Even after a full day of interviews, Pierce Brosnan remains outwardly fresh and exceedingly cordial. The new standard bearer for one of the most successful entertainment franchises in history appears unruffled as a hurricane of media attention swirls around him.
“It’s a business,” says the darkly handsome actor. “I’m part of the product . . . I am the product.”
As introductions go, this doesn’t rank with, “My name is Bond . . . James Bond.” But, clearly, this incarnation of Agent 007of Her Majesty’s Secret Servicerecognizes his mission and the risks about to confront him.
“That’s something that’s quite scary, something that I’ve never had in my life as an actor before,” says the 43-year-old native of Ireland. “Magazines want to know who Brosnan is. . . . Certainly the intensity has gone up about 110 decibels.
“The attention, the eyes, the energy that come at you can be overwhelming, and frightening. It alters you.”
And this from a guy with a license to kill.
Brosnan was ensconced this day at the elegant Four Seasons Hotel only a few miles from his Malibu homealong with several of his co-stars and members of the official Bond family. All were here to promote “GoldenEye,” the latest in a line of 19 such movies if you count the spy-spoof “Casino Royale,” and many people don’t to be harvested from the fertile source material (14 popular novels) provided by Ian Fleming, before he died in 1964. “GoldenEye” opens Friday.
This year being the 100th anniversary of the motion-picture industry, the arrival of a new James Bond title and this is the first since 1989 reminds us that the dashing secret agent has been around for fully one-third of that period. Ever since the release of “Dr. No” in 1962, it is estimated that some 2 billion tickets have been sold for admission to Bond movies a figure that doesn’t include audiences in two huge nations where 007’s role still remains somewhat clandestine.
“Only pirated copies are available in China and Russia,” said co-producer Michael G. Wilson. “First, there was a political problem and, today, it’s a financial one.
“In Russia, the return is too small to set up a viable distribution system. They just won’t show them in China, although picture books about the Bond films are available. The people know the character.”
In other countries, however, Wilson notes that a new Bond film is cause for celebration.
“In the Netherlands, they’re the most popular films for in-cinema viewing,” he noted. “In Germany, where we open on the 28th, the movie will be launched in theaters at 07 after midnight. It will be a black-tie event and they’re expecting 200,000 admissions nationwide.”
A family treasure
Wilson is the stepson of Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, who, along with Harry Saltzman, originally sold the idea for a Bond film series to United Artists. The family is further represented on the list of credits by co-producer Barbara Broccoli.
“I was born in 1960 and my dad signed the deal with United Artists in 1961 to make the first movie,” Barbara Broccoli said, relaxing on a couch in a well-appointed suite in this five-star hotel favored by the movie crowd. “James Bond’s always been in my consciousness. There’s never been a time, that I can remember, when James Bond didn’t figure in my life.
“It’s a family business. My interest in it obviously came from watching my father, who really enjoyed what he was doingeven the hard side. We’d take our vacations on location, in some of the most extraordinary places in the world. We grew up with the actors and technicians as close family friends.”
While the family’s influence has remained a fixture throughout the vast majority of the Bond films, there have been several well-documented changes in leading men.
Sean Connery put his indelible stamp on the iconic character during the first decade, creating a model that would prove difficult for his successors to follow.
Straining against the grip of the creative straitjacket around him, the Scotsman handed over the reins to Australia’s George Lazenby (You forgot?) in 1969’s “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” He returned briefly in 1971 for “Diamonds Are Forever,” and, in 1983, for the arch “Never Say Never Again,” a film that didn’t bear the Broccoli stamp.
The suave Londoner Roger Moore started his seven-picture run in 1973. Then, Welshman Timothy Dalton had a short go of it in the late ’80s, before legal problems with the troubled MGM/UA studio put the series on hold.
Brosnan, who has a three-picture deal to play Bond, should have had the job in the mid’80s, after “A View to a Kill.”
Instead, the star of NBC’s lively “Remington Steele” was forced to stay in television after the network unexpectedly renewed the series. He would later appear in several motion pictures, most notably “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “The Lawnmower Man,” and he began work last week on Barbra Streisand’s “The Mirror Has Two Faces.”
“This is the biggest franchise in movie history. The longest running, most loved of them all,” he says. “People really want to see this be glorious again. It’s a brand name. I’d like to think we’ve brought it back to the days of Sean Connery.”
Big shoes to fill
No small task. Not only did Connery’s sly charm and effortlessly masculine mystique add a new dimension to the popular literary character, but he was given the best books in the series”Dr. No,” “From Russia With Love” and “Goldfinger”in which to make his mark.
While Moore cut a suitably debonair figure, he was cursed by the media’s need to make comparisons andwith the exception of “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “For Your Eyes Only”given substantially more uneven and stunt-filled plotlines. Still, he eventually won over the public.
