An Interview with Ian Fleming

tonight in place of the program originally scheduled a timely repeat of an interview of special interest this is a case for rough Justice an eye for an eye these people can't be hung sir they ought to be killed M's eyes ceased to focus on bond for a moment they were blank looking inward then he slowly reached for the top drawer of his desk and extracted a thin file without the usual ual title across it and without the top secret red star he brought out a rubber stamp and a red ink pad mem opened the pad tamped the rubber stamp on it and then carefully pressed it down on the gray cover he turned the docket round and pushed it gently across the desk to bond the Red Sand serif letters still damp said For Your Eyes Only silenced last week was one of the busiest and most successful typewriters of recent years when Ian Fleming creator of James Bond died in England at the age of 56 following a heart attack after University Fleming worked for reuter's news agency as a foreign correspondent then in banking before joining British Naval intelligence during the war afterwards he was foreign editor of kimley newspapers with the contract which gave him two months off a year at Golden Eye his house in Jamaica where most of his writing was done and where the following interview took place Ian Fleming's name first appeared on the bookstands in 1953 with the first of Bond's Adventures Casino Royale which he had begun to write at the age of 44 after that startling things happened more than 32 million copies of his 14 books were sold earning him a Fortune of close to $3 million 12 million copies in the United Kingdom 15 million in the United States where the late President Kennedy was an Ardent James Bond fan The Adventures of bond appeared in 20 languages including Finnish Japanese and Thai two have already been turned into immensely popular movies and the third film is in production during each annual 2-month period at Golden Eye Ian Fleming wrote a new book 2,000 words in three hours every morning each one seemed to be assured of success but was it some critics charged because the books were heavily laced with sadism savagery and sex our interviewer asked Mr Fleming how he reacted to these charges well I don't mind very much I expect the same thing happened to PO old bulldog drumond on the rest of them know in our time but um the point really is that particularly since the last war we've all become much more educated in what really is uh violence and and and sadism and savagery and so on and it's ridiculous in these this day and age to have one's hero hit over the head with a baseball bat when in fact one knows what happens at aitz and all these other places during war Bon and so on and what technical tricks of torture and violence they gapa got up to what the KGB gets up to now in Russia what happened in Northern Africa was Algeria and Morocco these terrible electrical devices they use on people and so to as I say to use the old bulldog drum and baseball bet would be rather stupid or it just wouldn't be contemporary writing at all and as for sex well we've all got I mean sex is a perfectly respectable subject as far as Shakespeare is concerned and um I don't see why it shouldn't be as far as I'm concerned in any case I don't I mean I don't overdo it in any way that no four-letter words or nonsense of that s do you feel these are necessary items I I refer to the sadism and sex necessary items to sell Thrillers I don't think so no of course I don't admit to using sadism I admit to using violence but um I think they're part of life I mean all history is is love and violence and I think it applies very almost as much to the great novels as it does to the normal thriller so to speak but of course there are many different kinds of Thriller writers and many different kinds of Thrillers and I just have my particular line of country how do you feel about the uh the kind of Novel that has um great sexual Le detail in the entirely promiscuous cast well I must say of course I'm a certain age so that the whole thing rather stale news to me but uh uh I think it's unnecessary really I think you can convey sex uh without using raw words very much better than you can than by using them and um I personally think that this is only a phase that we're going through and that the so-called sex novel which you see so much of nowadays will in fact go out of fashion before very long I people get simply get tired of the same old situations which they know anyway you yourself referred to the fact that you don't use the Anglo-Saxon fourl words uh I take it you disapprove of that in literature I stud this some streak of my Scottish puran forbears but um I don't like seeing them on the page somehow I don't I use quite a lot of them when I'm playing golf for instance but um I personally don't like seeing them on the page and I think they hold up the reader uh cursive interest in the in the book in a way they sort of they say oh Lord you know what's that and then maybe they go on or maybe they show the book aside but I mean I think it's a bad literary device the use of for letter words certain people are always criticizing novels with uh sex and violence in them on the basis that they're going to corrupt our youth how do you feel about that and that meant uh warm-blooded heterosexual adults you know in beds and rway trains and airplanes they're not meant for school boys uh teenagers presumably are reading them however oh yes they are and I think they're enjoying them very much my son hasn't yet got to read them he's about Liv and a half he thinks they very D in one of the books you have Bond referring to uh his own basically dirty life yes well of course spying is a dirty trade and uh we all