Q: DID YOU EVER PICTURE YOURSELF AS BOND?

PB: As Bond? No, I didn`t. I read, and have read, that it was my life ambition to play this role, and I dreamt of playing this role—which is complete untruth. I grew up watching the Bond movies, and they certainly sparked my interest in cinema at the age of ten when I saw GOLDFINGER. But I never wanted to be Bond or dreamt about being Bond. It wasn`t until I was doing REMINGTON STEELE that these kind of mutterings and whitterings were going on about me being Bond, because my late wife had done a Bond movie and because we knew the Broccoli family. You already know the history of that from `86. But I guess he and I were just meant to meet on the stage: destiny, destiny, destiny, I guess. There was no getting away from it. And um, I enjoy playing the role enormously.

And you know us here at 007Forever. We like to show you what you wouldn`t normally see in the films or in the books (see Close Calls, The Eye That Never Sleeps for more details). Now, we bring you jettisoned excerpts from Steve Biodrowski`s interview with Pierce that will only be found here.

IS DOING A BOND FILM DIFFERENT FROM MAKING ANOTHER KIND OF MOVIE?

It’s basically the same. It’s just…it was easier this time around than the second time around and the first time, because it was the third time around. You’ve kind of figured out a little bit what you’re doing, and you have more confidence and relaxation about it. You don’t push as hard, or you know when to push and when to pull back on it. But the principles are the same: dealing with some kind of truthfulness and theatricality.

ARE YOU A BIT MORE DARING NOW WITH THE STUNTS?

Well…yes and no. I’ve done a lot in all three of them, to various degrees. There are certain things you just can’t do—you’re not trained for it, and they won’t allow you to do it, because of the insurance.

YOU MENTIONED ON A TALK SHOW THAT YOU HAD BEEN INJURED ON THE FILM.

It was actually the last film. I got whacked in the face. Actually, it happened again, on the top of my lip, but there were no stitches. It was driving the boat through the restaurant door—the door hit me in the face. That was it; there were no bones broken. That was me, sitting in the seat [of the boat]. I didn’t do the barrel role, obviously. It was a kick in the pants. It was amazing. I mean, this boat is so snug fitting. You just got to put your foot down and you got to go—it sits low in the water, so the nose is up and you can’t see where you’re going. You just toodle along with the nose up. It was just one of those wonderful things I could do.

IS THAT ONE OF THE FUN PARTS OF DOING A MOVIE?

Certainly a Bond movie, because you’re able to enter this world that you’ve known about and is part of your own kind of screen mythology and screen education from childhood, and you’re playing the character. It’s a guy thing, I suppose; it’s playing The Man.

HOW WILL JAMES BOND OF THE NEXT MILLENNIUM COMPARE TO PAST BONDS?
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Oh, I couldn’t be so presumptuous to answer that question. I don’t know. Time will tell.

WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE VANITY FAIR LAYOUT?

I thought it was wonderful. It was a great piece of publicity.

WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE BOND GIRL?

Well, the first one, I guess. Shirley [Eaton in GOLDFINGER] I saw when I was ten-and-a-half years of age. She left a permanent impression on my psyche, I must say.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE NEW BOND THEME SONG?

I love it. I think she does a great job. I think it’s on the money. It’s back to the Shirley Bassey. It’s as good as Shirley Bassey; it’s as good as GOLDFINGER. Miss Manson has a great set of pipes on her, and she delivers the song, and they went right for a kind of Bond theme. I couldn’t be happier.

WHO BRINGS THE HUMOR TO THE SCRIPTS? IS IT YOU?

No, Bruce Feirstein is a funny guy. Anyone who could write REAL MEN DON’T EAT QUICHE is a funny guy. So Bruce is there; there’s the direction and myself, so there’s collaboration.

DO YOU FEEL THAT BECAUSE OF BOND PEOPLE PUT YOU IN A BOX?

Oh yes, they do, but I don’t feel the box around me. I just can’t allow that box to be there. You have to make peace with that box and say, ‘Don’t sweat it. Just go with the flow.’ Otherwise, you turn negative on yourself and you get bitter about it, and the jig’s up.