“Without question, there will be comparisons with whoever the audience’s favorite Bond is,” said Brosnan, the single father of a son, 11, and two adult stepchildren (his wife, actress Cassandra Harris, who once played a “Bond woman” in “For Your Eyes Only,” died of ovarian cancer in 1991). “I remember when Roger took over and everyone said he isn’t Sean Connery. He made it his own for seven pictures.”
“It’s an evergreen character,” said Wilson, who, after being a lawyer with the company, began working full time on Bond films with “The Spy Who Loved Me.” “There’s Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Batman, Superman . . . James Bond. He can survive updating and changes in casting.”
Indeed, Bond seems to have made the leap from the Cold War to cyberspace without so much as a wrinkle in his tuxedo. Meanwhile, the films have gone from being considered extremely racy (Can any now-middle-age man ever forget the arrival of Ursula Andress in “Dr. No”?) to wearing the label of family entertainment.
The producers have been very careful not to alter the basic formula behind the success of the Bond series, even in the face of the evolution of gratuitous sex and violence in competing action-adventure movies. Sure, they have employed the latest in digital technology to enhance the still-spectacular stunts and chases that have always distinguished the movies, but the once-naughty stuff now is relatively tame and the violence almost cartoonish.
“We’re proud of the fact that the violence isn’t excessive and that families should feel very comfortable seeing this movie,” said Barbara Broccoli, the wife of Broadway producer Frederick Zollo and mother of a 3-year-old girl. “People know roughly what to expect. It’s not as if they’re going to take their kids to a Bond movie and be shocked or offended by what they see.
“I think that’s essential. There are certain movies I’m afraid to see.”
This doesn’t mean, however, that Bond can escape the gender-based realities facing other men in the ’90s. For one thing, the new Mhead of the Secret Serviceis a no-nonsense woman.
Did first-time producer Broccoli have any input, as a woman, on the character? After all, M calls Bond a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” at one point during “GoldenEye.”
“I don’t want to overplay my role,” she said. “I think that (director) Martin Campbell, the writers and Michael all felt that the film should be more contemporary and reflect more of the world reality. The M thing came about because Stella Remington was the head of MI5 in Britain.
“When the decision was made, I joked that everyone is going to think that it was my idea, and it wasn’t my idea. It was (writer) Bruce Feirstein’s idea and Martin seized on it immediately. I had some concerns about it.
“I said that we had to make her believable and realistic, that it shouldn’t become some kind of parody or stereotypethat the character has power and authority. In the past, M had always represented a father figure, so there was some concern about it.”
Adventure in Russia
As to 007’s mission, Wilsonwho’s previously written five Bond scriptsfelt that there was no better place than Russia to address the new world disorder.
“We’re in an era of the Soviet Union collapsing and, with the instability, there’s great danger there,” he explained. “A lot of their weapons of mass destruction are now on the marketplace, there’s a brain drain from Russia and there are a lot of agency people who are looking to sell themselves to the highest bidder.
“For us, this is a rather fertile ground for new stories.”
Wilson sees another dimension to the Bond character.
“We make action-adventure films, but try to find a personal quest, as well as a plot,” he said. “Bond’s personal quest in this movie involves treason and betrayal. He also has to confront challenges from within.
“Everyone around him is questioning his validity. M calls him a sexist, misogynistic dinosaur . . . a relic of the Cold War. His former counterpart in Russiawho’s selling arms and running a nightclubasks him if he’s decided to come into the 21st Century.”
Barbara Broccoli, for one, hasn’t forgotten who probably will be the first people in line when the box office opens on Friday.
“Our core audience is older males who have grown up on Bond,” she says. “It’s amazing how many people will come up to me and tell me that the first movie they ever saw, when they were 9, was a James Bond film.
“They’ll remember that it was raining, it was their birthday, they went with a friend, everything. . . . To a lot of them, it was a very meaningful experience . . . seeing danger and sex for the first time.”
HEF HELPED SHAPE BOND’S IMAGE
Few people have enjoyed a closer professional relationship with James Bond–and his creator, Ian Fleming–than Hugh Hefner, editor-in-chief of Playboy.
The Chicago-based magazine began printing Fleming’s short stories in 1960 (“The Hildebrand Rarity”) and regularly offered excerpts from his novels, from the early ’60s through “Octopussy.” Pictorials featuring scenes from the films and photographs of the “Bond women” became a well-anticipated staple, lasting into the Timothy Dalton period.
“There’s a very obvious and powerful interconnection, which worked very well for all concerned,” said Hefner, in a phone interview from his mansion in Los Angeles’ Holmby Hills neighborhood. “We pre-published a number of books, ran a number of short stories and, with the beginning of the movies–which really fed the phenomenon–we began doing pictorials in cooperation with the producers.
“That, I suspect, to some small degree, combined with my own lifestyle–the gadgets, the girls, the bunny etc.–all kind of became a part of the whole.”
