by Mark Edlitz
What elements of Bond’s character are you trying to capture?
Bond is bigger than life so that’s always what you want to portray. It doesn’t matter that on the poster he’s going up into outer space without a helmet. No one thought twice about it; it wasn’t going to raise any eyebrows.
You also painted a detailed poster with Bond in a space station.
I worked for about twelve years in the art department of 20th Century Fox before doing motion picture advertising. My job was to do storyboards and set illustrations. I had to create perspective drawings of the set and draw interiors and exteriors architecture. That background was helpful in painting Drax’s space station. I had some reference photos of guys in space suits so I included those. I put Drax in the background and had Lois Chiles leaning on Bond. I don’t think she liked her depiction; it showed a little too much leg.
I saw a version of the poster in a newspaper and someone retouched it and made it look like Roger Moore had [unflattering] jowls. It made him look older. I thought, no, Roger has to look chiseled. They also added more of those guys in space suits in the background. Once it leaves your hands, it’s out of your control. It’s just one of the pitfalls of illustration.
Let’s talk about the depiction of Moore on the Moonraker posters. He looks serious and determined. He doesn’t have a raised eyebrow, which would have undermined the character and the element of danger.
Right, he looks pretty intense. He’s looking right at you with a wolflike stare. You know something bad is going to happen [if you cross him]. I only used a raised eyebrow once—in the A View to a Kill poster—where he is standing back-to-back with Grace Jones. I liked Grace Jones’s head the most in that one. Sometimes the secondary figure is easier to paint because the pressure’s not on.
But of all the portraits I did of Roger, my favorite piece is the one I painted of him for Octopussy. Maude Adams is standing behind him and her arms are wrapped around him. I came as close to nailing Roger on that one as I did on any of them. I may have romanticized him a bit for Moonraker, but I liked it. Most motion picture stars have likeness clauses in their contracts in which they have final approval of how they are portrayed in advertising. There’s a little rock in the stream that I have to avoid. I want to paint something that they feel will be flattering.
The head is always the part I spent the most sweat over. It had to be as perfect as possible. I’d paint on a fairly large board and it was almost always located in a spot that was awkward to reach. I would paint the head on a separate piece, strip it, and hard glue it to the surface of another board. It’s a little bit of a collage.
What about Bond’s body language? In Moonraker, he’s in an action stance.
He looks like he’s ready to spring into action. I based the action stance on an image from the Bond films. Each begins with Bond looking down the barrel of a gun. Bond enters almost in silhouette, walks, and when he gets to the center of the frame, he turns, drops into a half-couch and points his gun directly at you. I painted a variation of that but because he’s in space where there’s no gravity, he’s floating. But he’s still holding that same stance. Other poster artists have used variations on the image. But whenever I hear the Bond theme that’s the image that comes to mind.
Bond is always holding a gun in the movie posters. In Moonraker, you swapped his Walther PPK for a ray gun.
The gun is always pointed upward at a slightly erotic angle. If he were holding a tiny little Walther PPK, it wouldn’t be too exciting, so I painted him with a laser gun.
One of the variations on your Moonraker poster has three action panels.
I only did the central figure. Once it got to the New York agency, someone else created those background panels. The panels make the poster confusing. But that happens when other art gets slipped in. I had Roger looking lean and mean, and sometimes they’ll retouch it so that he looks weightier. Somebody else also retouched the interior of the space station in Moonraker.
For the Octopussy poster, I intentionally extended Roger and Maude Adams’s legs a little longer than normal because I didn’t want Roger and Maude to look too stubby and I was planning on bringing another element at their knee level. It was either going to be the titles or some action. I also painted the vignettes of the Haram girls fighting the Mujahideen and Bond flying the small beach craft plane, where Roger is knocking someone off the tail. They combined them together and another artist in Italy added some explosions and some other stuff. I’m probably not giving him enough credit; he might have just painted one similar to mine. I’ve seen other posters that look like my paintings that were painted by someone else in Europe or elsewhere; it’s hard to say for sure.
What materials are you working with?
Acrylic is the medium of commercial art because you can just paint over it again and again without dragging up [the colors underneath] to the surface. I did most of those paintings fairly large, forty-by-sixty inches, which was quite larger than reproduction size. I thought that I could paint them looser so that when they were reduced to print size they would look a little tighter. Those works are all acrylic. The full-figure thumbnails were probably twelve by sixteen.
For Moonraker you painted three different but similarly themed designs. Each one has Bond in a space suit. Did you have to paint Bond from scratch on three separate occasions?
Right, they are separate pieces. I got paid for three separate pieces, which is the nice part. They agreed to buy the first reproduction rights so most of the original art was returned to me. I sold a lot of it at auction to a buyer in Germany named Thomas Nixdorf. He has a nice Bond collection.
Then came Octopussy. The central image is the one of Maude Adams standing behind Roger Moore. She has eight arms, all of which are doing something different.
