Lee Tamahori Talks Die Another Day
Part One: Playing with the 007 formula
It used to be that one director would make several James Bond movies, but starting with Goldeneye, each entry in the series became an opportunity for a new director to try their vision on a 007 film. For Die Another Day, that director is Lee Tamahori.
Tamahori toyed with some of the series' conventions. Right at the beginning, the traditional opening iris shot features a CGI bullet zooming towards the camera. The film also includes a lengthy Bond torture scene, which most of the other films have avoided. Of course, there are still the staple action scenes.
A rapid-fire speaker, Tamahori called for an interview from his room at the Four Seasons hotel. Some mild spoilers and plot details of the first act follow, but I've been careful to be as vague as possible and nothing ruins the film's surprises.:
What was the decision to enhance the opening iris shot? That I flung the cartridge, the bullet. Well, I decided to have a lot of fun on this movie. I said, "Guys, can I change some things? I only want to do it for one movie. I don't want you to do it for all of them." When I always saw that shot, I always felt like I was being shot, which you were supposed to feel. I thought, can we for the 20th movie and 40th anniversary, can we fire a bullet straight at the audience and put it in the surround speakers and make people feel like they're being shot? They said, 'Sure, you can do that." It's really done with a touch of love and reverence of the old movies and just shaking up them, but I hope they don't continue with it because I don't think it should become a staple of the movies that follow.
Were you involved with the talk of including Blofeld's daughter in this film? No, I don't know anything about that.
What about the rumor of a Sean Connery cameo? I was very involved in not the rumor, but I wanted a Sean Connery cameo. Michael [G. Wilson] and Barbara [Broccoli], with some well-reasoned thought behind it, it was one of the few ideas that was rejected. I think they thought if we put Connery in it with Brosnan, they thought [audiences] were going to get too confused. I'm not so sure that that's accurate. If they had followed my approach, which I think was a very good approach, it would have explained exactly why there were two Bond's in one movie. But they have a very loyal fan base and after 19 pictures, I'm not the guy to come in here and say that my idea is right and theirs is wrong. Some caution and some wisdom prevailed on that one.
What was the idea? My idea was basically that there have been several Bonds. It's just a prefix and a code name Even James Bond is not the guy's name. That's the way I've always been able to view these things from when Connery left and Lazenby and Moore took over, right up to Brosnan. How could this guy be so young still? Of course to me, it is just a prefix and a code name. That means that Connery either died or retired, Moore died or retired and so on. Following that, that allows you to have possibly two James Bonds in a movie. What happened to the others? Were they retired from active service or were they killed? That's where I came from. I thought what if there was a scene where Bond meets one of the originals, an older 007 who got out of the service and acted as a mentor to him, taught him some stuff about what was about to happen to him because he was being left behind and he was out of the secret service and people were trying to come and kill him. It was a different script at that stage, but I thought it was an interesting idea and I thought an audience may love it.
Awesome idea, but I have to bring up a fanboy point. Why are the other James Bonds mourning the same dead wife? Well, they don't.
Moore visits her grave in For Your Eyes Only. Oh, he does, does he. I didn't know that.
What would your answer have been had I not brought that up? I was not aware that he visited it. I thought if you sprung that on an audience, it may open up a whole new avenue or way of viewing Bond movies. Another reason I was proposing that as an idea was for future movies, when Pierce leaves and someone else comes on board, you may actually be able to do that as an introduction. You might be able to introduce the new guy as a new guy and look, there have been several before you, you're a new one. Don't rock the boat and don't do this and don't do that.