know it kof has said so and so is Alan dolles and uh we don't in England we don't talk much about our secret service but I know that we'd say the same thing if we were asked but of course pying is in fact a dirty dirty trade I mean so is uh private protective work and all that underworld of of sort of policeman ship is is a dirty life let phes and James Bond is engaged in a in a dirty trade well why do you think it uh hero who engages in a dirty trade and lead a basically dirty life has become so popular with thean public well um it's very difficult to say I think because perhaps the books have pace and plenty of action and um Espionage is not regarded by the majority of the public as a dirty trade they regarded rather sort of uh very romantic Affair you know since the first days when they spy from the other as side lifted up the tent flap and listened to the plans of the Arab Chieftain and tried to get away with it spying has always been the gued as a very romantic onean job so to speak one man against the whole police force or an army do we have a need you would forgive this bird but uh in Jamaica we have these cling clings and they make this tremendous thing buzzle do you do you feel there's a need for uh Heroes extravagant Heroes like James B well I think particularly today this is the age of the anti-hero and uh everybody's trying to debunk the great for no reason that I can particularly see but uh they do so and and um as you know all these seta films plays television radio shows uh all over the world world they're trying to sort of knock down the idols either of the present or the past and uh of course that end up by knocking out knocking down God if they go on as fast as they're going and uh I think this is personally is a great mistake because I got many heroes in my life I mean people like Winston Churchill and every those how many other people I've met during the war and um I think that the although they may have feet of clay uh we probably all have and all human beings have and there's no point in dwelling entirely on the feet there many other parts of the animal could be examined and I think that people like to read about heroes Mr Fleming in your books there's a great amount of detail two kinds of detail um sort of travelog detail and uh Espionage detail is this detail based on personal experience um do you make it up where does it come from well uh I can say it's 90% from personal experience really and I wouldn't say the esized detail is because um although I worked in na intelligence during the war and got mixed up in a lot of shenanigans uh of course I if I started sticking too close to the SR true sr's work of today I should be in trouble with the official Secrets act in England even supposing I had access to information so a lot of the esage detail is either invented or taken from U very often cases which have uh been brought between let's say the West Germans and the Russians the KGB uh or incidents that have occurred all over the world in the Espionage field and which of course the whole battle goes on the whole time so there's plenty of material available in that dire as for the backgrounds I try and um I can't really write about anywhere that I haven't seen myself and being basically a reporter by trade I have got a a good strong visual sense for background and and interesting detail and so on which I try to bring into my books just in order to um uh make them seem more valid and truthful and of course if you're off on some tremendous plot with who knows what James Bond in a hassle with some terrible villain if you if he can use a Ronson lighter let's say or drive a Bentley motorc car or uh stay in the Ritz hotel this all brings the reader back to Earth you have mentioned that you were a newspaper man yeah yes I started off in Reuters the international news agency at the age of about 23 and served with them for about four years in um London and uh Berlin and Moscow I found I wasn't earning enough money in journalism as I expect you probably find also and I went into the city to try and make some more and I wasn't very good in the city and so I went back to the times actually the London Times uh and got them to send me off to Moscow in 1939 um just before the war broke out actually in the in January or February of 1939 and um then I served in Naval intelligence as personal assistant to the director of Naval intelligence throughout the war under two directors and I had great fun and went around the world twice and and got involved in a lot of escapades which were very exciting at the time and after the war what kind of Escapade well actually part of the main plot of my first book Casino Royal the gambling sequence where bond out gambles a Russian agent and bankrupts him stemmed from something that happened to me on the first time I went with my director Admiral Godfrey to Washington in plain cloth before America came into the war and we took the long route down in flying Bo down by Lisbon and um Africa and then across to South America and up that way and um on our first night in Lisbon we talked to some of our secret service chfs there and of course they were interested hearing our views and we were interest in hearing theirs because Lisbon was a great Center of German Espionage and they said well if you want to see these uh uh agents of the abve as it was called then you will find most of them gambling in the casino at esteril and I suddenly had the brilliant idea that I would take on these Germans and strip them of their funds thus making a small dent in the secret um treasury of the ab so I sat down at the table and um boned one of the Germans once and lost and I boned him again lost again boned him for the third time and I was cleaned out so that