I always knew Pierce Brosnan could play James Bond. Back in the `80s, when his name was first mentioned in connection with the role, there was some grumbling from the hardcore 007 fans who were worried that they would be getting another Roger Moore, with a cool, tongue-in-cheek interpretation of the role.

You can`t really blame people for this fear, but it was based on the assumption that Brosnan`s take on Bond would be the same as his take on REMINGTON STEELE. But when THE FOURTH PROTOCOL came out, anyone paying attention should have been able to see that Brosnan is capable of putting aside the sophisticated Cary Grant routine; his performance as the KGB assassin had a serious, lethal edge that was clearly appropriate for playing the British secret service agent with the `00` license to kill.

Surprisingly, Brosnan expresses no regrets over the circumstances that prevented him from taking over the role at that time. “No, I think someone was watching over me with respect to doing it back in `86,” he declares. “If you saw photographs of me in 1986–I have seen photographs; I`ve got photographs of me with the late Cubby Broccoli, signing the contracts, standing outside the soundstage with his Rolls Royce–I look like something out of LEAVE IT TO BEAVER. I mean…it`s Remington Steele. That script sat beside my bed for all the negotiations of what ultimately became THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS. So I was lucky that I didn`t do it then, very lucky.”

Of course, the actor was very disappointed when the renewal of REMINGTON STEELE created a scheduling conflict that allowed Timothy Dalton to step in, because at that time Brosnan had no idea that the opportunity would ever role around again. This has led to some media depictions that he felt as if he had lost out on a role he had long coveted, but had he really always pictured himself as playing 007?

“No, I didn`t,” he says today. “I read, and have read, that it was my life ambition to play this role, and I dreamt of playing this role–which is complete untruth. I grew up watching the Bond movies, and they certainly sparked my interest in cinema at the age of ten when I saw GOLDFINGER. But I never wanted to be Bond or dreamt about being Bond. It wasn`t until I was doing REMINGTON STEELE that these kind of mutterings and whitterings were going on about me being Bond, because my late wife had done a Bond movie and because we knew the Broccoli family. You already know the history of that from `86. But I guess he and I were just meant to meet on the stage: destiny, destiny, destiny. There was no getting away from it. And I enjoy playing the role enormously.”

Brosnan helped breathe new life into a franchise that had lain dormant for six years, since the box office disappointment of LICENCE TO KILL. The Bond films had gone through a phase of self-parody during Roger Moore`s tenure, and the attempt to return to a more serious tone with Timothy Dalton had fallen flat due to a reluctance to completely abandon the over-the-top antics for which the series had become known. (For instance, the stunt-and-effects-packed chase scene near the end of LICENCE is an impressive piece of action-choreography when taken out of context, but within the film it detracts from the dramatic core of the story, which is about the personal conflict between Bond and his antagonist, the drug lord Sanchez.) With Brosnan in the role, the `90s films have struggled hard to maintain the proper balance between witty one-liners and action-packed violence, harkening back to the glory days of Sean Connery.

Says Brosnan of his predecessor, “Well, going into the ring, it`s about taking the belt. Connery`s got the belt; I want the
belt. It`s as simple as that. It`s a game; the whole bloody thing`s a game. You go in knowing that there`s only one man in the ring. There`s that analogy, which is kind of dramatic and makes for good copy, but there`s also just one`s own self esteem and respect for the character, respect for the millions of people who loved the character. Doing GOLDENEYE was huge. The tension was there from Day One when I put the phone down after my agents said, `You`ve got the job,` right through to finishing the press junket. And Connery was the Man. He was Bond; he was the one I grew up on. You have this kind of thing of wanting to take the belt, but you also have to find your own path with it and not get too blind-sided by the competition and someone else`s performance.”

Continuing somewhat in the direction of Timothy Dalton, Brosnan has moved away from playing Bond as the tongue-in-cheek caricature of Roger Moore. “For me, he is a human being,” says the actor. “To come into the role the first time round, it had such a mighty mythology to it. How do you make it real for yourself; how do you find your [own way]? Because what Fleming put down on paper and what Connery did in the beginning are two different things, really; there`s two different men. So you have to find the man for yourself. You pose the questions to yourself, `What if I were this man?` He`s highly trained, respected, solitary. A survivalist. Doesn`t simply like trying to kill anybody, but kills. Is always looking over his shoulder. Drinks too much. Did smoke too much at one time but has given up–I think he has a quiet cigarette behind the set. For me, it was just trying to make him human, and that`s a dangerous thing to do with any kind of fantasy-figure character. We did it more this time than the last two movies.”

