In a recent interview with Collider.com Director Sam MEndes talks about what it takes to creatively to make a Bond movie and also compares it to Doctor Who.
Question: I’m just going to jump in: you’ve touched on it before, one of the things about this project is that it was, basically, delayed because of MGM’s financial stuff and whatever reason. Could you talk about how things changed from when you first got involved, how the delay helped the film and what storylines and stuff got adjusted?
Sam Mendes: "Well, it’s funny because normally, of course, I’m able to be open about what the movie is and what the storyline is and I can tell you once I’ve seen it specifically what changed and so I have an interesting answer that I’m not able to use [laughs] because I don’t want to give away any story. But, it’s fair to say that there’s no screenplay that wouldn’t be improved by having a year more to work on it. There’s always trying to find ways, different interesting ways of telling a story. Particularly with a Bond movie where you have so many things that are necessary within the brief: you have to have different locations, you have to have action sequences, you have to have girls, you have to have Bond, you have to have M, you have to have MI6. You have this list of things that you’re given, so now, write a story around it and by the way, you can’t use the following cities because the last 25 years of Bond [films] have used them, you can’t use the following action sequences because they’ve done that. The baddies have represented the following things so, you know."
Going back to [Ian] Fleming and to make Bond more human, there was one film with George Lazenby, which was On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, so is there going to be a connection with that movie? What do you think about that movie?
Mendes: "It’s one of those…it’s commonly considered a neglected classic, and I think it is. I think it’s one of the two best Fleming novels; it’s a great novel. I think it’s where you see him, as a character, pushed to the edge because he does fall in love and he loses her and Tracy, the character Diana Rigg plays, is a great character, a feisty woman, his equal in a way, which is a little bit what they did with Vesper in Casino Royale. I love that book. I think that Lazenby was dealt a pretty cruel hand because he was following [Sean] Connery who they just did a home run the first time they got to bat. Connery was a great piece of casting; he was iconic in the role. And then they asked him to do strange things which I thought spoke a little bit of their insecurity, for example, right at the beginning, he turns to camera and says to camera, “That wouldn’t happen with the other guy.” You know?"
Yeah, the fourth wall.
Mendes: "The first time I saw the movie, I was like, “You’ve got to be joking! You can’t do that to the poor man!” But it was too…they were playing almost embarrassment, almost apologized for having a new Bond and I thought that was wrong, and I thought what they got right was Casino Royale. There was a kind of “We don’t need Q, we don’t need Moneypenny. We’ve got this character. We’re going right back to basics. He’s real, he’s in a real situation. Let’s start all over again.” I thought that was very refreshing."
That’s why I mentioned the word in the press conference, “regeneration” rather than “evolving,” because I feel it is like, you know, we have Doctor Who…there’s a geek answer…we have Doctor Who and I was brought up on the idea of Doctor Who, who at the end of his final episode, he dissolves and a new actor pops up and he regenerates and it’s a whole other character: sometimes it’s an old man, sometimes it’s a young man, but he just changes. I’ve always loved that idea.