Bond 25 To Be Honoured At Tribute To The Crafts

Posted December 20, 2021 by AI

The American Cinematheque announced today the honourees for their inaugural Tribute to the Crafts, which will take place on Wednesday 26 January in Los Angeles. Among those being celebrated include Stunt Coordinators Lee Morrison and Olivier Schneider for their work on Bond 25’s incredible stunt sequences and Billie Eilish and Finneas for their No Time To Die theme song.

Tribute to the Crafts will honour those who are at the very heart of filmmaking, and have exhibited extraordinary work behind the camera, over the past year. The evening will celebrate individuals in fourteen categories covering all aspects of filmmaking and will showcase clips from each of their respective films.

Apple Announce The Sound Of 007 Doc

Posted December 15, 2021 by AI

Apple today announced “The Sound of 007,” a new feature documentary about the remarkable history of six decades of James Bond music. The documentary will make its global debut on Apple TV+ to mark the 60th anniversary of the James Bond film series in October 2022.

“The Sound of 007” will go behind the lens into the greatest movie franchise in history from the genesis of Dr. No and the iconic 007 theme song all the way to No Time To Die, mixing heartfelt interviews with incredible James Bond archive material.

Signed, Sealed And XXL: The Art Editions

Posted December 14, 2021 by AI

Following on from the launch of The James Bond Archives No Time To Die Edition, Taschen releases two very special signed and numbered Art Editions. Each edition of the XXL sized book is signed by Daniel Craig and producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli and is accompanied by a museum quality photographic print signed by photographer Greg Williams. Just 500 have been made of each.

As the most complete account of the making of the film series, the XXL tome has been put together following unrestricted access to the Bond Archives and features stories from 150 members of cast and crew. Among the 1,007+ images are many previously unseen stills, on-set photos, memos, documents, storyboards, posters, and designs, plus unused concepts, and alternative designs.

Each Art Edition is signed and comes in a clamshell box together with its companion print in a portfolio and a certificate of authenticity. The numbered and signed prints are iconic images of Daniel Craig as 007, shot by Greg Williams – the Casino Royale (2006) Edition features the film’s teaser poster, while the No Time To Die (2021) Edition features Daniel Craig and Léa Seydoux in the DB5. Both editions are now available to order at 007Store.

In Love With Gold – “Its Divine Heaviness”

Posted December 10, 2021 by AI

“This is gold, Mr. Bond. All my life I’ve been in love with its colour… its brilliance, its divine heaviness.” Auric Goldfinger kick started an appreciation of all things gold which has run through the film series ever since. To celebrate, Zippo has released a precious James Bond 18k Gold Lighter, made in a limited series of just seven.

The launch sees the classic Zippo windproof lighter elevated to supreme luxury status. Crafted with a solid 18k gold and a gold-flashed lighter insert, the lighter pays homage to Goldfinger with the iconic quote, “This is gold, Mr. Bond” elegantly engraved onto its face.

Each 18k gold lighter is expertly handmade in Zippo’s Pennsylvania workshop, where craftsmen use their metalworking skill to sculpt gold – a notoriously soft precious metal. After the quote is engraved, the reverse side is engraved with the 007 logo and its unique 00 number, before being hand buffed to a reflective sheen. It’s then hallmarked in England and presented in a velvet-lined walnut wood case with a certificate of authenticity.

A maximum of just seven of these handsome collectible lighters will be produced, each with its unique 00 number. The James Bond 18k Gold Lighter is exclusively available to order at the 007Store here, priced £25,000.

Lasers, Norwegian Ice And Explosions

Posted December 7, 2021 by AI

When you want to add texture to a frozen lake, or cover the tracks of a fishtailing DB5, the man to speak to is No Time To Die Visual Effects Supervisor Charlie Noble. No stranger to the world of 007, Charlie worked on GoldenEye before returning to work on Bond 25 and has a CV littered with VXF standout movies including The Mummy, Batman Begins, Captain America: The First Avenger, Mission: Impossible – Fallout and Jason Bourne. We caught up with Charlie to find out more about the invisible effects he created for Bond’s 25th screen adventure …

(This interview contains No Time To Die plot spoilers)

What is the role of your team on a Bond film?

The work we do and the invisible effects we create are all about supporting the other departments. I see visual effects as an extension to all the other departments really. We had some amazing locations to work on from Ben Piltz. Lee Morrison’s team did some brilliant stunts and Chris Corbould produced some of his usual ingenious special effects. So we are standing on the shoulders of some pretty big giants there. We get called in when things can’t always be done for real – and then we make the impossible possible. We couldn’t really blow up an entire island or a building in London at dusk, so it’s better to do it within the computer. We enhance practical effects, smooth out some of the changeable lighting conditions when we’re shooting exterior work, and create set extensions to continue the fantastic work of Mark Tildesley.