Part Two: Making Die Another Day
What are the limits and freedoms of the James Bond formula? Well, it's a mixed bag. You get certain freedoms and then certain limitations. The limitations are not imposed by producers or the studio. They're actually imposed by the genre itself. And sometimes you impose them upon yourself. You know going into this what the genre is and you know you better not shake it up too much. You don't want to put him in therapy and you don't want to have him crying in a corner. So, the limitations are girls, gadgets and big action and humor required, usually in the form of double entendres and puns. You have to deal with it. It's like product placement. The big action must occur at a certain point and that Bond must drive the car at a certain point and there will be girls of a certain caliber in there. So, I immediately started with that. Let's start with the girls, I said. When it comes to the girls, can they please not be appendages and handbags to Bond. Let's make them smart. Let's have good actors in there and let's beef their characters up so they're really something I can be proud of rather than be ashamed of, to just have some old chicks in there that are just there for Bond to bonk. If you look carefully at what Halle is doing, she's kind of controlling the whole lovemaking scene in this movie and then she leaves him in the morning and leaves him behind. These were nice revisionist touches we could do with an old franchise. When it comes to big action, I say, bigger action or even spectacular action because that's what people expect. You may as well give it to them. Then you have to find something you haven't done before, and I thought we did a good job of it. So, they give you an enormous amount of freedom now to move within that.
How big a risk to have Bond get tortured? Well, it was something we spent a lot of time talking about. Will people buy this? Will they actually go to this? Will they believe it for a start was my point. First of all, it was three years [originally]. They were going to do it from the end of the last movie to this one so that the opening of the movie was somewhere around 1999 to he gets out of jail after the title sequence. I said, "No one's going to believe three years. I think we'll be lucky to get away with a year" but we needed to have a year because of [a plot device]. So, what we did was try to make it as credible as possible by just doing this great old cold war spy thriller genre piece on it and making it as dramatic as possible. For me, it was far more nerve-wracking with the hair and makeup. Would people actually buy Bond looking like Jim Morrison or Jesus Christ? I think they do. It's an unusual look for Bond to be incarcerated, looking kind of grubby and beat up. Having long hair and looking like Robinson Crusoe is a tough call but people buy it. I think the great thing about that though is there's something about North Korea and these failed, enclosed states that you can't get behind. You've got impenetrable walls like North Korea which seem to be the most hellish places on earth. If Bond were thrown in a Zimbabwe prison camp for example, I don't think people would buy it for a minute. Something about that Manchurian Candidate type of North Korean gulag-ish type of thing. We figured if we set it in such a remote and inhospitable place that people might buy it.
Are you involved in the new James Bond video game? No, I wish I had been because I love video games, but that's an entirely different branch of the Eon monster and I don't know anything about it. I was surprised to even see it.
What do you think of XXX? I saw XXX, I loved it. I thought it was a brilliant movie and I think it's excellent. Of course it's the competition now, but at the same time, I think there's room for all these movies out there. I have no such qualms that this is the opposition and I shouldn't like their movie. I think they did a great job.
What was the most complex stunt you shot for Die Another Day? Probably the sword fight because we shot all that live and it was done with the actors with real swords, so it's actually quite hair raising and it was great for the actors to do.
Why use real swords when you could use plastic and add the sound effects? No, plastic doesn't work. Looks like
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and then it bends and it warps. What you use is blunt swords but it's still real. It's not steel. It's aluminum but it's still metal and it'll hurt you. It's much better that you have substance and weight to the sword and you just make sure the actors don't hit each other and they don't. I agree, it sounds dangerous, but plastic won't save you either. If you go for the same lightweight material, they're still going to hit each other with a piece of plastic. All that soft rubber stuff, it doesn't work. You see it bending and waving and it looks stupid. Finally, can you talk about Bond's relationship with M and how you play with that in Die Another Day? Well, I love their relationship. I think the producer and the writer and Martin Campbell set that up beautifully in Goldeneye. Once that kind of adversarial relationship was set up, it allowed an obvious affection to develop and I think you've seen that through all four of these movies with Pierce and Dame Judy that she really loves this guy. It's a maternal love and she's really extremely fond of her finest agent and cares for him a lot but can't show it because she has to run a corporation. And I always think that's a really good place to come from with this because they both have huge admiration for what each other does, but they get brittle with each other, and it's as it should be.
