Hype Another Day
Newcastle Herald
Saturday December 21, 2002
A Bond movie is not made. It is packaged. Like an Almond Joy. So much coconut to this much chocolate and a dash of raisins.
Movie critic Joseph Gelmis on
Live and Let Die, 1973.
WHEN you're the man who puts the double entendres in 007's mouth, timing is everything.
For Robert Wade, the screenwriter of the latest James Bond extravaganza Die Another Day, timing was critical during a hectic round of interviews to spruik the new film.
Wade joined actors Pierce Brosnan, Rosamund Pike and Rick Yune and Kiwi director Lee Tamahori in Australia last week aboard the 20th Century Fox publicity juggernaut that steamrolled across Sydney and Melbourne hyping the 20th official Bond flick.
For Wade and the other on- and off-screen talent, the Australian invasion marked the end of the $142million movie's worldwide marketing blitzkrieg and globetrotting promotional tour.
The stars were accompanied by an entourage of 23 publicists, bodyguards and studio executives as they doled out quotable quotes at press conferences, in one-on-one interviews and to TV cameras lining the red carpet.
My own mission impossible - if you will excuse the mixing of spy caper imprimaturs - was to glean from Robert Wade some useful insights into the manufacturing of the 40th anniversary escapade of Ian Fleming's suave secret agent.
And it was to be a proverbial race against time.
Wade wrote the Die Another Day screenplay with his long-time collaborator Neal Purvis.
Their shared credits include the swashbuckling highwayman period comedy Plunkett and MacLeane and the upcoming Rowan Atkinson spy spoof Johnny English.
The British duo also wrote the previous Bond adventure, The World Is Not Enough, a film that dared to cast pneumatic American sex kitten Denise Richards as a hot pants-wearing nuclear physicist called Dr Christmas Jones.
For Die Another Day, Wade and Purvis have cooked up more of the same, plundering the Bond oeuvre for the essential ingredients: dastardly communists; a megalomaniacal tycoon; a
diabolical plot to rule the world; a laser satellite made out of diamonds; beautiful but deadly female double agents; and a cucumber cool English hero stirred but not shaken by extreme physical danger.
Back to my interview with Robert Wade.
As gadget man Q might have said to Bond at a similar point: Pay attention, 007. Time is money and you are but grist for the movie marketing machine. So get in, get to the point, get out and no-one gets hurt. This interview will self-destruct in 15 minutes.
James Joyce: Thank you very much for your time.
Robert Wade: That's OK.
JJ: Let's jump straight in, shall we?
RW: Yep.
JJ: What's the best part about writing a James Bond movie?
RW: Oh, it's probably thinking of an idea in the bath or something and a year later seeing hundreds of people working on it, film stars saying the lines, carpenters building the sets. It's really satisfying. In a way it's almost more fun than seeing it on the screen because you see how much trouble people have gone to all because of some silly idea you've had.
JJ: What's the most enjoyable part of putting the story together? Making up double entendres?
RW: No, the double entendres just kind of creep in. You don't have to try. They just end up there somehow. The fun is in thinking up a stimulating situation for the characters; when you settle on what kind of villain is going to be a real challenge for Bond, what he's going to be like, the scene where they meet and kind of dance around each other. When you find a good idea for that, that's quite fun.
JJ: But writing a Bond film obviously isn't as organic a process as most other films given all the set characters and commercial ingredients in the formula.
RW: Yes. But I don't think anyone outwardly thinks about the formula because if you did you'd just sort of do it by the numbers and I don't think the film series would have lasted this long if they'd just done that. You just have to go back to the character of Bond. That's who people are coming to see. And you've got to test that character out and find new ways to show his strengths and give the audience an insight into him.
That means coming up with a worthy adversary. Gradually, you think, well we should probably also see Moneypenny. And people like the relationship between Pierce Brosnan and Judi Dench so you really can't not make something of their chemistry. It ends up having those limitations of being similar but you have to try to make it different and that's what's very challenging about it.
JJ: Who's idea was it to make Bond's Aston Martin invisible?
RW: It was an idea that we had based on something that's real. There is this technology the military have been developing where they put screens on the sides of tanks that project images from cameras on the other side.
It's called adaptive camouflage. It's been developed for the desert and icy situations. It does exist but we've taken it that step further, giving the skin (of Bond's car) the ability to project (the landscape around it). So it's adaptive camouflage rather than invisibility. In the end, I suppose, it's been made quite invisible indeed.
When Lee Tamahori said "Can we do something really interesting with this car?" we said "Well, there was this thing we thought you could do". But we said it very nervously because we thought he'd probably say "What? That's a bloody stupid idea!" But that day he happened to like it. So it became part of the film.
JJ: I understand he also had you change the ending of the film part-way through the shoot.
RW: When Lee came on board he had an agenda to beef up the action. So you write a story and there are elements that suggest where the action can go. But you don't be very specific about it because it's bound to change (with input from) the stunt team and the special effects people.
When the director comes on board the action gets its actual flavour. What Lee did was increase the amount of action in the middle of the movie.
That meant the action spectacle we had written
for the end of the film, which was to do with a giant indoor beach being destroyed, suddenly became too much, too static and it just ceased to be the right thing in the right place.
So, then it became a question of what can we do to make this more dynamic? Lee thought of recycling an idea that was in the script about a plane falling apart. It was only about 5 minutes long. But he thought we should restage it for the finale of the film but make it bigger.
JJ: But how far over the top can you push those action sequences before they become totally ridiculous?
RW: If you turn it up to 11 then you've gone too far. It's really up to audience, I think. People do want it to be over the top. But that's not really a function of the script. It's like conducting a piece of music and that's the director's job. He decides how far to go and were to pull it back from the brink. As the writer, you're really just furnishing them with the themes.
JJ: Speaking of things over the top, what's the deal with Halle Berry's first scene with Brosnan. Bond dialogue is never a natural style of conversation but ...
RW: (Laughs) Yes, it's all quite arched. It's great fun to write that. We saw the Halle character as a woman who has her own appetites and her own attitude to life, ie, it could end at any moment so she takes her pleasures where she fancies. So, the whole thing is about predator and prey and the question in your mind is, who is the predator here?
JJ: You didn't seem to hold back on the sexual innuendo.
RW: It may be hard to believe (laughs) but we did hold back. There are lines that aren't in the movie that were shot which aren't innuendo. For various reasons, pacing or whatever, they ended up on the cutting room floor. So, we may come across as being only interested in the lascivious pun but we're not really. It's kind of what people expect.
JJ: You have also ramped up the action sequences with extreme sports like the opening night-time commando raid on surfboards.
RW: It was in the concept of the movie from the outset that we wanted to have a younger villain who was into extreme experiences because he puts no value on life. Funnily enough, only the other day I found an old National Geographic of mine. It was several years old and it featured 'Jaws', the Maui wave. I must have kept it because I had thought, wow, we should stick that in the Bond movie.
JJ: How much trickier is it making Bond movies after films like Austin Powers and XXX?
RW: Oh, I'm sorry. I'm afraid I can't answer that question. I have to go. I'm sorry about that.
JJ: Oh, um, right. Well, I appreciate your time.
RW: Not at all.
© 2002 Newcastle Herald