The faces may change, but all six actors who have played James Bond across the film franchise’s six decades have a few things in common, including a “00” designation, a license to kill and a taste for shaken (not stirred) martinis. And the five Bonds since Sean Connery have one extra piece of shared history — they’ve all had to lock down the part by nailing the same audition scene, a sequence that Connery originated in his second 007 outing, 1963’s From Russia With Love.
That bit of lore was relayed to Gold Derby directly from director Martin Campbell, who has personally watched two future Bonds — Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig — secure their place in movie history by retracing Connery’s footsteps. “It’s a simple scene,” says the director of 1995’s GoldenEye and 2006’s Casino Royale, which marked the debuts of Brosnan and Craig, respectively. “Bond comes into a hotel room, takes off his jacket and gun and goes to run a bath. He senses someone is there and crosses over the balcony to a sliding door — and there’s a girl in bed waiting for him.” (You can watch the O.G. version below.)
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Asked why that particular scene is the final exam that all the actors who would be Bond must pass, Campbell says that it spotlights the most important characteristic of Ian Fleming’s super-spy. “The word is effortless,” the filmmaker says. “You never see Bond fumble; he’s very economic, efficient — and effortless. That scene covers all the bases, basically.”
Footage of Brosnan’s interpretation of that From Russia with Love scene is safely locked away in the MI6 vault, but it’s safe to say that he made like the Beatles and passed the audition. Thirty years ago, on Nov. 17, 1995, the Remington Steele star exploded onto the big screen as the fifth 007 in GoldenEye, bringing the character back to the multiplex six years after the Timothy Dalton era unceremoniously ended with 1989’s License to Kill. Funnily enough, Dalton’s brief tenure only came about because Brosnan’s Remington Steele commitments prevented him from replacing Roger Moore in the mid-1980s. When the opportunity came around again, he came in guns blazing.
Apocryphal stories abound about the actors that might have headlined GoldenEye had Brosnan missed out on the part a second time, with everyone from Mel Gibson to Liam Neeson mentioned as potential candidates. But Campbell says that none of those names was in the mix when he took over the director’s chair. “In the back of our minds, Pierce was always going to play Bond,” he says, recalling that a few perfunctory auditions were held with other actors, whose names escape him now.
Janssen, Brosnan and Martin Campbell on the set of ‘GoldenEye’MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection
“Pierce had always wanted to play Bond,” Campbell adds. “He was determined to make it work and threw himself into the part. And he looked so bloody good! If you were to use AI to generate James Bond, Pierce Brosnan is who you would get.”
Flash-forward three decades, and we’re on the cusp of meeting another new Bond. The 007 franchise has officially changed hands from longtime producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Lewis to Amazon MGM Studios, which is forging ahead with a 26th film that will be directed by Denis Villeneuve and produced by Amy Pascal and David Heyman. Having successfully launched two new Bond eras, Campbell is uniquely positioned to offer some words of wisdom to the incoming creative team.
“Don’t break what isn’t broken,” is the director’s succinct advice to Villeneuve and his collaborators. “It doesn’t need to be a reboot — it just needs to be a bloody good Bond film! If we released GoldenEye or Casino Royale again next week, they’d feel just as potent. So don’t f–k with it, basically. There’s a lot of fertile ground for Bond, particularly the way the world is at the moment. I just hope that they don’t break what’s not broken!”
Read on for more of Campbell’s stories from the GoldenEye set — and why he’s adamant that the next Bond doesn’t need to be an established movie star.
Brosnan’s Bond begins
It’s no accident that Brosnan’s first act as James Bond is to crack a joke. Infiltrating a mountaintop Soviet stronghold, 007 lowers himself into the men’s room and greets a guard enjoying some solitude in a stall. “Beg your pardon — forgot to knock,” Brosnan quips, before knocking the poor guy out. “I thought it would be amusing to introduce the new Bond upside down in a toilet,” Campbell says with a chuckle. “It promised a sense of humor as well.” (Funnily enough, Daniel Craig later played his first big Bond scene in a bathroom as well — although that Casino Royale scene is more bruising than amusing.)