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This is in keeping with one element that Brosnan has emphasized in order to distinguish his characterization: a more obvious compassion for the women in the Bond films. This was on view in TOMORROW NEVER DIES vis-à-vis Teri Hatcher, suggesting a certain vulnerability not always apparent. “I cannot do, nor do I want to do, what Connery did,” he says. “Nor do I wish to do that kind of character who smacks women around and smacks them in the mouth. I mean, he could do it, and he has done it: with Famke Janssen in GOLDENEYE, he gives her a ding in the jaw, but then she deserves it.”

Brosnan is perhaps being a bit disingenuous here, considering what happens in THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH: Bond`s compassion re-emerges, even more pronounced, in regards to Sophie Marceau, but it turns out to be misplaced. “In the context of this film, he is so conflicted and torn by what has happened, and he is also very seduced by this woman,” he says of showing Bond`s fallibility, “and I think there`s nothing wrong in letting that seduction happen within the film. It adds to the drama.” Yes, it does, but it also creates a situation wherein Bond ends up giving a woman more than just a ding in the jaw.
This is all part of a move toward pushing Bond into a morally gray area. As in GOLDENEYE, the villain of THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH is a former friend or ally turned hostile because of past mistreatment. In this new film, however, Bond himself is at least somewhat implicated in the moral malfeasance.

“That is good,” says Brosnan. “We talked in that direction, Michael Apted and I. Bruce Fierstein, who has penned all the ones that I`ve been in, has always talked in that gray area of ambiguity from the beginning. I think GOLDENEYE had it in miniscule amounts, maybe in one particular sequence on the beach with Izabella Scorupco. The second film, I think they wanted to be so bigger and bolder and brasher than the first that it was just wall-to-wall action. But this time around they allowed us to have story, to have character-to have interaction of character and subtext of character, and subtleties. So you have this incredible heroic character, but there is that gray area–an elliptical side to him–and that`s what intrigues me: how far you can push that and how far you can go with that, without pulling it all down.

“When you dig into the dark side of this character, that`s when it gets really interesting–dealing especially with the killings, his license to kill, what really goes on in his head when the door closes in Hamburg or Helsinki or wherever he is in the world-the quiet moment,” Brosnan continues. “Michael Apted [is] not maybe an obvious choice for a big action movie, but I think at day`s end will be viewed as a man who brought it around in a different way. Certainly for me he did, because of his intelligence and storytelling and his own wry sense of humor. He was wise enough to let the boys who handle all the stunts and special effects get on with their job. People have talked about Michael coming back. I haven`t even talked about whether he would want to do another one or not. It would be wonderful to work with him again. It would be wonderful using this as a platform to push the fourth Bond out into an area that is not radical but following the train of thought that we`ve got right now with the character.”

Making the rather safe assumption that WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH will be successful enough to justify a fourth turn by Brosnan as Bond, what would the actor like to extract from the character? “I`d like to see the quietness of him,” the actor reveals. “I`d like to see him just alone on the stage there-how it all affects him, the mission, the killing of someone. We see a little bit in this, but he`s so heroic and always gets the job done; he always has the gadget at hand. But what happens when he doesn`t have the gadget at hand? What happens when it goes wrong? What happens when it`s the betrayal that he deals with in his life the whole time?

“I think we`ve kind of got the foundation to do a fourth and maybe a fifth,” he continues, referring to events in WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH that point in the direction he would like to go: “Because of his guilt, he lends himself to a particular woman, and then how foolish could he be to let it get out of hand so far?” He adds that he would like to extend the character by “taking all of those sequences one step further. You have a rating on this film, which is PG, which should always be there. But there`s a part of me that would love to do an R-rated Bond, or just take the PG rating off it and do it–not for real, because you want the fantasy–but just to see some surprises and explores facets of the character more.”

