SPECTRE production notes appear online

SPECTRE promotional art

Production notes for SPECTRE, the 24th James Bond film, have APPEARED ONLINE at a website called The Bearded Trio.

Production notes are sent to theaters to promote upcoming films. The SPECTRE promotional notes include plot details and comments from those involved with making the film. Here are some non-spoiler excerpts from the SPECTRE notes.

When approaching the 24th James Bond movie, SPECTRE, from Albert R. Broccoli’s EON Productions, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and Sony Pictures Entertainment, the filmmakers were keen to ensure that the film followed on closely from its predecessor, the $1.1 billion global smash Skyfall. Daniel Craig, of course, is back for his fourth outing as 007, while the characters of Q (played by Ben Whishaw) and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) both return after their reintroduction to the series in Skyfall. The new M (Ralph Fiennes) also returns.

The chance to explore all these characters’ stories was of vital importance to Sam Mendes, who is back for a second stint in the director’s chair. “It all starts from character with me,” begins the Academy Award®-winner, “and I wanted to explore all sorts of different aspects of the characters that I’d left behind in Skyfall. We had populated MI6 with a whole new generation of people — a new M, a new Moneypenny and a new Q. I wanted to let those relationships develop and grow.”

Soon after, the production notes paint a picture of Bond getting his mojo back in SPECTRE.

“Skyfall was an entirely reactive movie as far as Bond was concerned,” explains Mendes. “In the first sequence he was pursuing somebody with all his old focus and drive, but he gets shot before the credits even roll and for the rest of the movie he is one step behind Javier Bardem’s character, Silva. You could even argue that at the end of Skyfall he has failed. He has not kept M alive, and though Silva’s death is a victory for Bond, there are other elements that are failures. Hence, with SPECTRE, I wanted to give him a chance of redemption.”

EON Productions’ Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, long-serving producers of the franchise, agree. “I think this film is very much about the empowerment of Bond,” says Broccoli, “and with Daniel portraying the character, he does this with such enormous integrity that we really feel what he is going through, emotionally as well as physically.”

Of course, we’re also told this isn’t your grandfather’s SPECTRE.

“What we’ve got here is a kind of creation myth at play,” says Mendes. “We are not adhering to any previous version of the SPECTRE story. We are creating our own version. Our film is a way of rediscovering SPECTRE and the super villain, setting him up again for the next generation.”

If you want to read all the production notes (and don’t mind spoilers), CLICK HERE. If you’re spoiler adverse, you can always book mark it and save it for reading later. You won’t see any spoilers when you first open up the page. Included in the notes are biographies of the cast and crew.

The Bearded Trio is a site mostly about “celebrating all the work from George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and John Williams.” But it has also printed production notes from movies such as Ant-Man and Pixels.