Roger Moore interviewed by Jeff Westhoff

Northwest Herald film critic and HMSS friend Jeffrey Westhoff had the excellent opportunity to interview Roger Moore. The interview is on the Web site of the CHICAGO SUN-TIMES.

An excerpt:

Speaking by phone from the St. Regis Hotel in New York (where Bond stayed in the novel “Live and Let Die”), Moore said the publisher of his autobiography, “My Word Is my Bond,” approached him about writing another book focusing on 007 to coincide with the 50th anniversary hoopla. “They thought it might be a good time to bring out a book about my opinion of Bond,” Moore said.

He writes his opinions in a tongue-in-cheek style that reflects his portrayal of Bond. Moore frequently refers to Bond as “Jim” or “Jimmy,” and he doesn’t worry if this will further infuriate Sean Connery purists who complain Moore never took the character seriously. “That’s the way I played it,” he said. “That was my reaction to the character I was expected to play. He wasn’t a real spy. The idea that he’s known by every barman in the world, that he has a taste for martinis shaken not stirred.”

(snip)
In the new book, Moore remarks that recent Bond theme songs have been forgettable. He said Adele’s “Skyfall” theme breaks that trend. “The song is absolutely marvelous. It has the complete John Barry flavor. Unmistakably a Bond song.”

Moore attended a private screening of the new film several weeks ago “when [the print] was literally still wet.” He was “absolutely knocked out by it.” He praised Sam Mendes’ direction and was impressed with the way “Skyfall” presents a new side to 007.

“Bond shows a lot of vulnerability in it, but also that he’s a hard nut,” Moore said. “And I don’t think anybody can do that better than Daniel Craig.”

You can read more of Westhoff’s interview by BY CLICKING HERE.  

Well done, sir.

Amazon acquires exclusive North American rights to publish all 14 Ian Fleming James Bond spy titles

The books will be available summer 2012 from Amazon.com Inc.’s AMZN Thomas & Mercer imprint, which specializes in mysteries and thrillers. Amazon will also give the books a new look.

Read the entire WSJ story here. It’s also mentioned on the Ian Fleming Publications WEB SITE.

Quantum of Solace’s political point of view

Four years after it was released, Quantum of Solace can still stir up debate among 007 fans. One topic is whether the 22nd James Bond film had a political point of view. Director Marc Forster, in a November 2008 interivew with New York magazine, said it did.

Marc Forster while directing Quantum of Solace

Some excerpts:

“It’s like I worked under this political regime with extreme censorship,” Forster plainly admits, describing his arrangement with Bond’s producers, the infamously controlling Broccoli family. “I had to subversively inject my ideas to make the movie my own.”
(snip)
“I question the role that these Secret Service agencies play today—is their role really to protect the country? Or the interest of a few?”
(snip)
Most radical, Forster argues that “Bond isn’t a clear good guy—the villain and Bond overlap.” In fact, the director—never a Bond fanatic—is surprised that 007 has survived this long, “especially as a colonialist or imperialistic character. That’s why you have to put a dent in him, because those powers can’t survive. It’s the end of the American world power in the next few decades.”

Maybe the article was read by a lot of 007 fans at the time (we admit to missing it), but it doesn’t seem to be cited that often in all the message board debates. Anyway, to read the entire article, JUST CLICK HERE.

MI6 Confidential – “The Art of Bond” (Issue #13) Available Now

Peter Allen and our good friends at MI6 have informed HMSS that the MI6 Confidential Issue #13 “The Art of Bond” is now available to order on-line.

You can read the MI6 press release here, and below are a couple of the layouts and articles. (Go to the MI6 website for full details.)

Exceptionally fine shot(s), gentlemen! The photographs, graphics, commentary, and color are all top-notch. Nice work all around.

The HMSS Team

Omega Seamaster Co-Axial 300 M: Commemorating 50 years of James Bond films

With special thanks to our good friend Dell Deaton, it is a pleasure to release information about the new Omega Seamaster watch commemorating 50 years of James Bond films. Visit Dell’s twitter account here for additional information and more photographs.

TimeZone.com has the official press release here

No price communicated as of yet. Below are pics. (Click to enlarge.)

