Screenwriter »

• From Pinewood with Love

  April 11, 2012 @ 12:44 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  We have been transported to the English countryside to hang out with the cast and crew of the latest James Bond film. It’s called Skyfall for some reason. Chicken Little has not sued. A visit to Pinewood Studios is always a treat. You don’t really see all that much. But you are made aware that here is where a great deal of film history was made. Pictures of Gregory Peck, Tom Cruise and — yes — Norman Wisdom plaster the walls of the manor house at the studio’s core.

  We have had a chat with Daniel Craig (J Bond), Barbara Broccoli (producer) and Bérénice Marlohe (current holder of the Bond girl curse). Following fishcakes and roast potatoes, we will get to meet up with Judi Dench and  Javier Bardem. Everybody is being hilarious cagey about the plot. For all I know, the picture concerns efforts to repaint the Clyde Bridge.

  

  The highlight of my day so far, however, has definitely been the opportunity to hold the Walther PPK that Sean Connery used in From Russia With Love. It’s heavier than you’d think. When set beside a Glock, it looks like something that Roy Rogers might have used. But I still went a bit funny while wielding. It’s a funny thing. A man can live his life a sandal-wearing wet liberal. He can frown at the United States’ dubious affair with the firearm. But put a vintage pistol in his hand and he will, like as not, crumble into pathetic machine worship.

  Must run. Judi Dench is waiting.

   

• The next Bond film is called Skyfall.

  November 3, 2011 @ 10:06 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  The Bond films are perhaps the only movies that can generate press conferences a whole year before release. Earler today, Daniel Craig (current 007), Judi Dench (ongoing M) and Sam Mendes (upmarket director) gathered in the Corinthia Hotel to announce that the next film in the series would journey out under the title Skyfall. The news disappointed some Bond purists. The Craig films have, to this point, taken their titles from Ian Fleming works. Casino Royale was, of course, the first novel. Quantum of Solace was a previously unfilmed story. The 007 team still had the option to draw on three remaining Fleming titles: Property of a Lady, Risico and The Hildebrand Rarity. The first and last might have worked nicely. Still, after the fiasco that was Quantum of Solace, the producers probably did need to signal a shift in direction. Never before has so much initial good will — bequeathed from the fine Casino Royale — been so rapidly squandered. Explaining the cryptic title, Barbara Broccoli, longtime Bond producer, commented: “It has some emotional context which will be revealed in the film. You’ll have to wait and see.”

  Skyfall? Skyfall? I don’t like it. The full-length Bond novels, like Raymond Chandler’s books, always had delicious titles. This suggests one of those dire corporate rebrandings from the turn of the century. Remember when the British Royal Mail was relaunched as Consignia? It didn’t mean anything and, ultimately, it just ended up annoying people. I suppose it does, at least, lend itself reasonable comfortably to a proper theme song. One can just about imagine Shirley Bassey belting out that word in full throated shrieks. Nobody made any effort to write a song entitled Quantum of Solace. Maybe they should have had a go. More than a few phrases rhyme with Max Planck.

  Anyway, nobody seems to have heeded the advice that I have been putting Broccoli’s way (at no cost) for the last decade or so. Post-war comfort food of the most deliciously naughty type, Fleming’s books now take on the quality of genuine period pieces. Look back at them and you are reminded that, rather than being swinging sixties entities, they are thick with the prejudices and repressions of the Macmillan years. Surely, the time has come to launch a Bond series set in the original era. Come to think of it, since I first mentioned this to Broccoli, the folk who run American TV have cottoned on to the appeal of those years and forced the world to swallow fags, booze and casual sexism in Mad Men (and now Pan Am). The Bond team should really have got there first. Mr Fleming practically invented that class of cool.

  

• Quantum of Solace is lousy says director of Green Lantern

  June 20, 2011 @ 6:41 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Okay, let’s get the preliminaries out of the way first. You’re one to talk, Mr Martin Campbell. I mean it’s not as if The Green Lantern is ever going to be confused with The Dark Knight. Didn’t you also direct the useless Beyond Borders and the idiotic Vertical Limit? You have hardly earned the right to throw the first stone, mate.

  

  “Right? Who are you again?”

  Okay, now that’s off our chest, let’s acknowledge that Campbell did a fine job of reinventing the Bond franchise with Casino Royale. Yes, that film owed a little too much to the Bourne trilogy — run, run, run along that girder, Daniel! — but it reintroduced danger to 007 and successfully toned down the series’ suffocating excesses of camp.

  So, Campbell is in a position to comment on Quantum of Solace. “I thought it was lousy,” he has said. “I just thought the story was pretty uninteresting. I didn’t think the action was related to the characters. I just thought overall it was a bit of a mess really.”

  Campbell is not the first person from Team Casino to dump on Quantum of Solace. Last year, Paul Haggis, credited as co-writer on both films, sniffed in disgust when I mentioned that muddled film. “On Casino Royale they shot every word,” he reasoned. “On Quantum of Solace they began changing it immediately after I’d finished. What can you do? The director is in charge. He’s always in charge. If, as a director, you let yourself be influenced, then that’s your fault.”

  It is hard to think of another film that so efficiently annihilated quite so much good will. For decade after decade, the Bond producers threatened to return to the spirit of Ian Fleming’s cynical, brutal, borderline (sometimes not-so-borderline) racist books. Time and again, they failed to deliver on their promise. The films remained jokey, muddled and thrown-together. Never have so many sharks been jumped. Remember Vijay Amritraj wielding a tennis racket on Octopussy? What about the invisible car in Die Another Day?

  Casino Royale really did capture some of the propulsive nastiness of the original text (they even referenced the scene where Le Chiffre whacked Bond’s testicles with a carpet beater). It had its flaws. But it felt like a proper movie.

  And then Quantum of Solace. Earlier this month, we moaned that too many contemporary mainstream films are far too long. It is, however, worth being suspicious when a prestige picture such as this clocks in at a neat 106 minutes. The film appeared to have been cut to ribbons, rendering the story utterly impossible to follow. Can you remember what the thing was about?

  Anyway, Sam Mendes is at the helm for Bond 23 and he will surely do better. He could hardly do worse.

  What might it be called? If they stick with the current series’ habit of dredging up available Fleming titles, we are left with The Property Of A Lady, Risico and The Hildebrand Rarity (all from unfilmed short stories). The first sounds like a Henry James adaptation. The second is too easy to forget. The third gives off too many echoes of Robert Ludlum. Good luck, Sam.

  

  Not a real poster.