It was hard thinking up enough things for her to do with her hands. Maude’s holding the Fabergé egg and the martini glass in two of them. They wanted some things that were threatening, like the dagger, but she’s also caressing him. In the original thumbnails, she was kind of giving Bond a little kiss behind his ear. But they decided that they wanted Maude to look a little more in charge, so instead of kissing Bond, she’s giving a come-hither look.
Did you put her behind him so we don’t get too lost in the anatomy of what an eight-armed woman might look like?
Yes, the feeling was that Maude would look too much like a spider if you could see the whole thing. It would be a distraction. Keeping her behind Bond simplified it so that you could concentrate on her arms. Plus the fact that she’s kind of coming up behind him and enticing him with all these little gewgaws is more intriguing.
A View to a Kill was next. You painted the image of Roger Moore and Grace Jones standing back-to-back.
For reference photos, we hired a ripped female bodybuilder to portray Grace Jones. Then I put Grace Jones’s head on the model’s body. The person who posed for James Bond was just a nineteen-or twenty-year-old guy who worked at the agency. We grabbed him and put him in a suit and I then turned it into a tux. I also gave him a gun to hold.
What about the images of Bond on the Golden Gate Bridge wearing his tux?
The most interesting one was for A View to a Kill. It was the image of Bond on the Golden Gate Bridge. The high angle looking down was there so that I could see San Francisco in the background. The scale is probably off on the cables of the bridge that they’re standing on, but I’ve never heard a word of complaint about it. Apparently, most people are just looking at the main figures of Roger Moore and Tanya Roberts.
You have another A View to a Kill poster that’s with Moore on the Eiffel Tower. The concept is similar to the Golden Gate Bridge image. In both posters, Bond is positioned at a precipitously high level with a high-angle view of the city, and he’s wearing his tux.
That one also has an exaggerated perspective. That’s the poster where James is looking straight forward and Grace Jones is coming up behind him on the paraglider. That one was harder to do than
the one with San Francisco Bay Bridge in the background. That was the first teaser poster, the one with Grace Jones and Roger back-to-back was the second teaser, and the one on the Golden Gate Bridge was the final piece and the release poster. It was a nice chunk of work. I learned a lot working with Tony Seiniger; he’s one of the unsung heroes of motion picture art direction. He’s trained a lot of people who ended up working for studios and sometimes in competing shops. Illustration is more collaborative than most people realize. I communicate with a lot of people while I’m working on a poster. I’m not one of those diva types who never listens to anybody. I’ll listen to whoever is on the board about something I’m working on. But I’ve kind of retired; my eyes aren’t good enough for close work anymore.
Bond posters aren’t just art, they’re also marketing tools.
They call it show biz, not show art. Even though you want to make it as heartfelt as possible, the basic premise behind a poster is to sell the movie and to get across that flavor of James Bond as best you can. Movie poster art has gone through a lot of transitions. As time went on, posters created on computers replaced illustrated movie posters. Also, movie posters are no longer a major draw for audiences to get them to see a film. Now, television and the internet are used to let audiences know about upcoming movies.
Also, painting is a slow process, and a lot of studios want to see many different versions, and computers are just faster. Today, they can take three of our basic compositions and quickly put them together with a computer. When I did A View to a Kill, they had Christopher Walken leaning out of a big dirigible. I got a call saying that they have good news and they just wanted a small change. They wanted to move Christopher Walken and the dirigible two inches lower. I said, “Move it two inches or one foot; it’s the same amount of work.” Nowadays, you just put the whole image into a computer and you can use Photoshop to move the image.
You bring up an interesting point. Bond fans savor your art as a straightforward expression of love for the character. But it’s also a job.
It is a job. There’s a difference between fine art and illustrations. Fine art is art. Fine art exists for itself. With fine art, the artist is giving his impression of something. If people appreciate or empathize with what the artist is trying to say or express, then it’s a success. But it’s not the same type of success as an illustration, which is a more quote-unquote “commercial” form of art. Illustrations are created to help entice you to spend time with a product, to watch a movie, or to read a story in a magazine. The Saturday Evening Post had great illustrations. For me, it’s more of an accomplishment if you produce something that was also artful in the selling. It’s helpful to have parameters—it’s like a rope ladder you can walk on when you’re going over a cascading waterfall. You hold on to it, watch your step, and make sure you don’t stray too far.
Who is Bond to you?
James Bond is the ideal urbane, cosmopolitan stone-cold-killer type masculine figure. My mental idea of Bond’s character was set from what I had read in the books. When I first saw Sean Connery, I thought, that’s Bond. Sean Connery and Daniel Craig look physically the closest to Ian Fleming’s Bond. Fleming’s James Bond is not a particularly nice guy. He’s basically a hit man for the government. That’s why they gave him a license to kill. The Bond of the books would not say, “shocking, positively shocking,” after throwing an electric fan into a bathtub to kill someone. Everybody who’s played the role has to keep the humor. Roger Moore’s Bond is a different character from the Bond in the books. Roger has a crooked smile and a raised eyebrow. Roger was a good James Bond, and he brought work my way. But I would have loved the chance to draw Sean Connery.
If you had drawn Connery’s Bond, would you have taken the same approach?
