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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW |
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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW |
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In that section of Goldeneye I
really liked Lynsey Baxter as the Wren Lieutenant character based on
Fleming’s wartime lover Muriel Wright. Let me tell you something about the casting of Lynsey Baxter, who was another brilliant actress. I really liked her, but a lot of agents tried to get me to see other people. I met quite a few actresses that were dead serious about playing the role, one of whom I still see as a friend, but I didn’t think was quite right, although she’s a terrific actress – Jemma Redgrave. I also turned down Uma Thurman for the role! She came and saw me and was delightful, brilliant. Very, very good but I thought: ‘no, this is too obvious, too ‘movie star’ land.’ I also felt that she was a little bit too young, although Lynsey was no more than about 21. Possibly Uma might have been slightly more glamorous in a traditional sense, but Lynsey is a beautiful woman and I thought she was great. She made it work very well – she had that sort of cockiness that I wanted. |
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The New York scenes – how on earth did you made them look so good,
without filming in New York? We shot one of them in Lexington Street in London. We literally scoured everywhere in London to find places that approximated New York. The production designer Roger Murray-Leach was very good about that and he allowed me to be bloody minded about it! He took endless photographs to try to match up locations. I knew New York well, I’d lived there, so there wasn’t anything that was going to slip by me! Ultimately, we relied on a combination of clever design, isolation, and lighting. For some of those scenes I used New York photographer Arthur Fellig (1899-1968) [a.k.a Weegee] as a reference. There were some complete steals from Weegee photographs. I wanted the look of those photographers of film noir movies of the 1940s. The New York interior design was easy enough because I knew what bedrooms looked like in New York, and old ones too. For the big doorways, for example, when Fleming is dropped off in a taxi, we found a London doorway that matched. If you go down Lexington Street and look along, you’ll see that, from certain reverse angles, it’s very like New York – one of those narrow, downtown New York streets. Another sequence we had to be creative with was the scene with the sea-plane landing. I can’t remember for sure, but I think that was filmed on the Thames around the area of the Thames Barrier. Anyway, we photographed it and made sure that the backdrop was similar to what you might imagine New Jersey or whatever looked like back then – and it worked! You’d never have known it was the Thames! |
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Absolutely not! What about the overall
look of the film – and your work with the cinematographer Richard Greatrex;
I was very struck by how good it looked. Seeing it again, this time in the
cinema, was a real pleasure. Richard was a National Television School graduate. I knew him because back in 1982 I was conned and defrauded on a movie I was making called Gossip, which collapsed in three weeks. It caused untold problems for me. Horrible problems, but Richard was the DoP [director of photography] on that project and was very supportive. We’d remained friendly; he’d known what had happened. Insiders did. I’d always liked Richard’s talent and I got him involved in War Requiem, which he loved working with me on. Derek Jarman was truly collaborative and allowed me to have input in terms of how we went about shooting. I was there for every single shot, close to Richard and Derek. I loved Richard’s style and he responded hugely to my visual ideas. He was also very meticulous about how the camera moved. I wanted somebody that was going to be like that and who understood how vital the overall imagery was to the project. And so again, I said to Brenda: ‘This is who I want to do it.’ She said: ‘No problem. You can have him.’ So Richard came on board and it was a delightful relationship. He was very good because he kept me on target. He didn’t allow the pressure of time to take us away from the ideas we had, and that is crucial in a creative partnership. I don’t know whether you noticed this, but for instance, in the shot when we’re looking at ‘Goldeneye’ from outside and Noël Coward does his turn and comes towards camera, that was shot absolutely so that it looked like it would on a cinema screen. It was those sort of ideas that we deliberately had to give this constant visual reference to do with the iconography of what Bond and Fleming were about, so that audiences would feel comfortable – we were authentically fusing the fantasy to the reality. |
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In terms of that 007 iconography, for
