JAMES BOND 007 MAGAZINE | Behind the scenes with Boyd

BEHIND THE SCENES WITH BOYD The Original Goldeneye - Uncovered and Rediscovered!

So how long did you actually shoot at ‘Goldeneye’ for?
I’ll try to be accurate here… We didn’t have that long a shooting schedule – I think it was six weeks in total, and I think we were in Jamaica shooting for nearly three weeks, certainly two. By the way, you may have noticed from the credits that we had as an associate producer Tony Waye, who was connected with EON Productions – I think he was the reason why ‘Cubby’ [Broccoli] got to see the film.

Was Tony working with EON Productions already at that point?
Yeah – he had done so for years, and he was quite useful. Tony had a very old-fashioned approach which I found sometimes drove me completely mad. But in terms of pushing to do everything on time, I have to say he was very efficient. What he also did was import an element of what the Bond films were like, so that we could do things cleverly. He was very good at arranging the money so that I could do the underwater sequence, for example. Constructing the submarine was also one of those things that Tony helped a lot with. At other times I remember shouting and screaming at him, telling him to bugger off when I was worried that he was going to give me less time to do something! But we were very good friends actually and he was very supportive and liked the film greatly, which I was very pleased about.

Richard Griffiths, Phyllis Logan and Christoph Watlz in Goldeneye (1989)

ABOVE: (left) Accomplished stage, television and screen actor Richard Griffiths (1917-2013) played the Second Admiral in Goldeneye (1989). (right) Phyllis Logan with Austrian-born actor Christoph Waltz, who played a German spy in Goldeneye. Waltz would win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2010 for his performance as S.S. Colonel Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino's fantasy/war film Inglourious Basterds (2009), and in 2015 was cast as Franz Oberhauser/Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Spectre - a role he would reprise in No Time To Die (2021).

Was Tony’s presence a way of EON approving of the project in some way?
No. I made the decision for him to join. Brenda said to me, ‘You know, we’ve got a guy here who’s worked with EON. I want you to think about him as an associate producer.’ I said: ‘Fine, no problem’.

So there wasn’t any official cooperation with EON?
Absolutely not. Actually Tony said at the time: ‘I hope this isn’t something I’m going to feel embarrassed about later on!’ I said: ‘I don’t think you will be!’ He’d read the script and it was a high-profile production – Anglia were a big company and Goldeneye was a very prestigious project.

Until I watched Goldeneye again, I didn’t realise that among your cast was Christoph Waltz – who later won an Oscar for Inglourious Basterds [around a year after this interview was conducted Waltz was also cast as Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Spectre].
Yes! I have to say there are a number of people who later got huge awards that I gave real breaks to! Christoph… I was so proud of him. He and I got on so well. He really loved doing Goldeneye. He was one of the token German actors living in London at the time. When I saw him I cast him in an instant – he’s so bright and so creative and totally entered into the spirit of the whole thing.

Charles Dance and Phyllis Logan as Ann & Ian Fleming in Goldeneye (1989)

I thought Phyllis Logan was really well cast as Ann Fleming…
Totally my idea! I didn’t want to go for the archetypal upper-class girl. There was a lot of pressure for me to do that. I’d seen Phyllis in theatre and on television and I’d always liked her. I knew she was Scottish and Ann Rothermere had a Scottish background. I said to Brenda: ‘Look, she’s my first choice. I’ll see other people but she’s perfect.’ So I met Phyllis and we got on immediately. I said to her: ‘I don’t want there to be any form of sentimentality about Ann’, and she bought into that. We had a delightful relationship. When we were shooting I had to get her to speed up her dialogue a bit. It was a little slow. She probably can’t remember this, but I felt that she had to have some self-confidence about her because Ann was a very self-confident woman. And she had that imperiousness about her in the film, which I think worked really well. She’s an absolutely wonderful actress in every sense and really deserves her success.

What was your impression of the real Ann?
Quite frightening, and she wasn’t keen on talking a huge amount about her love affair with Fleming. She wasn’t well and I got the impression she was rather lonely.

Ann Fleming had quite a tragic series of relationships in life; one husband died in the war, her son Casper committed suicide; Hugh Gaitskell, who was her lover, died as well. I’ve read a lot of her published letters.
They are amazing letters, aren’t they? You’ve really done your research! Amazing! You can tell I haven’t revisited this for 23 years. But my memories of the project are pretty powerful. I liked Ann and I felt sorry for her. She wasn’t really very useful in research terms, to be honest.

Charles Dance as Ian Fleming in Goldeneye (1989)

I found the time scale of Fleming’s life you focused on in the film very interesting; you focus on the war and his relationship with Ann, and then you essentially leave the story just as Bond is beginning. You don’t end in the traditional biopic way with Fleming’s death. I wondered why you made that decision. Personally, I think it works very well because if you try to deal with too much of somebody’s life in less than two hours, it’s too sketchy. But I wondered how you came to that decision…
It was a very simple decision. I wanted everybody that saw the film to understand the catalyst for what became the books and the James Bond phenomenon – so I focused on Fleming’s love affair with Ann, his womanising, the war, his intelligence work – all of that period before he had any form of celebrity as a writer. I more or less stopped at the time that the first book was written. It just struck me as the right way to handle it. To deal with the catalyst, the backdrop and then allow people to take it from there. You know, Fleming and Bond are such iconic people, one a fantasy, one real, and there’s so much out there about them already. Biopics are a really strange sort of drama because as soon as you get to know anything that’s real, you’re sort of thinking, can I really dramatise this? How far can I go? There’s a kind of responsibility that enters into it and that was one of the things that Reg and I agreed about; that all our detail had to come from something that we knew was true in some form or another. In terms of the detail of the cocktails, the clothes, the tragedy, all of those things, I wanted it to be authentic. I also wove in, and I don’t know if you noticed this visually, but I really studied the period and the era and I brought in small little visual references to people like [French photographer Henri] Cartier-Bresson. I did that deliberately to give it a form of authenticity; although one was dealing with the man behind the fantasy, a biopic of a man who wrote a fantasy, the detail and authenticity had to underpin all of that.

I wondered if you could talk about what some of the references were – you mentioned Cartier-Bresson…
Yes, Cartier-Bresson; there’s a tiny moment where you see a bunch of priests with their hats at the side, that was a nod to him. In terms of the World War II sequences, I went and visited all the war museums, watching films and archives, so those scenes reference the famous Humphrey Jennings documentaries of London during the war.

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