wasn't a very successful exploit but it was on the basis of this real life episode that I based the big gambling scene in Casino Roy and bond actually repeated that and was only saved by the American agent giving him money wasn't that's right that's quite right absolutely right when you react to um a place like say Paris or when Bond reacts to Paris do I take it that that is actually the way you felt about Paris uh yes it is I gave Paris a bit of a pasting I remember in one of my short stories and complained that it hadn't been the same thing since the war since the occupation and all these observations are really of course observations of my own which I put into Bon's mouths or Minds in uh one or two of your books you have some brief uh descriptions of Canadian scen now I find that these tend to be much less colorful than your descriptions of other areas of the world I'm wondering if this is because you have found Canada a colorless Place well I've been know the main reason is that I've been very little in Canada I was there during a war two or three times on rather Hasty missions of Naval intelligence work but um I simply haven't had a chance to to to visit Canada and visit the Romantic parts of Canada I mean I can imagine that Toronto would make a tremendous local for a gangster story for instance these days as from what I read in the newspapers oh you get the impression we have gangsters in Toronto well I mean that's simply what I read in the in in the Engish newspapers but um I I'm really giving that an example of of a town that undoubtedly if I wish to set a gangster story in Toronto it would be a suitable local presumably in the books you describe uh little foibles of bond things he likes or dislikes usually things he dislikes um things like tea and Windsor knots are these your dislikes yes they are yeah are you given to many and strong dislikes I think so sort of FO as you know but um te I regard as sply the downfall of the British Empire and uh Ty of the Windsor knot I find much too tidy I think you know it shows that the man is rather vain I think if he uses the Windsor notot to his tie so I put these in they sort of they build up the perhaps the character of James Bond to a certain extent and I'm rather amused of course to put forward my own little qus in Pros how did The Empire found her on t well I think cuz people are always drinking with damn stuff I mean I remember during the war you know 4:00 came in the middle of some tremendous Naval action and then these bloody tea troles used to come rumbling down the corridors of the admal and somehow everybody used to stop work I mean that that's an exaggeration Mr Fleming how does an author tackle the problem of selecting a name for the hero of his stories well it isn't only the hero I mean I generally pick up names just driving through the countryside through Villages and so on you see an interesting name uh over a tobacconist or chemist or something of that sort in any country in the world but um when I started to write these books 1952 I wanted to find um a name which wouldn't have any of this romantic U overtones like piligrim kuras or it might be I wanted a really flat quiet name and one of my b bies out here is uh James Bond's birds of the West Indies which is a very famous uh orological book indeed and I thought well now James Bond now that's a pretty quiet name and so I simply stole it and used it Mr Fleming I appreciate that in any U book and particularly in a thriller you need a villain um you have a collective villain in most of yours or a lot of yours the Russians uh do you really feel they are as bad as uh you paint them well the trouble is that as any Thriller writer will tell you the villain is a very difficult man to find anywhere because if one's a fairly intelligent person one knows that a villain really probably has a psychopathic background and if you paint him a psychopathic background you immediately uh make him make the reader rather sorry for him make him a sick man which of course most villains are and and um the Russians have behaved in a very villainous way since the war in many respects I mean it's only last year there was a case uh brought against the Russian agent in k r who confessed to having killed three West Germans with a cyanide water pistol let say water pistol full of cyanide pure cyanide which leaves no Trace he generally shot the man going up a staircase and uh with this spray and the man fell down instantly dead and after very short while the cide fumes disappeared and probably the autopsy said that he died of a heart attack cling the stairs and this man had been sent to kill the third man or fourth man I can't remember quite which and his nerve broke as it often does with killers and he confessed and he got seven or eight years and so on so forth was out of his confession now that's a very villainous act and so if the Russians go go on with this sort of uh joke you know I shall have to pursue them but before the wall of course the Germans were always set as the villains in our Thrillers and I think nearly all Bulldog Drummond villains were Germans but I rather like the Russians I worked there twice and they are very great people and um I don't want to rag them too much and maybe before long I should be pushed off towards China but they very great people too and so I'm rather hard put to it it's very difficult thing to get these villains to grow on trees why do you say before long you may be pushed off towards China well simply because I think there's a tremendous uh relaxation in Russia and that uh the west and Russia perhaps even this year may get very much closer together that's my feeling just my nose and um if that if is going to happen and if peace is going to break out well