Times subscriptions?: new Barbara Broccoli interview

edited March 2013 in Bond 26 & Beyond Posts: 4,400
Barbara Broccoli: my lifelong affair with James Bond
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http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/film/article3711894.ece

May be some clues about B24 if anyone could open this up? Damn Times.

Comments

  • Posts: 7,653
    The are a business as well in the market to make some cash, expect this to be happening more and more in the near future.
  • Posts: 11,119
    Can someone post the entire article in here? Someone who has a subscription on The Times Online? I'm a great admirer of Babs and I love to read her insight.
  • doubleoegodoubleoego #LightWork
    Posts: 11,139
    SaintMark wrote:
    The are a business as well in the market to make some cash, expect this to be happening more and more in the near future.

    Yep! People said that the internet would be the death of the newspaper but online papers still need to generate revenue other than through their advertisers.
  • edited March 2013 Posts: 824
    I have a hard copy of the Times article. If no one posts a copy over the next few days I'll have a go at scanning and getting a copy here. Will have to wait until the weekend though.
  • Samuel001Samuel001 Moderator
    Posts: 13,350
    Thanks @PeterGreenhill.

    Do you know if there is any news in there? Talk of the next film at all?
  • At the start of the interview she states that she will talk about Bond but NOT about the future. So I'm afraid there is nothing at all about Bond24. An interesting article but no stunning info about future Bond movies.
  • Samuel001Samuel001 Moderator
    Posts: 13,350
    Oh, well. I guess we'll know all in two years anyway. ;)

    Even though the most important question has been answered, we'd still love to see the article so thanks for your effort @PeterGreenhill .
  • Sorry for the delay in posting the interview scan. A lot on right now. It will appear soon!
  • edited April 2013 Posts: 6,601
    She could just have gone for pleasure or do you see anybody in this film, she could be interested in for 24? Nice, how she defends Ben and a good example, how annoying fans can be.



    http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_look_of_love_2013/
  • Here's the article:

    Nobody knows him better: spy queen Barbara Broccoli talks about her life with 007 ... and the Daniel Craig effect

    Barbara Broccoli sits sipping from a mug of tea in her office at the family firm. Had her father run a pizza parlour, she suggests, she’d now be making pizzas. Instead we’re in a six-storey building at the Hyde Park end of Piccadilly. The ceilings are splendidly high. The purple-carpeted staircase is so broad you could probably drive a small sports car down it. And the firm’s most recent recipe, Skyfall, is the biggest earner in British cinema history. Some pizza parlour.

    Broccoli has been running the James Bond films for 20 years. She and her half-brother, Michael G. Wilson, took over the series after her father, the late Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, produced the first 16 of them. Since then they’ve been in charge of four Bond films starring Pierce Brosnan, three starring Daniel Craig, and have started work on the next Craig film. But without, as was widely reported last week, Skyfall director Sam Mendes.
    Broccoli is well-dressed, looks younger than 52 and talks in an accent that is, she admits, a mix of her American parentage and English upbringing. She agrees — with a flicker of “must we?” — to talk about Bond. “But I won’t talk about the future,” she says, friendly but firm, setting the parameters like a true producer.

    If that makes her sound a bit churlish — what else are you going to ask Barbara Broccoli about? Garlic bread? — then it should be pointed out that I’ve been invited into Bond HQ because she is producing a new West End musical, Once.

    Yes, when Broccoli takes time off from masterminding the biggest franchise in cinema, she likes to do a little moonlighting. “I can take a week off, maybe two weeks at a push,” she says cheerfully. “But I don’t do well doing nothing.”

    It is four years since she went with her daughter Angelica, then aged 16, to see Once at the cinema. They both loved this low-budget, low-key Irish film, a hymn to the power of music, which tracks the relationship between a thirtysomething Dublin busker and a Czech immigrant. And when Broccoli’s ex-husband, the American theatre producer Fred Zollo, mentioned that he knew someone interested in putting it on the stage, Broccoli made sure she was on the team. It is already a huge hit on Broadway after opening there a year ago, but the creators are all from the British Isles. Broccoli brought in John Tiffany, director of the National Theatre of Scotland’s hit Black Watch, who in turn brought in the Irish playwright Enda Walsh. They didn’t want to “ruin it” by making it too glossy. Even so, you cannot imagine dollar signs — or is it pound signs? — spinning in Broccoli’s eyes when she first saw the film.

