 |
| Previous
Works:
. The River Rat, Gorky Park, Gorillas In The Mist, P'tang Yang Kipperbang, Firstborn, Bring on the Night, Class Action, ThunderHeart, Moving the Mountains, Blink Nell, Extreme Measures, Dracula, The 7-Up series of documentaries. |
Not
the obvious choice for a Bond director, but it looks like the film will
benefit in the long run. Initially surprised at having been chosen by EON
to direct the next Bond, Apted commented "It never occurred to me that
anybody would ever ask me to do anything like this, because it's very much
the province of action directors, I truly thought they were joking when
they asked me." Michael Apted's first day of work, on this, his biggest
film yet, began August 17th, 1998. Official production on the film began
January 11th, 1999. Unlike Roger Spottiswoode, he seems to be getting
on well with the rest of the film crew, and I am sure he will devote more
screen time to character and plot development, which Tomorrow Never
Dies sorely lacked. Apted added "I think it was pretty clear
that they wanted to take care of the drama a bit more - to beef up the
stories a bit. One of the troubles with doing the Bond films is that the
action has to be so great because you have to compete with all these other
action films, and yet on the other hand you don't want the film swamped
with it." In addition, he has assured us that the action scenes "are going
to be as good as we can get them". Sounds promising.
. Back to basics? For the next film, the scriptwriters have gone back to basics. So out goes the machine-gunning superhero and in comes a vulnerable, more interesting 007. Expect to be shaken and stirred, says YORK MEMBERY. These days it's not just James Bond who inhabits a high-tech world. His creators do, too. The young British writing team of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade took a leaf out of 007's book - more accurately, electronic notebook - while penning the original screenplay for his latest big-screen adventure, The World Is Not Enough. "We both had infrared panels on our mobile phones that enabled us to plug into the Internet from anywhere in the world and send each other files," says Wade. "So at one point, we could both be working together on our laptops - but I would be on a beach in Australia, and Rob would be at Heston service station." Writing a Bond film in the less-than-glamorous surroundings of a motorway service station isn't the only thing that will be different about the new £70m Bond picture, which began shooting at Pinewood Studios last month. Nevertheless, the producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson - the daughter and stepson of Cubby Broccoli, one of the series' original producers - are preparing to take a gamble with Bond's future. The Die Hard-style action hero that 007's cinematic alter ego, Pierce Brosnan, was close to becoming in his last outing, Tomorrow Never Dies, is about to get a makeover for the new millennium. The die is to be recast. A new Bond is set to replace 1997's near-superhero. They began the process by inviting Purvis and Wade to write the screenplay in early 1998. "We thought the success of Tomorrow Never Dies would put pressure on Barbara and Michael to repeat its formula," says Purvis. "But they encouraged us to take Bond in a very different direction." Purvis and Wade, who together wrote the 1991 film Let Him Have It, about the trial and subsequent hanging of Derek Bentley - were flown out to LA and installed in the penthouse suite of the Shangri-La Hotel. Over the course of the next three months, in a series of brainstorming sessions with Wilson and Broccoli, they hammered out the future of the ageing secret agent, who made his big-screen debut in Dr No (1962), and his literary debut nearly a decade earlier in Casino Royale (1953). What emerged was a blueprint that they hope will see Britain's best-known screen icon continue to make a splash at the box office, repulsing foes on and off screen alike, long into the future. "We thought some of the core Fleming elements in the story had been lost," says Purvis. "Rather than blasting at people with a machine gun as 007 did in Tomorrow Never Dies, it was felt he should make the difference by picking up his Walther PPK and firing one shot. We also decided to delve deeper into Bond's character and to make the new film a little bit Hitchcockian. After all, the screen Bond of the 1960s owed a lot to Hitchcock pictures like Foreign Correspondent and North by Northwest." The biggest danger, all agreed, was to simply go on churning out a formulaic product - something the 007 series could be accused of doing in the 1980s. Crucially, Brosnan himself concurred with the new blueprint. "I don't want to just run around with a machine gun from start to the finish," the 45-year-old actor admits. "Having big, punchy set-pieces is a hallmark of the Bond films. But I also want to be tested as an actor and make my character more of a flesh-and-blood man." Cue the new, vulnerable 007 and MI6 of The World Is Not Enough. The new film will open with an audacious enemy strike at the headquarters of MI6 on the Thames in London. This five-minute opening sequence, which will take 34 days to shoot, is already being reported as the most expensive ever, at a cost of $5m, as Bond grapples with his adversaries on the roof of the Millennium Dome, and speedboats power down the Thames at 60mph. The MI6 building is blown up and the organisation left in disarray; even Britain's premier spy is in less than perfect health. "The