example, when the girl comes out of the Jamaican sea à la Ursula Andress,
was there ever any consideration or concerns about copyright? I know we went through a process with the script of vetting those things and I think there were one or two things we had to change, where we had to be slightly careful, but to be honest, I think the general atmosphere of it all was that we had a licence to thrill! And we had the licence to have some fun! So we took that licence. In any case, ‘Cubby’ absolutely loved the film and said to me: ‘Congratulations. I knew you would bring this off.’ It was a very short conversation but he was very clear about liking it. In terms of connections with the EON Productions film series, Roger Moore’s daughter Deborah popped up in Goldeneye. I wondered how that came about? Yes, again that was a sort of a joke. My casting director said to me: ‘How about Debbie Moore?’ and I said: ‘I’ll see her.’ She was very young – she’d only just left drama school. I said: ‘Perfect, we’ll have her’ and she did it – it was only a couple of days’ work. |
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Did it help with publicity? Well if the publicity people had missed that trick, they would have been stupid! The lovely thing about making a television film like that is that they intrinsically promote towards a television audience, so you’re not involved in the normal form of movie publicity, which of course that would have been a perfect example of. I did it as a joke. Incidentally, we also thought of casting Jason Connery [son of Sean Connery]. In the end we didn’t. I don’t remember what the role was but we were thinking of putting him in as another of the in-jokes. Jason Connery later played Fleming in an awful TV biopic Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming (1990). Unfortunately, he was totally miscast! When you were at ‘Goldeneye’ itself, did you sense the spirit of Fleming? Yes, I felt deeply connected. The house was entirely designed and built by him. When we were filming, Fleming’s maid Violet was there who had also served me when I visited before and I was totally immersed in it. Those broody scenes filmed there with Charles were very carefully orchestrated, you know, when he goes off on his swim on his own. All of those scenes were immensely important to me. ‘Goldeneye’ was Fleming’s love – his character and his life integrated into it; it was an immensely spiritual place and very, very powerful for me. And by the way, that was a spiritual connection that was absorbed and felt by everybody that came out with us to ‘Goldeneye’, bar none. We also went and visited ‘Firefly’, which was Noël Coward’s house down the road, to get a sense of it. It was bigger but not nearly as beautiful as ‘Goldeneye’. I slept in Fleming’s bed at ‘Goldeneye’ and I was so lucky that back then nothing had been changed or altered. Later on when I heard it had been altered I felt sad. It was a privilege to experience it as it had been in Fleming’s time, but I also felt rather regretful that something so special should be altered in that way. |
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I wholeheartedly agree with that. It’s
not how it used to be any more… Was it always the idea that Reg Gadney
would play the ‘real’ James Bond? Absolutely! I said to him: ‘I know you’re going to be an absolutely terrible actor Reg but you must do it!’ He made it work. He comes along rather eccentrically, he was literally sweating with nerves when we filmed, but I calmed him down and we did it. Reg embraced everything so brilliantly. I’ve got to say that, that film is one of my favourite films that I’ve made as a director, and my relationship working on it with Reg was one of the great pleasures of my life. In January 1995, when you discovered the seventeenth James Bond film was going to be titled GoldenEye, did that give you a bit of satisfaction – that your idea for a title had been adopted by EON Productions? It most certainly did! It also made me wonder whether we missed a trick by not releasing our Goldeneye in the cinema! Actually, Charles said to me: ‘Don, this should have been a feature film. It would have done well.’ So I have a slight sense of regret that it wasn’t. Incidentally, the director of [EON’s] GoldenEye, Martin Campbell, also worked with me on Scum (1979), which I produced. Do you have any desire to become involved in any future project related to Ian Fleming or the world of Bond – or are you satisfied with your input in this subject matter? I doubt it, because what I did with Goldeneye, well I felt I did the subject quite definitively. I don’t mean that in an arrogant sense. So I can’t imagine any territory there that would draw me back to it. The whole biopic genre is very tough. You have to have a real connection with your subject, and I did in that case with Ian Fleming, I really did. I feel I’ve done my bit! |
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