” And I said, “Sean, all I know is at the beginning Harry Saltzman said to me, ‘What’s Blofeld’s ultimate threat?’ I said, ‘Harry, he’s going to destroy the world.’” I swear to God, Harry said, “It’s not big enough.”
But when you look at the rules—and start with the rules—who are you writing? You’re writing a guy who every man wants to be and every woman wants to fuck. No woman wants to marry James Bond. I’m sorry—even though it’s a heartbreaking thing in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service when the Diana Rigg character dies. Every woman who goes to see Bond thinks about spending a weekend with him. How would you like to go to Rio with Bond? How would you like to go to the Bahamas with Bond? You don’t want to stay too long. He’s every woman’s one-nighter, two-nighter, three-nighter fantasy.
Once you know that, Bond can be as cruel as you want him to be. I don’t mean actively cruel, but that wonderful line in Thunderball when Luciana Paluzzi is shot in the back when he’s dancing with her and he says, “Do you mind if my date sits this one out? She’s just dead.” Then he puts her down at a table full of people and the audience laughs. Because you’ve established that character so well. If a normal character did that onscreen, you’d think, “What a despicable, horrible human being.” But it’s James Bond.
During my time writing Bond, Bond was becoming more like a Disney picture. That car in Goldfinger changed James Bond forever. The ejector seat, the squirting of the oil, the machine guns. The audience just loved it. So the pressure was on to get more and more stuff, but Bond should have remained the same. Bond should have been a smoker, although they outlawed it. Sean smoked for the first five or six movies. There was a limit to how much he could drink onscreen. It became more of a family movie. Bond’s original character got a little softer toward the end of Roger’s run, and with Timothy Dalton, they tried to bring back the tougher guy.
Do you think the audience should see only a limited amount of his personal life?
His personal life is never really dealt with in the books except in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963). By the way, the novels are a lot of fun to read. In terms of his private life, it’s always been verboten to get into that. Bond’s personal life is a cipher to me. I don’t see that he has a personal life. He’s always on the move. He’s always checking into a hotel
suite. He’s always got the good girl and the bad girl. Usually two bad girls. There’s the bad girl that he turns around and makes a good girl. The bad girl who tries to kill him that he winds up killing, but essentially it’s Bond faces the world as opposed to Bond sits at home.
Bond shouldn’t be an introspective or self-reflective person?
I don’t think he can be introspective or self-reflective. Also, he cannot be involved in a serious relationship with a woman whom he truly loves and continue to be James Bond because it’s totally irresponsible. Here’s a guy who gets caught inside coffins and thrown out windows. You couldn’t say, “This is my wife and I love her,” or, “This is my wife and kids,” and continue to put yourself in harm’s way as James Bond always does.
I had said to Sean back then, “If you want to do a completely original film”—and I talked to Cubby about it—“we should do a James Bond where you are in the Caribbean or wherever and you’re on the heels of an assassin, and you are one step slower. You realize that your time is up. He outmaneuvers you. It’s only through your wits that you finally kill him. During the film, you fall in love and we’d cast a big movie star.” I was thinking of Sophia Loren back then, who would be about Sean’s age, and they’d sail off into the sunset. Cubby said, “That’s great except there’d be no more fucking Bond movies and I want to keep making them.”
Timothy Dalton deepened the character of James Bond.
ILLUSTRATION BY PAT CARBAJAL
By the way, Sean once came to me to write his unofficial Bond movie, Never Say Never Again. I was very close to the Broccolis and I said, “I can’t do that.” Then after the picture was made and they had to reshoot, he asked me to come see it and to give him suggestions. I called Cubby and said, “Is that all right with you?” Cubby said, “Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.” He said, “By the way, it would have been alright with me if you had written it.” I never asked him because I didn’t want to put Cubby in that position.
In addition to your three Bond films, you also wrote two Superman movies. Christopher Reeve had concerns about being typecast as Superman.
It’s amazing that he was thinking about it at the time because the film had not come out and he had been in only one other movie in a supporting part. His first concern was—and it’s a young actor’s concern—“Am I going to be Superman for the rest of my life?” He wanted me to get him in touch with Sean Connery because I had done Diamonds Are Forever with Sean and I knew him pretty well. He said, “Sean Connery will know about typecasting because he doesn’t play Bond anymore. I’ve got to talk to him.” He was so earnest.
One night there was a party. I knew Sean wouldn’t want to talk to him about it in that way. Sean could be a prickly guy, too. Well, we were there, and there was Sean. Chris said, “Oh, please. I’ve got to talk to him.” I went up to Sean and said, “The kid playing Superman is over there and he wants to talk to you about typecasting.” Sean said, “Ahh, geez, Boy-o.” Sean used to call me “Boy-o.” I was only twenty-seven when I wrote Diamonds Are Forever, so I was “Boy-o” to him, but I persisted, “Do me a favor and just talk to him.” He agreed finally and then he said to Chris, “In the first place, if Boy-o wrote the script, it’s probably not going to be a fucking hit.” He loved to take the Mickey out of me. He said, “So you don’t have to worry about that. Now, if it is a hit, then find yourself something completely different to do right away.” Which I guess was why Chris did Somewhere in Time (1980), a love story [with Bond woman Jane Seymour]. Then Sean added, “By the way, if it is a big hit, get yourself the best fucking lawyer in the world and stick it to them.” Then, the favor granted, he walked away. I said to Chris, “Well, there’s your advice.”
What is the difference between writing for Sean Connery and Roger Moore?