Bringing the jokes back to Bond was one of the ways that GoldenEye’s makers sought to course correct the franchise after the dour Dalton entries. “The humor was missing in those movies,” Campbell acknowledges. “All those lousy punchlines are part of the charm of Bond; the fact that they’re awful makes them funny.”
Brosnan’s Bond wasn’t just quick with a pun — he was also fast on his feet and swift with a punch. Having worked with a number of action stars over the years, Campbell can authoritatively say that many of them aren’t as tough as they seem onscreen. Brosnan, though, “Pierce is very good at action,” the director says, adding that the star did as many of his own stunts as the production insurers would allow. “In that opening scene, there’s a moment where all the Soviet guards are shooting at him and Bond is hiding behind a tank when a bullet lands nearly an inch from his head. Pierce barely flinches and that was his idea. The major thing with Bond is an economy of movement and he understood that.”
Rather that function as an origin story for Brosnan’s wisecracking 007, Campbell wanted GoldenEye to feel like a middle chapter in the character’s ongoing career, one that sends him in pursuit of a high-tech space weapon that’s been commandeered by a former ally-turned-rogue agent — Sean Bean’s 006. “Pierce was replacing Timothy Dalton as the same Bond,” the director says, debunking the popular internet theory that “James Bond” is a code name as opposed to one specific spy. “He was at the same point character-wise that Dalton was, so it was really just a continuation. Bond is always the same person; different actors obviously, but the same person.”
Bond Girls 2.0
In bringing 007 into the then-present day of 1995, one of the biggest decisions that the GoldenEye filmmakers had to make was how to evolve Bond’s relationship with the opposite sex. Campbell says that abandoning the idea of the Bond Girl altogether was a nonstarter; instead, the goal became pairing Brosnan’s spy with women who were his match and then some. Swedish-American actress Izabella Scorupco played Natalya, a computer programmer who becomes Bond’s main romantic partner, as well as an active part of the action. “She’s not the usual, ‘Oh, James,’ Bond Girl,” Campbells says. “She does get seduced by Bond, but she’s a strong character.”
In the strength department, though, Natalya is no match for the movie’s superbly named breakout character Xenia Onattop, played by future X-Men star, Famke Janssen. Armed with life-choking thighs and an orgasmic lust for violence, Xenia fuses the Bond Girl with the larger-than-life Bond villain — think Richard Kriel’s Jaws or Harold Sakata’s Oddjob. “I love those kinds of Bond characters,” Campbell says. “Jaws is a little dated now, but I still laugh at all his crazy sequences. Xenia is the most extreme thing in GoldenEye — she has an orgasm every time she kills someone! — but the film needed that sort of personality.”
Xenia’s particular set of skills also allowed Campbell to turn the idea of a traditional Bond sex scene on its head. Confronting 007 in a sauna, Xenia proceeds to have her way with James — “her way” being wrapping her legs around him and slamming him into walls. “For her it was a sex scene, because the harder she got hit, the more sexually strident she became,” the director says, adding that the crew lined the sauna set with rubber walls to minimize potential injuries. “Famke did hurt herself during that scene,” he recalls. “Something with her back. I don’t remember it being too bad, but it was definitely something she had to get sorted out.”
Bond on a budget
GoldenEye’s financial backers at MGM/UA had high hopes for the Brosnan era — but that doesn’t mean they were willing to spend all the time and money in the world funding his inaugural outing. “They weren’t 100 percent sure that people would still want to come and see a Bond movie after the long hiatus,” Campbell recalls. “So they were very tight with the budget. We were given $55 million, and we said, ‘We can’t make it for that!'”