Before doing a fourth film, however, Brosnan would like some time off to recharge his batteries and to do other films. “I was trained and taught with the belief that I could do many different characters,” he says. “When you`re a younger actor, you feel you can do the whole gamut, but as you get older you realize you have limitations. So there`s that side to the question, but then there`s just me having a good time. Then there`s also me as the guy who needs to work to pay the mortgage, and you don`t have that many choices of scripts on the table, so you take that job because you have to take that job, because if you don`t take the job there might not be a job in two months time. So there`s been that element of my career. There`s an element now, a different side where I have choices, a few choices, most of which I`m making myself. There`s a flood of scripts coming in the door. But you make your own work for yourself, create spaces for yourself where hopefully you get the work, with luck and timing.”
Despite his desire to play other roles, Brosnan definitely wants to return as 007. “I want to do a fourth,” he states. “There is contractually the option of a fourth, and I would like to do a forth film. But I don`t want to go as quickly as we have done the last three. It`s just exhausting. I knew if GOLDENEYE hit, and hit hard, that we were going to be off running. When it did come in strong, then I knew that they were going to want one every eighteen months. So, if you are successful with it, you are going to be known as this character, because I have the knowledge and history of seeing what Sean Connery went through and what Roger Moore went through. So I would like some space between this one and the next one, but of course the studio will want it differently.

With the debut of the 19th James Bond film, THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, it seems fairly ludicrous to have ever wondered if 007 could still be relevant in the 1990s. Three films and $700 million into the final decade of the 20th Century, the answer is pretty obvious. But in November 1994, just prior to the release of GOLDENEYE, that question was very much on the minds of not only MGM – the studio behind the series that was desperate for a box-office hit – but the producers of the franchise who had been at the Bond game since 1962. And with good reason.

Their previous effort, LICENSE TO KILL, had been obliterated during the summer of 1989 by Tim Burton`s BATMAN, Richard Donner`s LETHAL WEAPON 2 and Steven Spielberg`s INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE. The critics weren`t impressed, and the audience stayed away in droves; the film collected a mere $38 million domestically.

Some blamed star Timothy Dalton, who they felt was too serious in the role, not bringing the humor that had been so integral from the moment that Sean Connery picked up his Walther PPK. Others believed that the series had become a victim of its own success, so mired in formula that this one-time genre innovator had fallen to the wayside in the wake of the competition.

Producer Michael Wilson states that at the time he, personally, did not feel the same kind of pressure as the studio. “I guess we`re consumed by the daily challenges and focusing on that,” he explains. “When you first start out, you have a sense of having to make this one good, but if you remember Truffaut`s DAY FOR NIGHT, in terms of making a film, he says, `You start off wanting to make the greatest film ever. By the end of the film, you just hope that you complete it.` There is something about that that`s true. After you set it up, it becomes a task to make it the best that it can and you stop thinking about every detail. There are production issues, staffing issues, personalities, money. Decisions that have to be made.”

Reflecting on the status of the franchise at that point, screenwriter Bruce Feirstein offers, “I think the formula needed updating. For me, the scene where the movies left the ranch was in the Roger Moore film, MOONRAKER. Roger Moore is in a gondolier, and it comes out of the water and he goes through the plaza. He`s a spy! It`s not right to look from today at what they did in 1979 because in their time those movies did really well. At the time of GOLDENEYE, it had been six years since they`d made a movie. Director Martin Campbell was in a position to start over again from scratch. There was going to be a new Bond in the form of Pierce Brosnan, and a new director. I think the six-year break was good. Everyone agrees that although Timothy Dalton was good in his time, the series needed to be reinvented. With GOLDENEYE, what everybody working on the film did was to see how Bond could be updated. When I got to the script, Martin Campbell and I met and talked and realized that the world had changed, but Bond hadn`t. Every scene in that movie is filled with that conflict. It was a way of turning the rubik’s cube slightly to find a new way to approach Bond. That film, in my opinion, has all the elements of a good Bond film. Look at the way that movie opens. It opens with an absolutely incredible stunt with the bungee jump off the dam. That sequence builds and builds. He goes into a chemical factory, all of the chemical stuff blows into the air, then he dives into a plane. Now, the plane is larger than life. It looked fake; I know it looked fake, yet because it looked fake, it became larger than life. It said, `This is the world we`re in. We`re in James Bond`s world,` and so when the pre-credit sequence ended, there was a huge amount of applause. It set up the fantastic world we, as the audience, were in. To some extent, the movie delivered on that all the way through.”