No, no. I think I would have to make it a little darker. Back in those days, Sean Connery had a kind of saturnine face and the bone structure in his face was more prominent. Even when he smiles, he looks lean and mean.
How much time does it take to paint one of these?
I’d say a couple of weeks. Because of the size of the image, I had to paint standing up. The days were long. The kind of day that when I’m done, my back and my feet were sore. But the thumbnails, creative sketches, and color comps, which were smaller, could be made at the drafting table while I was sitting in a chair. That was always easier. In the early days, I did work out of a bedroom in a house. Because the paintings were so large, I had to literally take it out in the hall just to take a look at it.
Of all the work I’ve done, the most time-consuming part was drawing the illuminated space suit on the Moonraker poster, which had all these little reflections on them. To get the space suit right, I ended up mixing various colors and putting them in various screw-on lidded containers so that I could keep them wet all the time.
Once you have completed a painting, do you take your only original to the agency?
Right, you take it to the agency so that they could shoot the work and return it. I got back some of the originals because they were paying for the full reproduction rights, but if they wanted the painting itself, that was extra. However, I never got the Octopussy poster back. That was the one and only time that the agency didn’t return my painting.
Do you have a favorite of your Bond posters?
I like the simple ones. I like the first one, where it is just Roger blasting up from the Earth and floating in space. Strong, simple images tend to attract the eye more than complex and busy ones. Once you have people’s attention, they will stand and pore over a busy thing for a long time. But they may walk by it if it doesn’t immediately grab them. A simple design grabs the eye faster. I also like the A View to a Kill poster with Roger and Grace Jones and Octopussy with Roger and Maude. I like them all and I was happy to do them.
Did you keep in mind how similar or dissimilar they were from the previous Bond posters?
It was probably youthful ignorance on my part, but I did not want to go back and look at them. Mitchell Hooks [Dr. No] and Bob Peak [The Spy Who Loved Me] have a strong design style. A movie poster has to make a more graphic statement than, say, a magazine illustration, where you’re trying to portray depth and perspective. You can have a guy standing on a hill and a battle going on in the background. Most of the really successful artists are the ones who have a sense of graphic design, and my work was done with a sense of illustration. It took me a long time to realize that. It came from working in storyboards for twelve or fifteen years, where you are showing the movement of the camera. My Bond work reflects a [camera’s] point of view.
Your posters have a strong sense of perspective.
Look at Drax’s spaceship. I was dealing with the perspective of the environment. I made the shapes a little asymmetrical and used them to create a sense of depth. All parallel lines lead to the vanishing point; they all come together at the infinity point.
I love your Moonraker poster. There’s a lot to look at but it’s not busy. You tend to strip all that away and keep the focus primarily on Bond.
I figured he was the tent pole of the movies. It’s all about Bond, so let’s make Bond the most prominent figure or place him in the vanishing points to help make him prominent. To make a figure prominent you silhouette them by using a contrasting light or dark source. Or you can make all the parallel lines meet behind the figure or their head. This way your eye is irresistibly drawn toward that spot.
In the Moonraker poster, Bond is dead center. There are many lines from the space station that lead to the center, which converge right behind Roger Moore’s face. And you have Drax pointing at Bond. You’re using different techniques to lead the viewer’s eye to Bond.
Right. Your eye follows Drax’s hands, which are pointing at Bond. The more people you have pointing at the main character, the more the viewer will look at the main character as well. It’s all a bunch of tricks that you learn in any art school.
Do you think that paintings capture something that photographs do not?
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bsp; I think that more emotion carries through in a painting than a photograph. You can emphasize or exaggerate aspects of a character in a painting that don’t necessarily come through with a photo or when a computer does it. But, of course, I’m biased.
Is the Bond of your posters literally the Bond of the films? Or are you creating another version of the cinematic Bond? Perhaps the ideal version?
It’s the Bond of the films. It’s the Bond you want him to be. But it’s also the artist’s interpretation of the first two. It was all of those things. The books set my mental idea of Bond’s character. But you have to look at the appeal of Bond from a number of angles, including the social psychology of why he’s become a cultural phenomenon to the idea of what people think is heroic.
The other thing about Bond is that he’s doing things that are superheroic, although he wasn’t wearing a cape. But then he would laugh it off. His humor takes the edge off. Look at his character. Bond is totally different from Gary Cooper’s character in High Noon [1952], who is forced into a situation that he doesn’t feel he can avoid. But Bond seems to have a love of or even an addiction to danger. Although he’s a servant of government leaders, he is primarily his own man. That’s why he’ll circumvent his orders to get things done.
Do you think Bond’s primary motivation is to serve queen and country? Or do you think that he is attracted to the lifestyle, violence, and excitement and that serving his country is a by-product?
You can make that point. It comes down to the question of how addicted is he to his job? Movies about hit men often leave you unsatisfied because they are one dimensional. And that’s what separates Bond. Bond is definitely multidimensional. He can get down and dirty and fight in the mud or tear up a train in a physical altercation, but he’s also cultured. He knows how to play Baccarat and how to dress well; he knows a proper martini should be shaken not stirred. He’s a Renaissance man.
