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Yes, it seems he was let more than down a tad by others, though GE and TWINE were brilliant. Brosnan should have had a fifth Bond in 2004/5, too. I'll have to try my method first, then I'll be happy to share it with you (if it does indeed work).
Playboy: How does it feel to be told that you’re too old?
Brosnan: It was kind of shocking to have ageism come on me when I was just getting started. It’s shocking to be told that you’re too old, that you’re past your sell-by date.
Eh, what?
It seems that he thought he had a few Bonds in him yet then. He did say he might do a fifth and even a sixth after DAD was released, so perhaps that is what he meant, no?
When asked about an ideal Bond girl, he gives another dig to EON:
Brosnan: Monica Bellucci is a ravishing beauty — a gorgeous, gorgeous woman. She screen-tested to be a Bond girl a while back and the fools said no. Teri Hatcher stole the day instead.
And also adds:
"It would have been great to have sex scenes that were right on the button."
Seems with the sex, violence, fighting, shooting, even smoking, he wanted it all in and all of it to be more realistic. I feel like he wanted to be as young as he was in GE again just so he could do what Craig does now. It's a shame, his placement in the series, being too old at the time when they wanted to do exactly what Brosnan wanted throughout his entire tenure.
@Dragonpol, sounds excellent, keep me posted on updates and how that goes for you.
Yes, that is very ironic indeed and eloquently put by yourself, @Creasy47. I'll keep you posted on my project to contact PB, certainly and if I have any luck I'll certainly forward the contact details to you by PM.
That would mean a lot to me, let me know how it goes! Hope it works for you.
"As soon as he got into the tie back in Hong Kong and cleaned up with the Remington product-placement razor, he was back in the f***ing straitjacket."
"They're too scared to take him out of the bag too much and have a real dramatic moment."
The moral of the story here kids, is speak up!
Brosnan is a far better actor outside of Bond and had he given us that in the role, things may have been very different indeed.
You've got it absolutely spot on. For all it's faults, for all the embarrassing CGI, invisible cars etc. What I hate more than anything else about DAD, is that the initial plot was ditched, 15 minutes after the PTS. I blame everyone involved for this mess.
He was in denial then, for sure. Maybe, maybe he had a fifth one in him, like his FYEO, had they released one for 2004. But that was about it. He was simply getting too old, and it seems not humble enough to admit it.
He was no where near 60, so I think there could have got two more out of him. 2005 and 2007 seemed to be the plan.
What gets me is how Brosnan seemed to have not read or even know about the books. In interviews he's said there's about seven of them, he comes across as not in the know in his first interview on the day of the Die Another Day conference and on the whole, both he and EON seemed to not have any idea what they were doing. It is all such a mess. Brosnan must have only turned up, done the Bond thing and went home. He's just the image of Bond and that's it. Again, what a mess and what a shame. One silver lining is, at last they have learnt their lesson.
Agreed on the greatness of Fleming faithfulness. Another point occurred to me in reading your post: Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan have much in common when it comes to James Bond and in the brilliance of their acting outside of that role.
I don't remember what it is exactly, but there's a quote of his that I love where he talks about the cigarettes, sex, and blood being all there (in the Fleming novels), and I think that's when he was asked about his films and what he thought of them. It was just Pierce pointing out how his films were different from Fleming's in that way, and that's what he really wanted to do.
Agreed @Creasy47 that both actors could shock in other films. Could this be the passage from the December 2005 Playboy interview that @Samuel001 kindly posted earlier in the thread?:
All the movies made money. Creatively, maybe, they could have been stronger, but they were Bond movies, and they advanced a certain degree out of the doldrums where they had been. They were tricky to do. I never really felt as as though I nailed it. As soon as they put me into a suit and tie and gave me those lines of dialogue, I felt restricted. It was like the same old same old. I was doing Roger Moore doing Sean Connery doing George Lazenby. I felt as if I were doing a period piece dusted off. They never really took the risks they should have. It would have been great to light up and smoke cigarettes, for instance. It would have been great to have the killing a little more real and not wussed down. My boys watch the movies on DVD, so I see them from time to time. I see myself with nowhere to go, and it’s all rather bland.
I think that's right - like he said himself he felt as though he was "strait-jacketed" in the role of James Bond by the powers at the time.
You can hardly blame them. They'd just taken a big risk (namely Licence to Kill) and it blew up in their faces. The same thing happened after On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
As a matter of fact, the Craig era is one of the first times the franchise has gone from over-the-top to subdued and gritty and had it succeed wildly. For Your Eyes Only was necessary after Moonraker and The Living Daylights was a slight step up (financially, not artistically) from A View to a Kill, but nothing on the scale of Casino Royale or Skyfall.
This is something that disappointed me in him, even from day one, when I was happy that he was cast as Bond and thought he was the best since Connery. I read an interview in a French magazine and it struck me that he knew so very little, way less than me in fact, who had not read a single Fleming novel yet. Like I said in a previous comment here. Brosnan seemed more interested about playing the icon than the character, and in the end played him like an icon, an image. It is as if I wanted to play Sherlock Holmes for the hunting hat, the coat and the pipe. And not having read a single Sherlock Holmes story.
It is a shame that his tenure ended on DAD and this note. It didn't have to be like that. And if course so many of us would have liked for him to have one more Bond film, a good one, to finish with. Judi Dench included; I believe she really loved working with Pierce.
Brosnan's films were in the old formula - for me, TND was supberbly done, he was a great Bond in it, yet it was still old school formula. Casino Royale blew that all away, and a good thing, too. But I do understand Pierce's frustrations from what he was given, and especially how his time as Bond was ended. In his shoes, wouldn't you feel that way, too? The last couple of years, and many fine and well regarded films (non Bond) later, Pierce has mellowed in what he says. I hope that for him he has moved on in every way; bitterness, even when warranted, eats away at a person. I think he has accomplished moving on after Bond very well, better than the other Bonds, overall.
@Creasy47 But the Assassin's Creed film is actually being made by Ubisoft so I'm confident it'll be faithful to the source material. To be fair maybe Fassbender just doesn't like video games.
No but as you said Lazenby read the one book he needed to and Connery read a few - Thunderball, From Russia With Love and Live And Let Die - for his character building, asked why he did not read the rest he replied "I don't really know", whereas Moore took elements from what he read of the series as a whole. Brosnan didn't read a thing. He went along with Parkinson in a 2002 interview where they both comment, "there's not a lot to go on" from reading them...
Connery was interviewed in '71 by the BBC whilst filming DAF and he confirmed he had only ever read 3 of the books.
That really disappoints me. I can understand Connery not reading many, after all it all started with a contract for him, at a time when Bond was obviously not what he is now.
I suppose you have the right to be disappointed, but then it's his right as well to draw inspiration from anywhere in the Bond canon. I still very much like his take on the role, inspired by the films or the books or what.