GOLDENEYE began in the mind of long-time Bond fan-turned-screenwriter Michael France, who had previously written the Sylvester Stallone spectacle, CLIFFHANGER. In writing the 007 film, France explains that he wanted “to make sure that the action was bigger than it`s been in some of the other picture. Not so much that it was bigger than other Bond pictures, but other mainstream American action movies, most of which I don`t think are very good and which have unimaginative action scenes. I wanted to make those as big as possible, because I knew these were the producers who could pull it off. As far as Bond`s character, I wanted to bring out a little more of the darker stuff and some of the Bond we know from the Fleming novels, and present a Bond that is like the Bond of GOLDFINGER. You`re entering a fantasy world, but while you`re watching the movie it seems real. Two hours after you watch GOLDFINGER, you think there`s no way any of that can happen, but when you`re watching it, you believe it – you want to believe it. I wanted to make sure this was grounded enough in reality, with the break-up of the Soviet Union and what`s happened in the world of spying. I wanted to have enough of that reality in the picture. If you believe that, then you`re willing to go along with the bigger parts of it, which are the action scenes.”

The producers next turned to screenwriter Jeffrey Caine, who proceeded to focus more on character relationships than pyrotechnics, embellishing what France had done. “I think things started to go wrong with the series with Roger Moore,” offers Caine. “A lot of the stuff with his films were very comic book, like the steel-toothed Jaws, who`s indestructible. Bond needs adversaries who are fearful but credible. Timothy Dalton was a little too austere in the role. I liked Tim`s performances, but the material he was working with was pretty austere, there wasn`t too much wit in it. I think it was a little too heavy on the stunt stuff. In fact, I think they still are. The problem is that these days studios have an idea that young audience require break-neck stunts, ever more fantastic than the last, for two hours. I think that gets tiring; you get restless watching yet another helicopter chase, another machine gun firing, yet another fall off a cliff. What I wanted to do was bring in some new characters and try to add some wit, and stuff to fill the spaces between the stunts. The whole idea of doing this film was to get something back of the flavor of the early Bond films.”
Says GOLDENEYE director of photography Phil Meheaux, “I think the nature of action films have changed a lot over the years, heading much more into reality. So what we`ve tried to do is retain the elements of Bond as a fantasy character in a sense, but also try and bring it into the `90s with a more real approach in terms of the way we film it. I think that`s been helped by Pierce as an actor, who`s very good with all that action stuff and likes doing it for real. Martin and my approach is more of a sense of reality than possibly the previous Bonds were.”
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Martin Campbell clarifies one point. “It`s not that I was consciously going out of my way to make it different,” he says. “I just made it the way I thought it should be made. Not to denigrate the previous director, but I think I`ve given it a lot more pace. It is tougher. By that, I mean I think the action is tougher and harder, with more of an edge. It`s a much pacier film than a lot of the previous ones have been. There have tended to be long stretches between the action. We`ve got some really good dialogue scenes and so forth, but equally there is a really good sprinkling of action and the whole movie moves pretty fast.”

“When DR. NO was made in 1962,” Meheaux adds, “people didn`t go to the Caribbean. Half that film was shot in the Caribbean, so for all of us in those days that was very exotic. Now everyone has traveled all around the world and that, to them, is no longer an excitement. The actual place that you are is not exciting – what is exciting to the audience is letting them see what happens in that place. I think that`s what made us change the way the films are made. It`s a move away from the exotic place to the more action-packed story. Martin and I wanted to bring it into the `90s, but also put our stamp on it, as it were. We couldn`t make a film in somebody else`s style. It`s very difficult to do that, so it was essential that the Bond company were prepared to let us do what we wanted to do. To give them their due, Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli and all of those people said, `It`s your film, do with it what you want.` We wanted to preserve the old Bond-style character and the nature of his way of life, because we liked all that stuff anyway. We preserved that, but we tried to make the shooting of it much more real and grittier.”