As a writer, I always said the difference between Sean and Roger is that Sean used to throw away the throwaway lines, and Roger, because of his RADA [Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts] upbringing, played them. So I wrote dialogue for Roger to really play those quips. The difference is you can put Sean at a nightclub table with a beautiful girl opposite him, and he could just as easily lean across the table and kiss her or use his steak knife under the table to stick it in her gut and then say, “Excuse me, waiter. I have nothing to cut my meat with.” The audience will accept him doing either one. Roger can kiss the girl but if he tries the knife thing, he would look nasty. Roger looks like a nice guy. Sean can look like a bastard, meaning that there’s a twinkle of violence in Sean’s eye that just isn’t there in Roger’s.
In The Man with the Golden Gun, Moore as Bond slaps a woman. Do you think it wasn’t that successful for the reasons you described?
Yeah, that’s right. First of all, they were trying to make Roger more physical. In the beginning of Live and Let Die—and Roger’s just a wonderful, wonderful man and has become a great friend—in the first scene we filmed, he was running for the double-decker bus that eventually gets shaved off during his car chase. Guy Hamilton said, “When we start, Roger, you run for the bus and hop on.” Roger said, “There’s something you oughta know about me, Guy. I can’t run.” Guy said, “Can’t run?” Roger said, “I look like a twit when I run. I have such long legs.” He said, “Watch.” And he ran and he looked like Bambi. So you had to adjust. Guy said, “Right then. Roger, walk briskly towards the bus and get on.” Of course, every actor has his strengths and weaknesses. [Note: As usual, Moore might have been unnecessarily hard on himself about his running abilities. In The 007 Diaries, Moore’s 1973 account of filming Live and Let Die, the actor revealed that on the first day of principal photography he injured his leg while performing a stunt.7]
It was a huge deal for Roger to take over for Sean. When he did, we were down in Jamaica, where there was an enormous press conference. Someone said, “Why are you doing this?” Roger said, “When I was a young actor at RADA, Noel Coward was in the audience one night. He said to me after the play, “Young man, with your devastating good looks and your disastrous lack of talent, you should take any job ever offered you. In the event that you’re offered two jobs simultaneously, take the one that offers the most money.” Roger said, “Here I am.” He’s wonderful. He’s a terrific guy.
When Roger Moore told the Noel Coward story, he was obviously being self-deprecating. He brought a lot to the role.
Oh, absolutely. Roger is very smart. Besides his natural modesty, he was self-deprecating because he understood that people love Sean and that Sean is a legend. It was exactly the right thing, the graceful thing to do. Especially at that particular press conference, since there wasn’t a foot of film yet with him as James Bond.
He got a bit of a bum rap over the years.
Of course he has. It’s because he followed such a big act. Sean was the only guy at the time—as George Lazenby found out—that people would accept in that part. The fact that Roger stayed on for so many of them is a real tribute to him, and he did it really well.
In Moonraker, outer space belonged to Roger Moore’s James Bond.
ILLUSTRATION BY PAT CARBAJAL
Do you recall any other script notes that Connery gave you?
Sean wanted to have a meeting when he arrived in Vegas to do Diamonds Are Forever. I was so pleasantly surprised that about half of his notes were for other characters. He would say, “Are you sure she should say this here? Wouldn’t it be stronger if she did something?” I thought, “Good for him. He’s really read the script and he’s thinking about everybody in it.” I’m sure he thought, “Don’t worry about me, I’ve played this part before.” He would say, “Can I get something funnier here?” When Lana Wood appears at the crap table and says, “Hi, I’m Plenty.” Bond says, “Why of course you are.” She says, “Plenty O’Toole.” He asked me if he could respond, ‘Named after your father perhaps?’” I said, “It’s a great line.”
But the very fact that he asked me—I was only twenty-seven-years-old—shows you the way he goes about his work. He’s totally professional. Any othe
r actor would just have tried it right in the take. I was amazed. It’s a good line. It’s his line.
Do you think that the character of Bond in Diamonds Are Forever is consistent with his character in Live and Let Die?
No. Roger’s character in Live and Let Die is a much more urbane Bond. I played to his strength. For instance, one of my favorite lines in there occurs when he’s taking the little old lady for the flying lesson and, because they’re being chased, they fly around in the plane, half-destroying the airport. The little old lady is so frightened by the end of the chase that she nearly passes out. He looks at her and says, “Same time tomorrow, Mrs. Bell?” Now, Sean wouldn’t have played that well. I would have found another line for him, but Roger had this urbane kind of cheeriness about him that you can do that. It’s just an instinct. You know who you’re writing for.
You spoke earlier about Connery’s uneasy relationship with the part. How did Moore feel about playing Bond? Moore seemed more comfortable with it, a little more at ease.
Roger is very comfortable in his own skin. He really is. And that shows. So when you give him a part to play that suits him, he is just awfully good at it. He’s a real pro. That’s a wonderful quality for an actor to possess, especially when you know that you’re playing something that you are absolutely right for. If you cast Roger as a crazed killer because you thought, “Boy, this is gonna be great because you’re casting Roger against type,” you’d probably be disappointed. I don’t know if Roger plays that very well. I suspect he’d be uncomfortable playing so dark a character.
Do you have a favorite one-liner?
Maybe the best Bond quip that I ever wrote—and I wrote hundreds of them—was cut out of The Spy Who Loved Me. It’s when Roger meets Barbara Bach at the bar. He knows that she’s a Soviet major, and she knows he’s 007. Anyway, he says, “I must say, you’re prettier than your pictures, Major.” She responds, “The only picture I’ve seen of you, Mr. Bond, was taken in bed with one of our agents—a Miss Tatiana Romanova.” She’s the girl in From Russia with Love. Roger then said, “Was she smiling?” And Barbara Bach answers, “As I recall, her mouth was not immediately visible.” Roger retorts, “Then I was smiling.”
