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Comments
That looks so familiar....
It’s like he’s a hissing cat!
It does seem a bit odd that Forster hired Joshua Zetumer to help with new on-set dialogue in QOS after the strike was over instead of getting P & W in, but maybe that immediate next-day rewrite stuff simply isn't what they do? Dunno. You'd think that Paul Haggis would've been the obvious choice to punch up his own script at that point, but there's the famous story that BB tells, where Haggis handed in his script literally two hours before the Writers' Strike began, collected his cheque and then went straight outside with a placard and started picketing the EON offices! Even allowing for comedic licence, you can see why something like that might not've endeared him to them! :D
Interesting choice. Excellent actor. Sadly also a bit old, no? Don't want to sound ageist at all, but at 76, I'm not sure how many of these films he has in him.
That’s one piece of it. The other is that I think he’s kind of , too on the nose as either M or the villain. It’s like casting Charles Dance to play a British Army General. He’s always great at it, but he’s also done it 25 times now.
I’d love to see Brian Cox‘ Q though. I think he’s an underrated comic actor and him spewing bile at but then coming around to a very young Bond could be fun. Never going to happen of course.
Pick up some threads from QOS for a modern take as we move from fossil to electric: shady organization looks to control and exploit lithium mines in South America. Maybe one of the major players in this organization is in good grace with her majesty’s government (nod to Moonraker novel).
Would be a good excuse to film in Buenos Aires, as well as beautiful rural parts of Argentina/Chile. Add a stop in modern Asian megacity like Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, or Seoul. Maybe Bond could also attend an opera or something in Poland.
I love it. Purrs Brosnan.
For me, there's always the route open that the villain is simply insane. Meaning their plots don't have to make sense in the end as long as they have a kind of twisted internal logic to the character. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it, but to me that's the difference between say Safin and Drax. Safin wants to kill hundreds of millions of people because... they desire oblivion? And then what? Drax wants to kill hundreds of millions of people to create a new master race in space and repopulate earth under his rule. That's even more crazy and impossible, but it has a kind of internal logic and an end point to it, doesn't it?
But I agree that aiming for more thriller and less fantasy does these films good.
I've written my pitch here before so I won't write out the whole thing, but I'd base the next film in the world of online banking/financial tech and take the wirecard scandal as a blueprint. It's specific enough that a lot of viewers would kind of get a handle on what the problem is, while allowing for all kinds of made-up stuff of the "5-minutes into the future" variety that probably wouldn't age too badly.
Plus, finance already has many of the standard Bond trappings built-in. Location hopping between London, New York and any number of Asian financial hubs is logical. Frivolously luxurious settings are par-for-the-course in that world. And you can easily plug in any flavour of villian you want: Crazed industrialists, nation-state spies gone rogue (or not), gangsters and terrorists all need financial services in some way.
I think it really depends on how well the villain's motives are set up. You can get away with a lot of contrivances if the audience understand what drives the villain. It can be as simple as a maniac wanting to be known as the best or richest in their field (ie. Goldfinger, Elliot Carver) or as deep rooted as revenge (ie. Silva, Alec Trevelyan). Just as long as the villain's motives are consistent (a character like Safin fails because why he's doing what he's doing becomes unclear by the end of the film) and the plot is directly related to the villain's motives (so a film like TMWTGG fails because Scaramanga seems to have little interest in the Solex and it's set up as almost a secondary plot point). Hell, the plot can even change direction when the villain is introduced (ie. SF in which the the list of MI6 agents, the sort of McGuffin of the film, is released, in effect ensuring Bond has failed his mission, and the rest of the film becomes a last ditch effort in protecting M and getting rid of Silva).
EDIT: @ImpertinentGoon probably said it better than myself, but that's essentially what I was getting at. The villain's logic has to to make sense.
https://deadline.com/2023/04/hollywood-strike-wga-rules-1235337584/
I do think the concept of Carver and his plan was probably one of the best in recent years. Taking real megalomaniacs and tweaking them just slightly, and with the real world relatable and unique quirk of newspapers (not just some slightly faceless tech which doesn't mean much to anyone)- it's a great setup for a villain.