Note the diamond at the seven on the dial, the “50” in red on the chronometer, and the use of Binder’s gun-barrel design on the back.

Cool, and understated. Just the way HMSS likes it. Well done.

The HMSS Editors

Ian Fleming Responds to Concerned Fan Over the Death of 007 (1957)

Ian Fleming caused quite a stir in 1957 with the release of From Russia with Love, due in no small part to what seemed to be the death of James Bond at the novel’s close. In fact, so concerned were 007 fans that the author quickly amassed thousands of worried letters. Ever the storyteller, Fleming responded by way of charming letters similar to the one linked below.

HMSS found this to be particularly fascinating. Fleming writing as Sir James Molony? Genius!

The HMSS Interview: Jeffery Deaver

We were intrigued to learn, in May of last year, that the next official James Bond novelist would be American (and Chicago’s own!) crime writer Jeffery Deaver. Best known for his Lincoln Rhyme detective series (its first entry, The Bone Collector , was filmed in 1999 with Denzel Washington as the quadriplegic detective), and his Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award-winning World War II thriller Garden of Beasts, he may have been viewed as a surprise choice for the assignment. But the author of these brainy mysteries also has a personal fondness for scuba diving, skiing, fast cars, and guns, as well as having started his career as a journalist. Sound like anybody we know?

“The novel [now titled Carte Blanche – ed.] will maintain the persona of James Bond as Fleming created him and the unique tone the author brought to his books, while incorporating my own literary trademarks: detailed research, fast pacing and surprise twists,” Deaver tells us, and we’re looking forward to see how he does it.

On last year’s book tour for his novel Edge, he made a stop in Franklin, Tennessee, at the “Killer Nashville” mystery writers conference, where he was Guest of Honor. HMSS sent our good friend — and Deaver’s fellow lawyer — Mark Henderson to chat with the author about his thoughts on tackling the 007 saga.

Jeffrey Deaver, proud owner of some groovy HMSS swag

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HMSS: George Bernard Shaw said that the English and Americans are two people separated by a common language. How intimidating is it for you to not only attempt to write an iconic character, but do so in a foreign idiom?

JEFFERY DEAVER: It is a writer’s responsibility, as a novelist, to step into the minds of all his or her characters. Doing that is something that I happen to enjoy a lot. I am a rather empathetic person. I don’t mean that in a good sense, that I care about people necessarily. What I mean is that it is easy for me to take a look at somebody, if I know anything about their life, through either research or having lived these sixty years, and write about them with some credibility. I have written about elderly African American characters. I’ve written about teenagers. I’ve written about women. I’ve written about heroes. I’ve written about bad people. And I seem to have a facility, I won’t call it talent, but I have a facility with a little bit of diligence and research, to step into the mind of someone who is different from who I am. So that has not posed a challenge at all in creating the Bond character as we now know him, although he is British…technically Scottish and his mother was Swiss, but he is a British citizen.

HMSS: Ian Fleming adjusted that over the years to accommodate for Sean Connery.

JD: Right, and we didn’t find out until reading Bond’s obituary [in You Only Live Twice]. So writing about a modern British agent is not then particularly daunting. I did a great deal of research and spend a lot of time in Great Britain, so that doesn’t bother me at all. I will say one thing: I am extremely aware of the responsibility of creating a character who echoes in the time of his creation. He was as you know, and as readers of the books know, unique in thriller fiction. Especially when he came about, we had never seen anyone like that before. Of course, suave and sophisticated, and yet a bit existential. He said, and this is not an exact quote, that he lived life to the fullest because he expected to be dead by the mandatory retirement age from the SIS, which was in the 40’s. 45 I think. So I am creating a character that has those elements that Ian Fleming created, and yet I am bringing them into a story of my own. So, is it daunting? It is no more challenging than writing any other character of mine. I have set books in locations other than those I am indigenous to, through research, and one just has to roll up one’s sleeves and get the job done.

HMSS: Fleming’s James Bond character was very much a product of World War II — forged in the crucible of a truly existential conflict. That’s not only where his fierce loyalty to England (and to M, who for Bond personifies England) comes from, but also his carpe diem attitude towards life. Your James Bond will have been born in 1980. What will have made him into the man we understand to be, and will recognize as, 007?

