As a follow-up to my post about Casino Royale early in February, some of Martin Campbell’s views on the new film have featured in a story over at CommanderBond.net (apparently pretty much lifted verbatim from The New York Daily News).
According to Campbell, the new film will take the storyline from Fleming’s original novel – his first – and tweak it for a 2006 audience. “There are things that will have to be changed from the original novel. The Cold War elements will have to be reconfigured, for example, but Casino Royale will be a grittier, tougher and more realistic Bond movie. We’ll be getting away from the huge visual effects kind of films.”
Perhaps the biggest revelation from Campbell is that Casino Royale will take James Bond back to his early 007 days (a similar idea was floated during pre-production on The Living Daylights). However, CBn can confirm that the movie will not be a period film.
“In the new film, Bond is essentially starting out in his career, and has just recently become part of the double-0 section,” Campbell said. “The idea is to put a bit of the dash back in Bond. By the end of the movie, the character will have been forged into the wiser, harder Bond we know.”
The interview touches on Bond’s romance with Vesper Lynd from Fleming’s novel, one of the most unique of the series. “The door is open for Bond, emotionally. He’s in love with Vesper and he sees there’s another side to all of this, that life might be far more pleasurable, more gratifying, than being a secret agent. And ultimately that door is slammed in his face, which makes him the tempered steel kind of guy that we know. I’m looking forward to humanising Bond a bit.”
While it’s good to hear Campbell wanting to do the character-based nature of the novel justice, what’s with the “Bond at the start of his career” stuff? So it’s not a prequel, or a period film, but it is about Bond at the start of his career? This is basically what they tried with Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears, and that basically killed that franchise (admittedly, a weak franchise to begin with).
Of course, the Bond series doesn’t have any real sense of internal consistency – the Bond of Die Another Day can’t feasibly be the same Bond we saw in Dr No. But the slippage of the internal time has always been fairly invisible – one Bond film generally can be seen as taking pretty much right after the other, and certain aspects of the character are consistent. For example, the loss of his wife in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is explicitly acknowledged as still part of the character’s past in 1981’s For Your Eyes Only (with Roger Moore), and fairly directly in 1989’s Licence to Kill (with Timothy Dalton). The Brosnan films deliberately kept this aspect of the character ambiguous – it wasn’t acknowledged, but there were occasional references dropped to losses in his past that the fans could read as references to Tracy if they wished.
By contrast, an explicit disavowal of all that came before is really unusual and seems a risky move. The previous lapses in continuity have tended to involve quietly ignoring what came before. 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, for example, completely ignores the death of Tracy in the film before. The principal villain (Blofeld) was the driver of the car from which she was shot, but there is not a single mention of the incident, and Moneypenny flirtatiously jokes about marriage in the first few minutes. (As Jim Smith and Stephen Lavington put it in their book Bond Films: “Surprisingly Bond doesn’t respond by shouting, ‘My wife was murdered at the end of the last film you heartless cow!’ at her.”) That ruled a line under the very close continuity than through all the 60s Bonds, and the consistency was always much looser after that. Yet even The Living Daylights (from 1987), which introduces a much younger Bond, avoided actually acknowledging any change.
What’s strange about this is that “resetting” the character is an unnecessary risk from usually risk-averse producers. They would be better off setting Casino Royale totally outside the established continuity of the series – effectively quarantining it as an art Bond film, in the way I described back in the early days of this page.
I’ll write about something other than Bond or animation next post, I promise.