Scaramanga's Solex plot annoys me every time I think of it. They had the plot device of the world's greatest assassin and threw it away for some dull nonsense about power plants. I know it was vaguely topical at the time, but it's a waste of the idea of the man with the golden gun.
Thanks for posting this. The really interesting part to me - someone who hasn't looked into this closely before - is that "negotiations and discussions regarding present or future writing projects" are also banned. With the already discussed fact that hyphenates (writer-directors, producer-writers) are also included in this, that really puts the kibosh on any further planning for B26...
What are the current estimates on a strike actually happening and how long it could last?
The chance of actually striking has been described as: very likely.
How long it will last: the last strike was 100 days and set back many projects. They say IF there is a strike, it’ll be long and nasty. No estimated time. Just dig heels in and “for as long as it takes” will be the thinking. After all, if the strike happens and from Day One on, everyone is losing income, they’re stating that they’re in it for the long haul.
It’s Hail Mary time over the weekend…. 🤞 that last minute negotiations save the industry from another lengthy pause (after Covid, this is almost like playing Russian Roulette. Many projects will be killed if a strike happens).
Safin was best when he was simply obsessed with Madeleine. That aspect of the character was crystal clear. They could have tweaked that to: "My family was poisoners, they built this garden, and I'm even better because I created the nanobots. No one is going to take Madeleine away from me!"
Yes Carver was one of the best “real” villains of the last 30 years. There are WAY too many people like him now more than ever.
As for Scaramanga’s solex plot, it was a good idea, just somewhat poorly portrayed. I blame Richard Maibaum for that. That idea didn’t come around until he worked on the script. So much for thinking him thinking he’s better than everyone else! Tom Mackiewicz’s idea of Bond and Scaramanga being equals should have been the forefront honestly. However, with him and Guy Hamilton in charge, it may have been way too goofy, honestly. But I still enjoy the movie we got.
Sorry to hear that, I hope it passes as quickly as possible.
Yeah I think 'assassin' is a good enough setup on its own: have Bond racing to stop him assassinating someone. If you really need a big power station set, then have it belong to Hai Fat or something and make more of his assassination, I don't know.
But it's like having the outline for Day of the Jackal and deciding it should be more about the baddie wanting to run a train station.
My job may be done by midnight on May 2, and I may not be able to visit set or all the fun stuff, but I was doing polishes all weekend and talent is circling— so I hope this means I dodged a bullet!!
I'd be up for Cox as M. Much more in line with the books. How old was Bernard Lee when he played M? Probably a similar age.
Likewise, I'd be up for an older villain too this time, something along the lines of Gert Frobe in GF, instead of the young whippersnappers we've been getting in the past 30-odd years.
Yes, TMWTGG feels like a missed opportunity. I always got the impression the Solex was introduced to up the stakes and have a McGuffin for Bond to get, but it’s very boring and even Scaramanga doesn’t seem overly interested in it beyond using it for his laser gun (which looks horrendously cheap and dated). In the same way DAD reused elements of DAF it’d be nice to see them try and ‘redo’ TMWTGG for a future film. Even the basic premise of Bond having to hunt down and kill an assassin who murders a fellow 00 has so much dramatic potential.
But Safin had achieved his lifelong objective when he got rid of Spectre. What does he do for an encore? Probably didn't have a coherent plan for what came next. Plus, he was a whackjob - of course his scheme didn't make any sense! ;)
That all sounds very positive!
I don't mind the laser gun, but I almost wonder if it should have been the objective rather than just a bonus- that Scaramanga needed a super gun to shoot down a space shuttle carrying the President or something(!).
But yeah Golden Gun is the one I wouldn't mind seeing remade, as there's more potential in there than the film used. I think it could even be the good basis for a spin-off: Scaramanga is the perfect anti-007 and would work as a Bond replacement.
I can even imagine a golden gunbarrel sequence, where the man who walks into the dot is the poor victim who comes to a glittering end! :D
A modern day Scaramanga spinoff would be a great opportunity for both a movie or a novel.
It’s more that it feels relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. I have the same problem with SP and the Nine Eyes programme.