JD:The question was posed to me once, how can you create a hero, and model him on an essential cold war hero, where the great bear of the Soviet Union was the great threat on the horizon? My response was, how many attacks were there by Russia on the soil of England or the United States during that period? And the answer is none…they did a lot of bad things, assassination and so forth, but nothing like 07/07, the bombing of London, nothing like the Madrid train bombing, nothing like our 9/11 attack and some of the crazy people in America who have tried to carry out other attacks. The threat wears a different guise, but it is nonetheless a genuine threat: good versus evil. My Bond will be a veteran of Afghanistan. He was a soldier over there. And so he is a patriot. He will do anything he needs to do for Queen and country. He believes in freedom and democracy. He believes that bad guys should not get away with bad things. So that was one of the easier transitions actually. He still has the same carpe diem attitude because he puts his life on the line every day. And in my book, without giving away details, there are situations where he is threatened, not only his life (I am not going to kill him off in the first third of the book), but could he sustain a tragic injury forever? I am not saying yes, I am not saying no, but certainly, he is willing to risk everything to make sure the Realm is defended. So, he is not going to miss a moment of life.

Hodder & Stoughton (UK) cover

HMSS: Was it your choice to set the new Bond novel in the present day, and if so, why?

JD:It was a mutual decision. When the Fleming Estate contacted me, I said that I would only want to do it if it were set in the present day, and they said we agree, that is what we were hoping for too. And the reason for that is the original books were not period pieces, of course. They were a product of their time, and Fleming, being a former journalist and intelligence agent, gave them the Cold War ambience. He was a great writer of manners, as they used to call it. So he would look at people in his books, or rather James Bond would, and draw conclusions about them. And they were right on about classes of society, men and women, attitudes of course reflecting the spirit of the time… not quite what it is today…and that is my Bond will be doing. Exactly the same thing.

HMSS: Fleming had been a journalist prior to writing the Bond novels. He credited that experience with giving him attention to detail and pacing, not to mention being able to write with some dispatch. Does your experience as a journalist enhance your writing in a similar fashion, or do you find it gave you other skills that are important? Do you feel like being a former journalist will help you carry on the Bond tradition?

JD: I had not thought about it, but I think it is probably true. I have a very meat and potatoes style, a journalistic style, as Fleming did. Although, he was capable of brilliant word-smithing. Go back and look at the beginning of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, where he is seeing the woman who turns out to be his wife, Tracy. He observes her, in what is a masterful use of flashback. This scene where he is at the beach and Bond is reflecting on his life, as a child going to the beach, responding to when the sun is going down. It is brilliant writing. I aspire to do that, but I do know that my writing style matches the narrative of my books so I am pretty content that I will produce a very satisfying prose.

HMSS: How much of a challenge is it to make the villains truly evil in the modern day, without making them look clichéd?

JD: This book as every other book of mine will have an emotional content to it. A thriller does no good if you do not feel the book in your heart. And you do not feel it in your heart if the characters are cliched or cardboard. I have created sympathetic characters on the good side that have faults, and I have created villains who are to me unique. I have not ever seen any characters like the villains I have created, and yet that resonate with some truth. They will not be cliches. They will be horrific and yet there will be a reason why they are horrific. To put it in context, look at a character like Hannibel Lector who did horrific things, yet had an odd sympathy. So that is the sort of atmosphere I am trying to bring to my book.

HMSS:Will any of Fleming’s recurring characters appear in your novel, and if so, which ones?

JD: I don’t want to say too much, but I will say that the core of his allies are drawn from to populate the book. I can say there will be no bad guys from the past. They are entirely my creation. So, let’s just say that characters like M, Bill Tanner the chief of staff, Miss Moneypenny, of course will be back.

HMSS:Fleming was influenced by reading the novels of Sapper and Buchan during his formative years. Besides Fleming, what authors would you say have had the most influence on your writing?