What is the scope of VFX in No Time To Die?

It starts with choosing anything that’s not practical in camera, for whatever reason. They can be tiny, little things or they can be really big things. You’re dealing with the practicalities of everyday filmmaking – sometimes you might have some lights in shot or a camera track, so we have to paint them out: that’s the bread and butter for us. The easy stuff all the way up to how to sink a boat or blow up an island – things that you probably wouldn’t easily be able to do for real. So it varies but on this film, we had around 1,500 shots scattered throughout the movie. I would say that we touched – to varying degrees – and were involved with, close to one in every three shots across the film. Everything from laser beams on rifles through to bubbles in the water for the trawler scene.

What are the challenges then working on location?

Knowing that you’re only there for a limited amount of time to capture as much of the environment as possible – just in case anything crops up later – for those moments that are unforeseen so that we can recreate things if we have to. That’s the main part of our work. You’re there to make sure that everything shot is how we like it, but if there are visual effects set-ups to do, we need to be comfortable that what we’re shooting is achievable later on. It’s great to go to these fantastic places because the richness does come through and you can’t really replicate that. Shooting outside does throw out the usual challenges of changeable light and changeable weather conditions.

Can you share a scene where this happened?

I think a good example of that was the opening Norway sequence. We travelled to an amazing remote frozen lake just to the east of Oslo in Norway. Cary’s vision as director was for this house by the lake. The lake would be covered in this thick ice – the Norwegians call it steel ice. He wanted it to be an early morning, misty look. Cary and Linus, our cinematographer, selected one hero shot which had the perfect balance of this beautiful slightly pinky, early morning sky with a lovely layer of SFX mist. We built this CG version of the environment and we could then line up all the other angles that had been shot practically and use this as a guide as to how to grade the footage so that everything matched. We then also stripped in our CG ice. We tried to clear a large portion of the lake with the ice rink polishing machine but it never really cut through the top crusty layer of mushy frozen crystals and it didn’t really give us the deep, steel ice that we wanted to show so we had to strip ours in for all the shots running out onto the ice, which looks gorgeous actually. We are only adding in as much as is necessary. It was all shot with IMAX cameras and it looked pretty stunning on screen.

What were some of the other complex elements on No Time To Die?

There were a number of complicated setups. In terms of the number of locations that we knitted together, it would be the Norway safe house escape scene. That involved eight different locations being knitted together. Bond arriving in Norway was filmed in Norway and Pinewood; various locations for the car chase were between Norway, Scotland and Salisbury Plain. So each time we’re switching locations, we’re having to strip the backgrounds from one location into the incoming shot, just to keep continuity going. In the car chase, a lot of it was shot practically but every now and again we needed to push cars closer together so that certain action beats were more telegraphed. That sort of sequence is primarily driven by Lee and Chris but it’s a good example of how we’re all working in tandem. Every now and again we as VFX get involved to support the narrative.

You said earlier you couldn’t blow up a building for real, so what did your team do for the London lab scenes?

We see the tower block exploding from the exterior. It was toned down a bit from its original idea of the building fully exploding just to show that it’s a targeted attack on the lab. The villains weren’t necessarily wanting to blow the whole place up, just one area. We shot various plates in Canada Square in Canary Wharf for this sequence and we did aerial work as well. We gave it nice street lighting, tweaked the sky and made it look pretty to give us that lovely mirror effect that Cary was after as the whole city was reflected in the side of this building. It did look gorgeous. We did subtle work in that scene like adding and enhancing the laser beams of the sights on the rifles.

Which are your favourite effects that viewers might miss on a first watch?

I think the Norway ice work was gorgeous. That and the river chase, that was pretty special as well. Matera was fun too. There’s a lot of subtle stuff in there – we come out of a CG tunnel to reveal the whole of Matera. Whenever we have material of Matera, we’re putting the bridge in from a neighbouring town. We cleaned up a lot of 21st century clutter that was in shot – aerials, satellite dishes, cranes and anything that made it not look as quite as pretty as it really was. Then there’s the chase scene in the DB5 and we had to paint elements of those scenes out like tyre marks from previous takes. Once you get into what we call ‘The Donut Square’, Chris Corbould had rigged it with pyro that he clad onto this 1,000 year old square. We obviously couldn’t damage it but when the DB5 performed the donut move, the pyro went off, the bullet hits went off on the masonry as the car went around in a circle. Bond deploys the smoke as he exits and we needed to add a bit more just to give it that continuous donut look that the team was after. A nice cylinder of smoke as the DB5 exits the square.

