There was tremendous pressure on all the
writers, and Cubby (and Harry, when he was there) to make each one bigger than the last. Better
somehow was synonymous with bigger because the audience was by now used to seeing the most
unbelievable production and locales, and whatever, in every picture. The feeling of the studio (I mean
United Artists and Cubby) was that if you pulled your horns in, and made a smaller picture, they would be
disappointed. I think, for instance, the best stunt in any Bond picture is the ski jump in the beginning of
The Spy Who Loved Me. It was racking your brain over and over again to try and come up with something
that hadn't been done. At that particular point I did a rewrite on Spy before they started shooting, and it
was the first time in a long time I had looked at a Bond script fresh. It was sitting there, overlong, and not
quite focused, but I found myself just grinning and roaring with laughter as I went through what was
there. The ski jump was in there already, and Jaws, as a character, was already in it, and so on.
That kind
of giant meal, of all those things combined, is what the audience was used to. I think now there s going to
be a change, principally because, as the last one showed, Bonds are no longer unique in terms of showing
special effects. Everyone's showing special effects; Star Wars, Close Encounters, I worked on Superman
for a year and a half. All of those pictures now are in direct competition with Bond, and I think what
Bond is going to do what Cubby feels like doing is play his other strong card which is to make a
tougher, harder picture with a strong line of real tension; a real love affair, whatever.
M: There's a two headed thing here. Let's take You Only Live Twice. Once you have a helicopter
come by with a giant magnet and pick a car up off the road, and dump it out in the ocean it's a
staggering thing to look at. Once you say to an audience all's fair; we can do that , it's awful tough to
keep a serious plot line going. You have so many tools available, so many outlandish things which an
audience is not only used to, but they want to see, they got indoctrinated into it, and that's when I say
Bond became Disney, in a certain way. It became an entertainment; it became an afternoon out, where for
two hours you were going to see stuff you never saw before.
B: To get back to the character.
M: Yes, get back to the character. I think what happened to the character, to the Bond movies, is perfectly logical seen from that point of view, if you take as the departure point the car in Goldfinger. The final proof seemed to be that, with some exceptions, the grosses kept getting higher and higher. Golden Gun was disappointing, but I think it was a disappointing film anyway. Outside of that, the grosses kept building. Spy Who Loved Me did wonderfully.
B: Diamonds Are Forever you were brought in for a rewrite. Live and Let Die you actually wrote. I think two things probably are very closely linked: the fact that you had to make a new direction for bringing Roger Moore in, and the fact that there is... well, Diamonds had jokes, but Live and Let Die is a comedy.
M: That was the departure point, in a different way. When I wrote the script, we had no idea who Bond was going to be. The script was written and finished before Roger was cast. Having had the experience of OHMSS, United Artists was desperately concerned that the film be, above all, entertaining. They didn't know who the hell was going to play Bond; it got down to Roger or Burt Reynolds, actually, to play James Bond.
B: How could they even consider an American?
M: Cubby was the man who vetoed Burt Reynolds. I must say the best people at the time were voting for Burt Reynolds.
B: How could they consider him?
M: I don't know, but Cubby was the one who had the veto power, and put his foot down and said Bond has to be played by an Englishman and that s that. They had, obviously, a giant investment in the Bond pictures and an interest in making sure there was a continuing series of them. Burt Reynolds was just at that point where he was really getting hot and he would entertain the proposition of doing a Bond, so they thought about it seriously. Just like when I came on Diamonds are Forever. Sean was not definitely set yet and they had John Gavin in the box, waiting. They had a deal with him that he was going to play it if Sean didn't.
B: Anyway, about comedy: Even without Roger Moore's "darlings" and all the other Mooreisms that were done because they knew they had a hot property in Moore as Moore, it still is just less serious...
M: Yes, definitely. I think the pictures very intentionally took that tack at the time. It started from the studio, Cubby, and Harry, and filtered on down, because the audience was starting to expect the kind of production, and the kind of, to use a bad cliche word, romp that seemed to work. I mean, the audience seemed to like it. The more unsure they were, in the case of Live and Let Die, of having a new Bond, the more one wanted to balance it on the other side. I think David Picker said to me, though I'm not quoting him exactly, I want to have enough stuff in this picture so that no matter who plays Bond, it is a terriffic, entertaining, evening in the movies, for anybody. There was no guarantee that whoever the new Bond was was going to be accepted by the audience at all. Especially... it wasn't a question that George Lazenby had done it and now there was going to be another Bond; Sean had come back, and Diamonds did very, very well, principally I think, because Sean returned. I was in theatres many times when in the beginning of the film he said My name is Bond, James Bond and audiences cheered because he was back. That's a terrible burden to lay on another actor. So Roger was going to be, in the beginning, for lack of a better word, protected as much as possible. Also, Roger's strong points as an actor are in exactly opposite spheres as Sean. I used to use the analogy that Sean could sit at a dinner table with a beautiful girl and he could either lean over and kiss her, or he could stick a knife in her under the table, and turn around and say something funny to the waiter, and the audience would laugh at either one. Roger can lean across the table and kiss the girl, but if he sticks a knife in a girl he looks nasty, somehow. Sean looks like a bastard; Roger doesn't look like a bastard, Roger looks like a nice man. Roger also plays with language better. Oddly enough, he's more like Fleming's Bond than Sean.
B: People keep saying that but...
M: The Bond in the books; oh, he's much more like him. The Etonian dropout and so on. As I'm sure you know, when Fleming first saw Sean he called him that BLEEP lorry driver . Later on, he got to love Sean, he adored him. That s why in Golden Gun he gave Bond Scot heritage; that Bond was going to retire somewhere up in Scotland. The original James Bond was British; I mean English through and through, and a Scottish accent is anathema to the English purist. I would say Fleming s ideal Bond, the way I picture him, is a young David Niven, but slightly more athletic.