    “But I’m motivated entirely by passion,” she insists. “You want to do good things. You want to do great stuff. You want to work with amazing people. And I wanted to see it! The idea was to bring a lot of interesting people together who could make it special.”
    So is that her role, whether in film or when producing Chariots of Fire or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the stage? Is she throwing a party? “I suppose so,” she says. “Expensive party! But Bond does take over your life for a good two-and-a-half, three years. So I feel like I decompress from Bond doing theatre.”

    She goes to the theatre a lot; she enthuses about Nicholas Hytner’s regime at the National, about Helen Mirren in The Audience. Her first stage production was 13 years ago: La Cava, a musical written by her mother, Dana. “I like to say that I got my love of movies from my father and my love of theatre from my mother.”

    Broccoli and Wilson always get credited jointly. Wilson is 18 years her senior, Dana’s son from her first marriage. Is there a hierarchy between them? “No, we have to agree on everything. Which, in business, we do. We don’t agree on politics or religion, we have the typical brother-sister disagreements on other things. But I can’t remember when we disagreed on something to do with work. We were educated by my father, we both have his sensibility.”

    Broccoli was only a year old when her father started work on the first Bond film, Dr No, with his then business partner Harry Saltzman. She went to British schools, then to university in Los Angeles before returning to London. She feels both American and British, she says — and has the dual citizenship to back that up.

    Her childhood was exotic. After school she would often pop off to the Bond set at Pinewood. In school holidays, she would follow filming around the world. Her father allowed her to sit in on production meetings. “Like a lot of kids you try to help out your dad, make tea, do bits and pieces. I wanted to be around him and that was the way to do it.”

    When she was 17 she got a job in the publicity department for The Spy Who Loved Me. Later she joined the series as an assistant director and an assistant producer. Did her colleagues resent her? “Not resentment, I don’t think. But nobody likes having the boss’s kids hanging around, so you’ve got to prove yourself.” It was important to her father that she got familiar with every layer of the business. “Because when you are running a company, you need to know what everybody’s jobs are.”

    Cubby taught her to listen to everyone, she says, but also to know when to stop listening and start doing. “He used to say, make a decision, even if it’s wrong. Because the paralysis caused by indecision in film-making is time-consuming and costly. So, you know” — and suddenly her accent goes 100 per cent British — “get on with it. If you make a mistake, you can deal with it. In a long-running series, 50 years, you’re going to make mistakes. We certainly have. But make them your mistakes. And learn from them. You learn from your failures more than your successes.”

    Which must make it a challenge to learn from Skyfall, $1.1 billion worldwide and counting? “Yeah, it will be very difficult to compete with that film. It’ll be tough. But we’ll try.” As the producers, Broccoli and Wilson tend to be responsible for the basic idea for a film, the locations and the cast. In what is traditionally a director’s medium, they wield a lot of power. “Well, we are the custodians,” she says. They have two starting points: the personal, making sure the story stretches their hero “emotionally as well as physically”, and the political: “We think, what is the world afraid of? Where are we headed? And then we try to create a villain that is the physical embodiment of that fear.”

    Talking of which, I tell her that I’ve recently watched early Bond films with my 8-year-old daughter. She likes them a lot, but she’s perplexed by some of the sexism. Broccoli nods sympathetically, before adding that there were some positive female role models then too. “But it’s because Bond films have been around for so long they get the beating. Compare them to some of the other films at the time — I mean, Christ!”
    Has the depiction of women in Bond films been a natural progression, then, or something she has consciously addressed? She splutters. “Well of course I’ve consciously addressed it! How could I not? But, you know, like all women try to address it in their daily lives. We don’t put up with a lot of the stuff that used to go on, and we have to address it all the time.

