Broccoli speaks
CREDIT: GREG WILLIAMS/EON PRODUCTIONS
‘No Time to Die’: A Rare In-Depth Interview With the Keepers of James Bond
By BRENT LANG
For nearly 60 years on the silver screen, James Bond, the rakish secret agent who jets from one exotic port of call to another, romancing women and besting bad guys in the name of queen and country, has answered to one person. M, the no-nonsense intelligence chief, is the only one who can revoke the British spy’s license to kill. And even M isn’t always successful at reining in 007.
Off screen, it’s a different story. One family, the Broccolis, has long maintained an iron grip on the franchise. Thanks to a highly unique deal, they have been able to exert an unprecedented level of creative control, serving as the final arbiter on everything from the scripts to the casting to the promotional materials.
Eon Prods., the family’s company, splits profits with MGM/UA, the studio that has the right to finance and distribute all of the Bond movies.
“For better or worse, we are the custodians of this character,” says Barbara Broccoli, who oversees the franchise with her half-brother Michael G. Wilson. “We take that responsibility seriously.”
It’s an arrangement that was first hammered out by Broccoli’s father, the producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, when John F. Kennedy was president and the Twist was all the rage. Miraculously, that pact has prevailed through the decades and generations, enduring everything from corporate mergers and bankruptcies to shifting consumer tastes and geopolitical upheavals. The elder Broccoli died in 1996. but not before ceding control to his two children with the 1995 release of “GoldenEye,” a film that proved a sexist superspy, conceived by novelist Ian Fleming in the 1950s, still had a role to play in post-Cold War cinema.
Hollywood’s longest-running — and one of its most lucrative — franchises, the spy series has spawned 24 films that have collectively amassed $16.3 billion in global ticket sales, adjusted for inflation, according to a 2018 Forbes story on Bond by the numbers ($6.9 billion unadjusted, per data site The Numbers).
On April 10, “No Time to Die,” Eon’s 25th Bond adventure, will hit U.S. theaters, representing a moment of both triumph and uncertainty for the series. It serves as the culmination of Daniel Craig’s critically acclaimed, massively successful five-film run as 007; this time, after threatening to turn his back on the series for years, the star is insistent that he is finally holstering Bond’s Walther PPK for good.
“I’m in total denial,” says Broccoli. “I’ve accepted what Daniel has said, but I’m still in denial. It’s too traumatic for me.”
Broccoli, who joined Wilson in a rare sit-down interview with Variety last month, conducted in a drab Brooklyn studio far removed from the casinos, five-star hotels and villas that Bond habituates, weighs her words carefully. She’ll cast a reproachful eye at Wilson when his attempts at humor strike her as ill-considered. “Americans don’t do irony,” he notes at one point, gesturing toward his U.S.-born interrogator.
Unlike the famously chatty Bond villains who have a penchant for spilling every detail of their deadly schemes instead of concentrating on killing off 007, the plot details of “No Time to Die” are being closely held. There’s a paper-thin logline, one that states that Bond, having retired from active duty, finds himself pulled back into the world of espionage after a scientist is abducted. Neither Broccoli nor Wilson will reveal much beyond that, but they do promise that the film will tie up loose narrative threads left over from previous Craig outings.
“We have come to an emotionally satisfying conclusion,” says Broccoli.
On the press tour for 2015’s “Spectre,” Craig complained about the physical toll of playing Bond, saying that he would rather “slash my wrists” than return for another outing. After giving him time to rest and recuperate, Broccoli prevailed upon him to reconsider.
“Barbara doesn’t take no for an answer,” says Craig. “It’s not in her wheelhouse. I had a nice long break, which I really needed. And then she was just persistent and came to me with some ideas, which we started formulating, and I got excited again.”
Already, the media has begun speculating about who could step into Bond’s impeccably tailored tuxedo, with everyone from Idris Elba to Richard Madden finding himself at the center of chatter. Broccoli and Wilson insist they haven’t started to map out a post-Craig world; they’re focused on completing “No Time to Die,” an enormous, $250 million production. But they seem open to broadening the search beyond the usual suspects.
“You think of him as being from Britain or the Commonwealth, but Britain is a very diverse place,” Wilson says.
[QUOTE]“For better or worse, we are the custodians of this character. We take that responsibility seriously.”
BARBARA BROCCOLI
There are certain things the duo appears open to considering, and other conversations that are nonstarters, when it comes to selecting the next Bond. “He can be of any color, but he is male,” says Broccoli. “I believe we should be creating new characters for women — strong female characters. I’m not particularly interested in taking a male character and having a woman play it. I think women are far more interesting than that.”
If anything, Broccoli and Wilson’s experience with Craig has emboldened them to shake up the Bond formula. On paper, the choice was shocking. Craig, with his blond hair, boxer’s swagger, creased face and gruff volatility, didn’t fit the mold. He wasn’t conventionally handsome, he didn’t smack of fine living and chateaubriand and he lacked the black or brown locks that previous Bonds, from Sean Connery to Pierce Brosnan, had all rocked — though in Connery’s case that was courtesy of a toupee. Craig’s selection was considered to be such an affront to 007 purists that websites, dubbed CraigNotBond, sprang up to decry his casting. Even the actor was surprised to win the role.
“I thought I was just on a conveyor belt of actors who go through their door,” remembers Craig. “I assumed they were just casting their net very wide. I thought I’d go and meet them and then have a story to tell friends about that time I was considered for Bond. When they suggested they were serious about me doing it, I was completely flattered but perplexed.”
It turned out, however, that Broccoli and Wilson were interested in doing something entirely different with the character. Although 2002’s “Die Another Day,” the last of Brosnan’s four-film run, had been the most financially successful movie in the series’ history with a worldwide gross of $432 million, its climax, replete with a giant space laser and an invisible car, pushed the story in a preposterous direction.
“We got too fantastical,” says Wilson. “We had to come back to Earth.”
They were also looking at a much different global situation than the one in which “Die Another Day” was conceived. “The world obviously had changed,” says Broccoli. “We’d had 9/11, and the stakes were higher, and we felt we needed a more realistic Bond.”
Martin Campbell, the director of “GoldenEye” and “Casino Royale,” says finding the right man to play a fresh version of the legendary superspy involved whittling the final list down to eight candidates. Craig, just off a red-eye from the U.S. set of “The Invasion,” was subjected to a series of screen tests. In one, he read a tense tête-à-tête in an office from “Casino Royale,” while in another he re-created a seduction scene that Connery performed in “From Russia With Love.”
“To be honest, it took me a little while to see it,” admits Campbell. “Daniel’s acting was terrific, but he wasn’t a pretty-boy. Barbara was adamantly in favor of him.” Campbell won’t say who else was considered, but one insider says Craig beat out the likes of Sam Worthington and Gerard Butler for the part. Despite the pushback, Broccoli knew she made the right call.
“He brought flesh and blood to the character,” she says. “Bond in the novel is a silhouette. Daniel has given him depth and an inner life. We were looking for a 21st-century hero, and that’s what he delivered. He bleeds; he cries; he’s very contemporary.”
[/QUOTE] continued next post