Needless to say, GOLDENEYE astounded virtually everyone by pulling in a worldwide gross of $350 million, neatly establishing itself as the most successful Bond film of them all (not counting for inflation, of course) and paving the way for future films. Plus, it immediately established Pierce Brosnan as the true successor to Sean Connery`s crown as 007. Two years later, MGM released TOMORROW NEVER DIES, a decidedly more action-oriented Bond directed by Roger Spottiswoode. The plot involved media mogul Eliot Carver`s (Jonathan Pryce) attempts to trigger a war between Britain and China in the hopes of boosting his profits and ratings. As such, it seemed quite `90s and managed to equal the box office success of its predecessor.

Director Roger Spottiswoode admits that he tried to take Bond to his next logical step following GOLDENEYE. “What we tried to do,” he offers, “was to make it firmly into a different formula, which was a very contemporary thriller that happens to have this character James Bond in it, and many of the things you associate with that character do actually happen, but they`re much more cleanly imbedded in the plot, much more functional. Obviously there`s a lot of action, but it`s pretty well rooted into what is going on. One doesn`t want a string of meaningless stunts that don`t really connect. I think action like that is completely pointless and it doesn`t even work; nobody quite enjoys it. You have to be invested; you have to go for the ride; you have to be involved with the characters, it has to work in that way; otherwise, it`s meaningless. If one has succeeded, great, other people will tell you. I can only tell you what I wanted to do.”

One person not entirely pleased with the final results was Bruce Feirstein. “I personally did not want all of the running and shooting in the film,” he says. “I had a different kind of conception for the character of Eliot Carver. I wanted him to be much more like Goldfinger. I have a background in journalism, where I have at one time or another worked for all the moguls. I didn`t see this as being a character who was surrounded by eighteen guys in black camo-gear, carrying uzis or whatever. I saw him as a guy being surrounded by eighteen guys with briefcases. That was lost. At the box office, obviously I was wrong. Michael Wilson and I had long conversations about this. Michael has very firm beliefs that this is why people go to see these movies. We have tremendously funny arguments where I would say to Michael, `You basically believe that in the basement of every building in the world there are eighteen guys in camo-gear waiting to spring.` In the end, TOMORROW NEVER DIES did $350 million worldwide. When I went to work on THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, Michael and I had this very conversation where he said, `You see, I was right.` And the truth is, the numbers are on his side.”

Feirstein is hopeful that THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH falls somewhere between the film`s two predecessor in terms of tone. “What I`ve been told from the early screenings is that people love it,” says Feirstein, who had not seen the finished film at the time of this interview. “Pierce has gone around saying that it`s the movie he wanted to make, that it`s filled with characters and he got to portray the character he wanted to portray. He is extremely laudatory, as we all are, of director Michael Apted in that he wanted to make a more character-driven movie. This, I think, was the goal there. Hopefully there will be enough action and there will be enough romance, suspense and intrigue that it will have all of the great Bond elements. The reason I sound strange regarding the action is that on one hand I think there was too much action in TOMORROW NEVER DIES, but on the other hand there still needs to be action. It`s finding a right balance. The truth is that these are still big international movies that have to play in a variety of languages. I don`t know that people who go to see James Bond movies see the day-to-day struggles and tribulations of James Bond. But I know there`s room for character and action and that both can be accomplished. People go to James Bond movies for the ride. I believe GOLDENEYE delivered on the ride. You do not go to a James Bond movie to see things you saw in AMERICAN BEAUTY.”

Having successfully conquered the 1990s, the Bond franchise has its eyes set on the 21st century. “Bond is a contemporary figure and he has his own unique personality,” says Wilson. “He`s one of the few suave action heroes: intelligent, sophisticated, a man licensed to kill. I think it`s a dangerous time. There are more wars going on. Things are not centrally controlled anymore. I think Bond is more timely than ever. As long as all those people were under central control in the Eastern Bloc countries and the former U.S.S.R., it was fine. Now they`ve all been released from that control and are for sale to the highest bidder. So you`ve got 5,000 highly trained agents roaming around the world, looking for work. I think Bond is going to be well occupied into the 21st Century.”