Did the party scene in Cuba require VFX work?

Yes, we added to the look of the prosthetic make-up for the boils appearing on the faces when the iridescent mist containing Heracles comes down on the SPECTRE agents. We had to enhance a few of those to make the boils grow, certainly on a close up on one of the first guys to go down. The other thing we did was give a lovely sort of rainbow iridescent quality to the mist as it falls.

Were your team heavily involved with the trawler scene in Jamaica?

Absolutely. We filmed the real trawler in Jamaica and we had our scanning and texturing crew with us throughout so we could build a CG version of it for later use. Chris Corbould set an explosion off on the real thing so the shot of the plane flying away was created for real. We added a few extra bits and pieces that skid across the top of the water and we cleaned it up and got rid of the island in the shot but, pretty much, it was all in camera. It was a real explosion but we added a bunch of detritus and extra splashes. We added some more CG bubbles in there as well just to give it a bit more frenetic activity.

Chases, Jumps And Stunts Of No Time To Die

Posted December 4, 2021 by AI

What does it take to put a 007 stunt together? No Time To Die Stunt Coordinator Lee Morrison and Supervising Stunt Coordinator Olivier Schneider explain why there’s no bigger challenge than being on a Bond film and doing the stunts for real.

No Time To Die Breaks New Records

Posted December 2, 2021 by AI

No Time To Die has now become the third biggest film of all time at the UK box office. This week it reached £95.5 million which overtakes Spectre and now only Skyfall and Star Wars: The Force Awakens are ahead of it in the all-time list. No Time To Die continues to thrill audiences around the globe and has now made more than $758 million.

Tommy Lane (1937 – 2021)

Posted December 1, 2021 by AI

Tommy Lane, who played the stylish henchman Adam in Live and Let Die (1973), has died aged 83.

Fans will remember him for scenes opposite Roger Moore’s 007, including a standout sequence where Adam leaves Bond on an island surrounded by crocodiles and alligators, ending in an epic speed boat chase on the Bayou waters.

Lane, who also worked on films including Shaft and Cotton Comes To Harlem, died on Monday in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Pinewood Name Building In Honour Of Peter Lamont

Posted November 29, 2021 by AI

Pinewood Studios have renamed their East Side Complex building in honour of legendary Production Designer Peter Lamont. Peter worked on 18 James Bond films starting with Goldfinger (1964) and working on all but one of the films until Casino Royale (2006). Tomorrow Never Dies was the only James Bond film that Lamont was unable to work on over 41 years due to his commitment to Titanic. He was nominated for three Academy Awards for his work on Fiddler On The Roof (1971), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and Aliens (1986), all were shot at Pinewood. His fourth nomination, for Titanic (1997), won him the Oscar.

The tribute was hosted by the British Film Designers’ Guild and Pinewood Studios and attended by family, friends and colleagues from the industry including Producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli.

The Art Of The Title Sequence

Posted November 26, 2021 by AI

Since 1995, Daniel Kleinman has designed eight iconic James Bond movie title sequences, including the opening to the latest 007 adventure No Time To Die.

“I was always a fan of the title sequences,” he explains. “I was involved in art and music and was in the right place at the right time to start doing music videos in the early 1980s. When MTV got started, a lot of feature films used MTV and videos as a way, not only of publicising the songs and the bands but also the films. I used to do quite a lot of videos and because of that I got asked to do the music video for Licence To Kill by Gladys Knight. That video was my salute to the title sequences on James Bond, which I had always liked.”

After working on all but one 007 film since 1995’s GoldenEye, where does Kleinman start when coming up with the theme for a new Bond title sequence? “I start with the script and look for moments that stand out,” he explains. “I think the moment when I started to think, ‘Ah, I’ve got it. I’ve got the hang of it’ on No Time To Die was when I thought about the connection to the Heracles virus, a swarm of microscopic nanobots that infect Bond’s DNA which, without wishing to spoil anything, becomes crucial towards the end of the film’s storyline. I began to think, ‘What would James Bond’s DNA look like? It’s made of guns!’ Bond is an assassin and once I saw the structure of the double helix with the Walther PPKs firing, with the trails of the bullets making the faces of the people he’s come across in the past and killing being in his DNA, I realised I had the perfect hook and a moment to pin everything onto.”