    “But when you have a daughter like you do and like I do, you want to make sure that they are treated properly in life, that they have all the opportunities open to them. And my father always treated me that way. He never said, ‘Oh you can’t do that because you’re a girl’. He actually thought women were far more organised and effective and capable.”

    I showed my daughter Casino Royale at the weekend. The difference was palpable. “Yeah. He’s grown up.

    Bond has grown up.” So though Broccoli needs a break from 007 now and then, she still adores the work. “Wouldn’t you show up for work,” she says with a cackle, “if you were making a Bond movie?”

    And if the series is riding high now, she gives Craig a lot of the credit.
    “He has allowed the audience to get a glimpse of the inner life of Bond. Bond doesn’t talk about his feelings very much, so everything that Daniel does he does through his acting, which is very subtle — so subtle that I think people don’t realise what a great actor he is. He conveys a lot of complex emotions without talking about them. He’s been a huge part of the success.”

    And how much difference does the box-office windfall make to her? It’s useful professionally, she says: these films are expensive. “My dad was always about: put the money on the screen.” But personally? She smiles, then pauses. “You know, I’m very lucky, I’m financially very comfortable. I’m very grateful to my father for putting me in that situation. Money buys you freedom. But I don’t do this to make money. I do this because I have a passion for it and it’s a legacy that I want to uphold.” And will her own daughter, currently at college, also be upholding that legacy at some point? “She’s a very good creative writer, but she’s also interested in journalism. So she may be following in your footsteps.”

    At which point I can only state the bleedin’ obvious: if I had to advise someone which of our respective family firms to gravitate towards, it wouldn’t be mine.
    Once previews at the Phoenix, London WC2 (0844 871 7629) from March 16 and opens on April 9.
  • SandySandy Somewhere in Europe
    Posts: 4,012
    Germanlady wrote:
    She could just have gone for pleasure or do you see anybody in this film, she could be interested in for 24? Nice, how she defends Ben and a good example, how annoying fans can be.



    http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_look_of_love_2013/

    Actually Michael Winterbottom, the director. He made a few amazing films a few years ago but lately has done only so, so.

    Thanks for posting the text here @Jones_The_Bond.
  • Posts: 6,601
    Did he do any action? Too lazy to look him up.
  • TheWizardOfIceTheWizardOfIce 'One of the Internet's more toxic individuals'
    Posts: 9,117
    Germanlady wrote:
    Did he do any action? Too lazy to look him up.

    9 Songs was quite action packed.
  • Posts: 6,601
    Germanlady wrote:
    Did he do any action? Too lazy to look him up.

    9 Songs was quite action packed.

    And was it any good?

  • SandySandy Somewhere in Europe
    Posts: 4,012
    Germanlady wrote:
    Germanlady wrote:
    Did he do any action? Too lazy to look him up.

    9 Songs was quite action packed.

    And was it any good?

    Action packed in not the first idea that comes to my mind about that film. Just in case, do not try to watch the trailer while at work or with children around you...
  • Posts: 9,730
    Michael Winterbottom for 24 makes snese and he is completely from left field
  • 0BradyM0Bondfanatic70BradyM0Bondfanatic7 Quantum Floral Arrangements: "We Have Petals Everywhere"
    Posts: 28,694
    I have to give a hand to Barbara for keeping her cool. So many stupid questions and annoying shouts of:

    "Barbara! Barbara! Barbara! Barbara! Barbara! Barbara!"
  • Posts: 2,081
    Thanks for the article, Jones. :-bd
  • Samuel001Samuel001 Moderator
    edited April 2013 Posts: 13,350
    Great article, and I love to fending off of some of those silly questions.

    Michael Winterbottom could be our guy or any actor who is part of that production.
  • edited April 2013 Posts: 6,601
    There seems nothing between 04 and now and
    :O Because of the improvisational element of much of his work, his films often use hand-held (sometimes digital) photography with roughly edited jumps between scenes and locations
    http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0935863/bio
  • Samuel001Samuel001 Moderator
    Posts: 13,350
    Have a look here:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Winterbottom

    He's done a lot since 2004.