Sure enough, the final cost of GoldenEye ticked upwards to $58 million. “After the film came out, the head of the studio told me, ‘I was prepared to go up to $65 million,'” the director says, laughing. “I told him, ‘It’s bloody late to tell me that now!'”
While Campbell still delivered plenty of bang for those limited bucks, the penny-pinching did curtail some of his grander ambitions. For example, he initially wanted to film the centerpiece action sequence — an extended chase sequence thru the streets of Saint Petersburg with Bond piloting a tank — entirely on location in that Russian city. Instead, cost concerns forced Campbell to dispatch a second unit team to shoot limited on-location footage while he rebuilt Saint Petersburg at London’s famed Leavesden Studios, now owned by Warner Bros.
“That was a financial decision, but it turned out to be the correct decision,” he acknowledges now. “There was no way that we’d be able to knock down all those buildings in the actual Saint Petersburg!” Besides extensive use of studio sets, GoldenEye was also one of the last Bond films to rely entirely on old-school effects — including an extensive use of models and matte backgrounds — in place of digitally-enhanced tricks. “Back then, there were still artists around that were able to use those techniques,” Campbell says, almost wistfully.
In fact, GoldenEye was the final Bond film overseen by F/X wizard Derek Meddings, who worked on multiple Roger Moore installments as well as Richard Donner’s Superman and Tim Burton’s Batman. “Derek was a natural at all of that stuff,” Campbells says of Meddings, who died in September 1995, two months before GoldenEye bowed in theaters. “He created all of the space effects in Moonraker with models, and it was quite brilliant. GoldenEye is probably one of the last films to use those techniques with almost no digital F/X at all.”
Brosnan never dies
Another benefit of keeping GoldenEye’s budget low-ish was that the movie’s profit margins went sky high. Bosnan’s first Bond picture grossed over $350 million worldwide, reversing the steep downward trend of the latter-day Moore movies and Dalton’s two-film stint. Accordingly, the budget on the follow-up, 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies, jumped to over $100 million. Campbell says he was offered the chance to return alongside Brosnan, but decided that he’d “already blown up one control room” and wasn’t interested in doing it again. The director’s chair passed to Roger Spottiswoode, who Campbell says delivered one of his favorite entries in Brosnan’s four-movie run.
Michael Apted took over the franchise for 1999’s The World is Not Enough followed by Lee Tamahori’s Die Another Day in 2002. While the latter movie was still a sizable hit, it also tipped the scales too much towards Moonraker-level exaggerated excess. “Lee was a great director,” Campbell says of Tamahori, who passed away earlier this month. “The movie just got kind of ridiculous with the invisible cars and ice palaces.”
Yet another franchise course-correction was necessary, and Brosnan proved a casualty of that pivot, his planned fifth 007 movie scrapped as the producers decided to start the series over from Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale. Exit Brosnan… and re-enter Campbell. “They came back to me, and I said yes because it was going to be a different Bond with a different tone,” the director says. “It was also a damn good script!”
Unlike GoldenEye there was no obvious choice for 007 waiting in the wings. That mean multiple actors did their own versions of that From Russia With Love scene, with Daniel Craig ultimately emerging as the right Bond at the right time. Unlike his predecessors, Craig was able to play the part from birth to death as it were, showing audiences how his “00” career began in Casino Royale and ended in 2021’s No Time to Die.
Asked if there are any actors he’s rooting to see inherit Bond’s license to kill in Denis Villeneuve’s movie, Campbell suggests that there’s a perfect Bond out there — we just haven’t met him yet. “There are no established standouts like Pierce,” he says. “Pierce was a perfect Bond for his time. But Daniel wasn’t Daniel Craig when he got the part, and all credit to Barbara Broccoli for pushing him. So what you’re looking for is another Daniel Craig, someone who isn’t necessarily a star.”
“Frankly, you don’t need a star,” Campbell adds. “James Bond is the star and the film is the star. They just need to find a terrific actor who looks right for the part.”
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