movie will show a Bond with an Achilles heel," says an insider. "A Bond with a very real chink in his armour." Don't expect Bond to be too badly hurt, though. After all, he still has to defuse an international power struggle with the world's oil supply hanging in the balance. If it hadn't been for the phenomenal success of the last two Bond films, Wilson and Broccoli - who control Eon, the company that has made the 18 official movies to date - could never have contemplated revamping their celluloid secret agent. GoldenEye in 1995, in which Brosnan made his debut as 007, and Tomorrow Never Dies together grossed $700m (nearly £500m) at the box office, reviving what had seemed until then a flagging franchise and making Pierce Brosnan easily the most financially successful Bond. Having re-established 007 as a sexy screen icon - something that owes as much to Irish-born Brosnan's casting in the lead role as anything else - it has become possible to attract the sort of top-drawer talent that was harder to come by in the series' dog days in the mid-to-late 1980s. Consequently Judi Dench is back as M; Robbie Coltrane returns as the former KGB agent Valentin Zukovsky; the French actress Sophie Marceau plays the villainess, Elektra; The Full Monty star Robert Carlyle plays her equally malevolent accomplice, Renard; and John Cleese debuts as Q's assistant, R. The director is Britain's Michael Apted; although best-known here for the 7 Up television documentary series he has also made such films as Gorillas in the Mist, Extreme Measures and Blink. When Carlyle, 37, who played the psychopathic Begbie in Trainspotting before going on to appear in The Full Monty, explains why he took the part, he speaks for all those who remember Bond's glory days in the 1960s and fervently hope Bond has entered a new golden age: "I went to see the 007 films with my father as a kid, when Connery was Bond. And when I thought of the posters, the music and everything about the films, there was no way I could turn it down." There is something of the feel of a military operation to making a picture such as The World Is Not Enough. The shoot itself lasts five months. In all, some 500 people - actors, technicians and support staff - around the world will work on the film, and units have already been dispatched to Azerbaijan, Bilbao, Istanbul and the French Alps among other places. To the initial consternation of Purvis and Wade, the film's release date - November 19, 1999 - had been decided before they even started work on the script. But there were also advantages to being part of such a movie-making juggernaut. "One morning we discussed using an aircraft carrier," says Wade. "That afternoon, the line producer had found one." With every new Bond film, thebaggage of the past also becomes that much greater. Where do you go for glamorous locations when 007 already lays claims to being the world's best-travelled secret agent? How do you top stunts such as GoldenEye's vertigo-inducing bungee jump? Is it possible to dream up as chilling a villain as Ernst Stavro Blofeld? "We watched the films on video night after night and eventually we realised we had to ask not, 'Where had he not been?' but, 'Where had Bond not been recently?' because he's been just about everywhere," says Purvis. Stuntwise they are unwilling to give much away, but inside sources say one of the film's highlights will be a spectacular ski chase. As for creating a baddie, Purvis and Wade admit that "a Bond film is only as good as its villain", but reckon that in Elektra and Renard, an international anarchist with a bullet lodged in his brain, they have delivered. "It helps to have a bonkers idea when you're trying to invent a bad guy," says Wade. Another worry faced by Wilson and Broccoli, as well as Brosnan and the scriptwriting team, was whether Sony would succeed in its long battle, being fought out in the US courts, to win the right to make a rival Bond series. A year ago, it seemed a distinct possibility and there were rumours that Liam Neeson might be cast as a rival 007, and Sean Connery might even play the villain. But following a recent pre-trial victory won by MGM - which has bankrolled the official Bond films - this threat has now receded, much to Eon's relief. Shooting on The World Is Not Enough - whose title was inspired by Bond's supposed family motto - might not finish until the end of May, but if the buzz is to be believed, it's going to be special. The last 007 film was beset by problems, to such a degree that the director, Roger Spottiswoode, and the screenwriter, Bruce Feirstein, were not even talking by the end of the shoot. "Things were difficult," says Feirstein. This time around, it's different. The original script may have already been through four drafts, amended by another writer, Dana Stevens, and given a final "polish" by Feirstein. But while the Bond camp is understandably wary of raising expectations, there's a feeling that the new picture is a classic in the making. "We've got a great story, a great cast and a great Bond," says an insider. "It's looking very good." The air of confidence is boosted by the so-called Third Film Theory. This refers to the fact that both Connery and Roger Moore found their feet in the role in their third outings as Bond: respectively in Goldfinger (1964) and The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), both regarded as among the best of the series. If the theory holds true, we can expect Brosnan's best Bond ever. |
....RETURN
TO MAIN CREW AND PRODUCTION SECTION...