the last thing I want to do is to uh uh provide any hindrance to the process when you say closer together do you mean just closer together at the conference table you or do you think there is a a changing of uh political ideas and ideals oh I think there's a tremendous melting of the ice flow flow in Russia itself and I think they're moving towards uh something like the brand of extreme socialism that uh we have an extreme left wing in England and elsewhere in Europe and I think before long we all all end up in s of more or less the same brand of of socialism but I mean that maybe wishful thinking but um that's how I see General pattern of History probably working out because uh certainly communism is breaking down in its Machinery very badly as we all know from the bad crop situation this year in Russia and um of course may be a very long process but uh I can't help feeling that that is probably the way of History I think um I mean I personally don't believe there'll ever be an atomic war because I think War has gone out of fashion there whole business of killing millions and millions of people either one weapon or another I think has become oldfashioned and um may go completely out of cease to be a form of human activity altogether if everybody can become civilized at the same rate but of course um that is not possible and we have a lot of a lot of dangers that some lunatic like castra or one of the new African States May suddenly get hold of nuclear weapons and start threatening the world and you know playing around with these things and um so what one's really got to do is to try and ensure that um the climate of History moves equally all over the world and let's hope the Chinese for instance will Sly be caught by the infected by the general atmosphere which I see I don't know whether I'm right or not you approve I presume of the uh French Trend now then to recognize uh red China oh yes I think it's ridiculous I mean here is one of the greatest nations in the whole history of the world we' what 500 million people I mean you can't just s of wipe it off from that I think uh with any luck in a year or two China will be a full-blooded member of the United Nations and um completely accepted as a member of the committee of of Nations it's ridiculous of course that this huge vacuum should exist on the map really they're wonderful people they may be politically misguided in our view but it doesn't mean that they aren't they find people a moment ago you referred to um Castro as a Madman with Cuba only 90 M miles away from you uh here um is James Bond not afraid of a Revolution being exported to Jamaica well they're trying I mean in a way they they're putting off putting over a great deal of um revolutionary propaganda on the radio as they are to all the Caribbean States and the Central American states but the Jamaican if he hears politics being talked on the radio he's rather in trying to turn it off and get on to music you know he just doesn't really want anybody's politics in one of your books you referred to a cab driver Born Into the buyer Market of the welfare state in the age of the atomic bomb and space flight for him life was meaningless this is a pretty gloomy view of the welfare state Etc well I think it was an exaggeration I described the young man as a bit of a beatnik and um I was trying to say which I personally believe that while the welfare state has brought us a lot of uh very wealth while dividends particularly in the shape of Medicine and so on and so forth and the basic necessities of life it has feather beded the ordinary man in the street to my mind to too great an extent I think this is recognized by politicians everywhere but of course once you start on welfare statism it's very difficult to to slow down the process and when you get a chicken in every pot then the next government has to offer a chicken and a half in every pot and so on and so forth and the it goes on and I think it's rather inclined to uh to make everybody sort of uh Spectators rather than combatants let's say in sport and so on and so forth they don't take Parts in much they just go to spectate and of course the television and so on nowadays with all due respect to you people would rather kind to sit at home and not get out into the fresh air but um I think nowadays A lot of people are rather inclined to sort of wander around and get bored and boredom is the worst sin of course of a human being really and it's the worst thing that can happen to him boredom does this again then take us around to a reason for James Bond being so popular in that he always has a goal I think it probably does in a way I mean his um his task is a straightforward one and he goes for it in a fairly straightforward fashion and I think people like the action is it possible that one of these days we'll read a James Bond novel in which the hero was killed at the again I couldn't possibly afford it this interview was originally seen on the program the 60s last February well for Bond there may still be one new adventure a 13th Bond story was left unfinished at the author's death and it would hardly be surprising if the Publishers found some way of having so valuable a property finished so perhaps agent 007 May yet turn his attention to the Chinese and perhaps another hand will be able to do what Ian Fleming could not have board to do and James Bond's adventures with a bullet next week at this time the first of a new National film board series called comparisons which this year will compare life in Canada with that of Thailand and in Greece

Channel: I. Amanatullah

Views: 6,734

Keywords: Ian Fleming, James Bond, 007

Id: -mJsrBPXdFc

Length: 27min 17sec (1637 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2024