Simon & Shuster (US) cover

JD: Going back into classic mysteries, Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. Agatha Christie, by the way, was one of the masters of the twist. You don’t hear about her so much any more. The BBC had a Miss Marple series that was quite well done, and of course the Margaret Rutherford series which I saw when I was quite young. I sort of relate those to the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series. Rather broad Hollywood films for a larger appeal. The Holmes series with Jeremy Brett had a more subtle appeal. He was the Holmes for me. Anyway, those were major influences on me. As well as John le Carré, in terms of style, his writing is breathtaking. The intrigue within the intelligence community is fascinating. As far as hard-boiled fiction, I don’t read a lot of it. Mickey Spillane and so forth. Now international intrigue, Frederick Forsythe wrote one of my favorite books of all time, The Day of the Jackal. The original movie was excellent. And I also enjoyed Alistair MacLean. The books were quite lean. The late Elliot Kastner, who was a friend of mine, came up with the idea for Where Eagles Dare and talked MacLean into writing the screenplay, from which he later wrote a novel.

HMSS: You won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award from the British Crime Writer’s Association, for Garden of Beasts. The hero of that novel is a hitman for the mob who is sent by the United States government to kill a German who is in charge of organizing Nazi Germany’s re-armament. He is a hitman with a conscience and only kills bad guys. How will your James Bond compare to that character, Paul Schumann?

JD: It is not a coincidence that Schumann was who he was. The 00’s were sanctioned to commit assassinations for the government in the Fleming novels, and I think there are two references to this never reconciled there. There was a question whether it was awarded first so he could go kill, or afterwards, indicating that he had killed in the line of duty. My Bond will stay true to that, but you have to be kind of careful, because the SIS publically and vocally disavow targeted killings. The CIA does not here: they fire drones. The SIS has disavowed it. Anyway, Paul Schumann was a hitman with a conscience and James Bond is the same thing. For instance, in one of the Bond short stories, “The Living Daylights,” where he is supposed to kill an assassin in Berlin, when she turns out she is a female, he shoots her in the hand rather than kill her.

HMSS: What is your favorite James Bond movie, and why?

JD: From Russia With Love, because it was most true to the book. It was almost a literal interpretation of the book. What I really liked was the subtlety involved. None of the broad Hollywood techniques. It had Robert Shaw as one of the best villains of all time. It encapsulated the gritty spirit of the Fleming novels. I know fans enjoy some of the more recent films, and I would say that my second favorite is the new Casino Royale . It was exactly what I had pictured a high budget production of a Bond movie as being. There were no overly clever special effects. Just a good espionage thriller. And Daniel Craig is fantastic.

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Carte Blanche will be published on May 26 in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton, and in the USA on June 14 by Simon & Shuster. Mr. Deaver’s official website is JeffreyDeaver.com. HMSS’s interviewer Mark Henderson can be E-mailed here.. Thanks to both gentlemen for a terrific interview!

Roger Moore discusses A VIEW TO A KILL on MTV (1985)

Veteran HMSS contributor Jim Paul came across this little-seen video from 1985. Then a studio director at MTV, Jim assisted in writing the questions for Roger Moore who had come to the MTV studios to promote AVTAK. Jim jests, “If Nina (Blackwood) seems like she is “challenging” Roger, that’s my fault.”

It’s interesting that Mr. Moore knew the origin of the term “From A View To A Kill.” Also, was he really thinking he would do another Bond film after AVTAK? Really?!

HMSS thanks Mr. Paul.

See the video here:

Rest In Peace, John Barry Prendergast

We have lost a musical giant, and one of our true heroes. A supremely sad day.

Thank you, Mr. Barry.

U.N.C.L.E. wins Mister 8’s May Madness

The results have not been declared official but it appears The Man From U.N.C.L.E., a TV series that went off the air in January 1968, won the May Madness competition of fellow COBRA Mister 8’s May Madness.

The website hasn’t declared a winner but the voting was supposed to end at midnight last night, and the vote was 395 for U.N.C.L.E. and 197 for Queen & Country’s Tara Chace.

Mister 8 patterned the competition after the NCAA’s men’s basketball tournament, with James Bond and Jason Bourne being the “highest seeded” fictional spies. Tara Chace, created by writer Greg Rucka, defeated 007 in the first round. U.N.C.L.E., after narrowly defeating Get Smart in the initial round, knocked off Bourne.

UPDATE: Mister 8 on June 11 has officially declared The Man From U.N.C.L.E. the winner. We’ve alerted our headline as a result.