    Broccoli may just be there to see Anna Friel though. ;)
  • Posts: 96
    "And if the series is riding high now, she gives Craig a lot of the credit.
    “He has allowed the audience to get a glimpse of the inner life of Bond. Bond doesn’t talk about his feelings very much, so everything that Daniel does he does through his acting, which is very subtle — so subtle that I think people don’t realise what a great actor he is. He conveys a lot of complex emotions without talking about them. He’s been a huge part of the success
    .”"


    This.
  • StrelikStrelik Spectre Island
    edited April 2013 Posts: 108
    Quarrel wrote:
    "And if the series is riding high now, she gives Craig a lot of the credit.
    “He has allowed the audience to get a glimpse of the inner life of Bond. Bond doesn’t talk about his feelings very much, so everything that Daniel does he does through his acting, which is very subtle — so subtle that I think people don’t realise what a great actor he is. He conveys a lot of complex emotions without talking about them. He’s been a huge part of the success
    .”"

    This.
    Although Craig is not my favorite Bond actor, I agree with this statement. Throughout his performance in Skyfall, Craig communicates a great deal using his eyes alone. A remarkable example is during the finale when Craig pauses before stating: "Last rat standing." During that brief pause before the quip, Craig's eyes alone convey a range of emotions: A moment of speechless uncertainty, followed by a hesitant second of reflection, and then a sudden idea for a quip. He creates the illusion of spontaneity quite well. Whether one likes him or dislikes him as Bond, he is a good actor without a doubt.

  • SandySandy Somewhere in Europe
    Posts: 4,012
    Strelik wrote:
    Quarrel wrote:
    "And if the series is riding high now, she gives Craig a lot of the credit.
    “He has allowed the audience to get a glimpse of the inner life of Bond. Bond doesn’t talk about his feelings very much, so everything that Daniel does he does through his acting, which is very subtle — so subtle that I think people don’t realise what a great actor he is. He conveys a lot of complex emotions without talking about them. He’s been a huge part of the success
    .”"

    This.
    Although Craig is not my favorite Bond actor, I agree with this statement. Throughout his performance in Skyfall, Craig communicates a great deal using his eyes alone. A remarkable example is during the finale when Craig pauses before stating: "Last rat standing." During that brief pause before the quip, Craig's eyes alone convey a range of emotions: A moment of speechless uncertainty, followed by a hesitant second of reflection, and then a sudden idea for a quip. He creates the illusion of spontaneity quite well. Whether one likes him or dislikes him as Bond, he is a good actor without a doubt.

    I remember very often what Albert Finney said about him, that he is a very precise actor.
  • DragonpolDragonpol https://thebondologistblog.blogspot.com
    Posts: 17,727
    ^ Thanks for posting the article.
  • You're very welcome :)
  • Quarrel wrote:
    "And if the series is riding high now, she gives Craig a lot of the credit.
    “He has allowed the audience to get a glimpse of the inner life of Bond. Bond doesn’t talk about his feelings very much, so everything that Daniel does he does through his acting, which is very subtle — so subtle that I think people don’t realise what a great actor he is. He conveys a lot of complex emotions without talking about them. He’s been a huge part of the success
    .”"


    This.

    Thats why he's the most human James Bond, that you actually feel for the guy. I think he's a huge reason James Bond is back on Top after years of Jason Bourne kicking his ass. The man's a genuis.

  • 001001
    Posts: 1,575
    Quarrel wrote:
    "And if the series is riding high now, she gives Craig a lot of the credit.
    “He has allowed the audience to get a glimpse of the inner life of Bond. Bond doesn’t talk about his feelings very much, so everything that Daniel does he does through his acting, which is very subtle — so subtle that I think people don’t realise what a great actor he is. He conveys a lot of complex emotions without talking about them. He’s been a huge part of the success
    .”"


    This.

    Thats why he's the most human James Bond, that you actually feel for the guy. I think he's a huge reason James Bond is back on Top after years of Jason Bourne kicking his ass. The man's a genuis.

    James Bond has always been on top don't you think?

  • if the same trend of mixing lot of emotions through Daniel Craig's interpretation of Bond then James Bond in future will become James Bourne or Jason Bond totally making the conventional Bond image to vanish
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