007's license to kill...directors?

"You've had your six..."

Is it just plain bad for a director to do a Bond film? I ask in part because my pal Jeffrey Wells, continuing in his dyspeptic mode at Hollywood Elsewhere, today closes the iron door on director Mark Forster now that he's just signed on to do the next one.

The Bond franchise has never been particularly congenial to directors who put a strong personal stamp on their films, a.k.a. auteurs. The pictures are always producer's projects—first, Albert "Cubby" Broccoli and Harry J. Saltzman, now Cubby's daughter Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael Wilson. Cubby and Harry liked to hire solid craftsmen, and lots of 'em—Ken Adam's set design on many Bond pictures defined those films as much as any other component did. The first Bond director was Terence Young, who had a bunch of standard actioners under his belt; with screenwriter Richard Maibaum in tow (he worked on Young's 1956 Zarak and 1958 No Time to Die) he did Dr. No and From Russia With Love. Unavailable for Goldfinger, the producers handed the directorial rein to Guy Hamilton, who had been an assistant director on the likes of The Fallen Idol and The Third Man and went on to helm, among other things, a creditable version of Priestley's An Inspector Calls in 1954. For Thunderball Young was back; then Lewis Gilbert did You Only Live Twice. Longtime Bond editor Peter Hunt got one directorial shot, supervising fellow one-timer George Lazenby for On Her Majesty's Secret Service; when Connery was lured back to the franchise Hamilton directed him in Diamonds Are Forever.

It was during the Roger Moore years that Broccoli/Saltzman implemented a dual-prong system of playing musical chairs with old Bond directors and promoting from within the organization e.g., giving full directorial dutes to second-unit stalwart John Glen on some pictures. To get a taste of just how NOT director-driven the Bond movie of this time were, take a look at The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker side-by-side one evening. Spy can't touch Russia or Goldfinger of course but it's one of the better Moore Bonds; Moonraker, on the other hand, is, well, Moonraker. (Although I can't ever bring myself to fully hate a Michael Lonsdale picture.) Both were directed by Lewis Gilbert. A short explanation as to what brought about the falloff in quality (because we all know it can't be laid solely at Moore's feet, as much as we would like to believe that): in the '60s Broccoli and Saltzman were setting trends, whereas in the Moore years they were almost desperately trying to follow them.

And truth to tell that's what the Bond franchise has been doing ever since—sometimes more successfully and less desperately than others. Last year's Casino Royale, for example, demonstrated that Broccoli and Wilson have, among other things, paid close attention to Universal's burgeoning Jason Bourne franchise, and learned from it.

But to get back to directors. The ones on the recent Bond pictures have all been, like the '60s directors, strong craftsmen. At first glance they seem like they're maybe a little more idiosyncratic than the likes of Young and Hamilton, but they're really not, and it doesn't matter anyway. It might have looked as if Lee Tamahori had the makings of an auteur given Once Were Warriors, but his subsequent Hollywood work demonstrated otherwise. Then he was scooped up to make Die Another Day...and that seems, frankly, to have driven his career down a notch or two, given that his subsequent films were a Vin Diesel sequel and the no-there-there Next. Michael Apted made the risible The World is Not Enough in 1999...returned to somber, competent, uninspired form with Enigma a couple years later...and now he's in line to do the third Narnia picture. And so it goes.

Way back in the day there were rumors that Scorsese was possibly gonna direct a Bond picture, and in the runup to making last year's Casino Royale there was much Tarantino-talk...it was never gonna happen. The Broccoli forces would never give up their control...and in a way, why should they? As great as Scorsese and Tarantino may be, it's quite likely that neither one of them is constitutionally capable of turning out a recognizable James Bond product...which is what every film in the series is obliged to be.

Which brings us to Forster. If I were to screen for you his mondo-depresso 2000 feature Everything Put Together and tell you, "Hey, the guy who made this is gonna direct the next Bond film," you'd think I was high. His next picture, Monster's Ball, exhibits a similar, shall we say, integrity. His subsequent pictures see him stretching out from those films' rawer modes, exhibiting a wide range of interests...but finally, not much of that personal stamp. And his latest picture, Stranger Than Fiction, reveals him to be not as smart as all that—a more astute director would have demanded that screenwriter Zach Helm plug up the huge holes in what was already a sub-Charlie-Kaufman conceit.

That said, I can totally understand why a sort-of smart young director like Forster would want to do a Bond film, money aside. Same reason Scorsese and Tarantino would have wanted to: Bond's not just a franchise, he's a piece of modern and post-modern mythology. But my buddy Jeff isn't having it. "[T]his is the final dropping of the pants," says he. Cue up "Nobody Does It Better..."

Comments

[Michael De Luca]

Lewis Gilbert came off "Alfie" to direct "You Only Live Twice", then later returned to the franchise to direct "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "Moonraker", after which he went off and made "Educating Rita" and "The Browning Version", which are recognized as two of his finest films. It's about choices. Lee Tamahori could have just said "no" to a sequel to "XXX" and could have gone off to do another "The Edge" or the criminally-underrated "Mulholland Falls". It's a shame he didn't.

[cinephile]

Michael De Luca-- Thanks for mentioning those two great Gilbert films. And let's not forget that Apted made "Amazing Grace" last year (which I haven't seen yet, but which scored decent reviews), and is the auteur behind the extraordinary "Up" films (which began at roughly the same moment (1964; '62 for Bond) as the Bond series, and act as a fascinating companion piece in relation to 007 (if one thinks about how connery's persona made the character much more working-class, then ponders how the Up movies also document shifting class positions in Britain in the 60s/70s/80s). Tarantino of 10 years ago would've been fabulous for Bond, but now he feels like a hollow parody of himself-- I get the same creepy vibe watching him on tv/film as glenn kenny does thinking about spencer tracy (see post above). And Forster's a hack-- Monster's Ball was paternalistic, badly acted silliness that was acclaimed only because Roger Ebert gave it an inexplicably huge boost of Oscar buzz, and Finding Neverland manages to waste Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Dustin Hoffman AND Vannessa Redgrave: a truly impressive actorly body count. I worry more about the future of Bond in his hands than how the series will "hurt" him.