Kleinman worked closely with director Cary Joji Fukunaga and producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli to create the sequence. How did Kleinman find working with Fukunaga compared to the other 007 directors he’s worked with? “Cary was great, he had some great ideas and gave good feedback which helps in the collaborative process. It’s entirely ironic though because Cary wanted to shoot the movie on film and he was very into it having a retro feel to the quality of the visuals. I was kind of going backwards in time. I couldn’t actually shoot on film because some of the things I worked on were too technical to shoot on film. I had to shoot on video to make it look retro. I had to put on artificial film grain and an artificial weave to make it look like film. I’m actually using modern technology in order to make it look like it used to before the technology came along.”

As with all of Kleinman’s work on Bond the No Time To Die credits feature an array of compelling motifs and multiple layers of symbolism. “There are quite a few little nods to things from years gone by. The falling statues at the beginning has two ideas weaved around it. On one hand it’s Britannia falling down and breaking apart. One of the themes in the film is that M has slightly lost his way and it’s not Britain’s finest hour. Britain is doing something which isn’t great, creating this technology which was actually quite maleficent and Bond is almost fighting against that. Bond is almost fighting against his own side. That’s how we get Britannia crumbling at the beginning but also it harks back to GoldenEye with the Soviet Union statues crumbling. Whether anybody else picks up on those nuances we’ll have to see.”

How does Kleinman decide which names get to appear over which graphics and can he save the best bit for when his own name appears? “One forgets that the title sequence is just a lovely excuse to have the names of the people who worked on the films and celebrate their work as best as possible and, as long as it’s not boring, I’m allowed to create some pictures to put with them.” When asked if there are specific rules about where most of the names have to appear Kleinman explains that “the list of names actually changes and the order of the names can move up and down. It’s not until quite late in the process when I get the final list of names, by which point, the graphics have been made, so I tend to not worry too much about who appears where and how long they are going to be up for. Where they are placed is quite coincidental actually.”

As Daniel Craig’s swansong, No Time To Die is infused with an air of nostalgia (the use of We Have All The Time In The World in the soundtrack is especially poignant) so we ask Kleinman whether he had something similar in mind when thinking about the tone of the credits sequence? “I wanted the whole sequence to bring Bond together from across the years in one way,” he agrees. “Which is also what Cary was doing in the main film, tying up all these loose ends and coming to a conclusion bearing relevance to previous films. There are the Dr. No style dots at the beginning as a nod to the past, even though my dots are a little more sophisticated now in 2021 than the original dots made by Maurice Binder. Technology allows me to make them fly around then blow away and do stuff which Maurice could not do at that time, but they still purposely look like those dots. It was nice to repeat those.”

Bond fans may have recognised items including the inner workings of a clock, sands of time and an hourglass similar to those seen in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service indicating the theme of time. “There is something even more subtle than the hourglass and time in there. The colours are closely linked to the films of the 1960’s” says Kleinman. “I really like the title sequences of that era and the likes of You Only Live Twice and the nod to that time is the mix of colour combinations. I was conscious of No Time To Die’s title sequence having echoes of those previous films through style and in the imagery of some of the people from previous films such as Vesper Lynd and Blofeld. Those characters are still relevant within the story of this movie.”

So what does Kleinman feel is the secret to making a classic Bond title sequence? “There are a lot of things to put in the main titles to ensure it’s jam packed with stuff and you have to be able to enjoy it initially without knowing all those references on the first viewing but I think die-hard fans will enjoy some of those references. I’m sure there will be people who miss them the first time but will get them eventually.”

Filmmakers Attend International Film Festivals

Posted November 23, 2021 by AI

Director Cary Fukunaga attended the Stockholm International Film Festival last week to take part in a “Conquering Hollywood” masterclass for young filmmakers at the Bio Victor Cinema, discussing his first steps in the industry and his experience making No Time To Die. He also introduced a special screening of the 25th James Bond film with actor David Dencik, who plays Valdo, at the Park Theatre.

Fukunaga was later joined by Director of Cinematography Linus Sandgren in Toruń for the CameraImage International Film Festival. The two took part in a masterclass together, expanding on how they established visual connections to previous 007 films while also creating a new look for Bond’s latest adventure. On the final evening of the festival, Fukunaga and Sandgren attended the closing ceremony to present ‘tadpole’ awards to young aspiring filmmakers (awards for the professionals are ‘frog’ awards) before introducing a screening of No Time To Die, which was selected as the closing film of the festival.

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