Making of Never Say Never Again.

[Music] [Music] never say never again actually goes back to the 1950s when ian fleming in collaboration with producer kevin mcclory and screenwriter jack whittingham created an a-bomb hijacking story called latitude 78 west when that didn't sell fleming wrote a novel called thunderball and didn't credit either whittingham or mcclory creating a huge lawsuit which resulted in fleming losing the rights to thunderball and kevin mcclory got the rights back and made a deal with cubby broccoli and harry saltzman which created the thunderball movie my late husband jack schwartzman who was originally a entertainment attorney and it became known that the rights were now available to remake thunderball as an attorney he felt that this was a totally legally doable project he thought it would be a fantastic coup to go outside the studio system and do a bond picture so it really came down to jack's wanting to establish himself as an independent producer of major projects for the marketplace my dad's biggest passion was if somebody said this can't be done then he wanted to do it even if it was crazy i mean embarking on remaking a james bond movie where some arcane legal loophole in the rights is something you go why would you even want to do this find another movie if you want to make a movie with sean connery what jack did was convince sean that this could be done that sean would have so much of his input in the shaping what would be his last time playing james bond oh yes double 07. connery's involvement actually came when jack went to him and said these are the rights this is what i believe i can do and this is what i'll pay you and in those days he paid him a huge fee compared to what actors could get at a studio and it was actually connery's wife who came up with the title of the picture because shawn had made the comment that he would never do another bond picture and when he agreed to do it at dinner one night they were trying to think of a name for the picture and shawn's wife said never say never again it's a remake of thunderball and so it must be discernibly thunderball we had to do the book and we could not copy anything from the film lorenzo simple is a fine dramatist and i had seen wonderful work of his and i read some stuff that he had done i wrote a treatment the idea being to bring back an older sean an older bond that appealed to me a great deal i stuck with the vision of this other bond this is a later bond he's called back into service the idea was that the opening of the movie he would be sort of in a rehab not from drugs or anything like that but just that he'd been burned out i took the treatment over to spain to marbella where sean was living spent a couple days with him talking about things and he read the treatment and sean said he'd do it i knew we were taking a gamble because the bond fans i felt were probably a younger crowd and they wanted to see bond shooting screwing doing all those things that the bond's supposed to do i felt that it wouldn't work it wouldn't work with him the script did nothing like the recent bond movies with nothing like that super violent almost comic strip opening that they always put on them now in matters of death spectre is strictly impartial the bad guy is not someone who's got silver teeth or fangs or one eye or disfigured or is a monster no the bad guy is a contemporary businessman corrupt because he loves power what's your latest venture oil yeah it's the overall threat in the movie we had been through the oil crisis in the 70s and so obviously setting an atom bomb that would destroy the oil fields would be an extremely powerful and timely extortion thing you should have studied the plot more carefully the script was not as action-packed nobody expressed at this moment much concern about it because the idea from the beginning had been to have this not a super action movie it's sort of a psychological study of an older spy spy who came in from the cold kind of thing was it a bond story was he really an older bond did it have the humor of a bond chris and i work on the script a bit and i mean there's no conflict of any kind to speak of we sit down and uh i'm told with nobody's objection do some rewards take this sequence out take that sequence out to save money some of the action sequences i read it and i felt that it wasn't the older bond it was something different it sort of was bond in some places and not bond than others he was having problems with it there was no doubt about it i am nervous about sean because this was done without discussion with sean shawn read it and he told me that this wasn't his idea of what the film would be he basically hits the fan he says this is not the movie i agreed to do sean missed the action there's a period there when they were afraid that he might back out of it entirely so immediately something had to be done to make him happy and so it always has to be human sacrifice that's the only way to keep things going i told jack i said it doesn't work the impression was given that all these ideas these changes were my horrible ideas and that you know if i were removed by then everything would be okay they could fix them it just didn't come together and i don't think jack liked it either when jack said they decided to go and take another route or whatever phrase producers always use when they fire a writer i was not terribly upset after sean objected i may have worked for a couple of weeks with kirsch making some changes once lorenzo semple junior the screenwriter left the project irvine kirschner had to assess how much material would remain in the project and how much has to be changed there were two distinct problems the story the dialogue what was the tone of the dialogue what was the story by now we had four scripts and we put it together and it began to make sense it began to have a form and that paved the way for the introduction of the new writers dick clement and ian lefornay they were great on dialogue they could get the little humor the little bits of humor and get away from the exposition mr bond i need a urine sample if you could fill the speaker for me from here we were kind of in that lovely position that writers are in when it's not your mess and you haven't you know all all they can hope is that you you may be able to help them out of it but you didn't create the mess i thought they were terrific but they should have been brought in in the beginning and they were unfortunately brought in at the end we started to write but we soon became aware that there were various factions on the set and a great deal of tension on the set you're not going to make any trouble are you because of the threat of litigation they had been told at some point you can only use the original dialogue from the book it's impossible to write a screenplay where you only use dialogue in the book it's insane everything had to be checked by by the producer by the director by sean and then by the insurance company who were insuring the company against litigation so they were checking through everything we wrote as well so the four sets of people checking every line that we wrote which was extraordinary sean was more concerned with the tone with his dialogue with that to be you know a bit of polish a bit of wit about it and sean would come in and read the things and finally he began to say yes it's coming together i can feel it now it's it's happening it's happening i think sean was relieved because he knew our work for english tv i think he felt reassured to have british voices writing for him no caught you seducing his wife did he no sir not at all but in fact i lost four pounds and god knows how many free radicals the first 40 pages of the film are pretty much ours with the exception of one or two of the action sequences which includes all the hell farm stuff the bahamas stuff with rowan atkins and character a great deal of that is is down to us obviously things like the shark sequence no when we suggested a different opening they were delighted and also there was one they could shoot in the bahamas while they were there i saw an abandoned house and i thought of an opening in the abandoned house which is the present opening so while people were shooting sharks and underwater stuff it was it was relatively easy to write that sequence and it was kind of fun and um it cost almost nothing when the film was about eight weeks into shooting in the bahamas the crew were kind of not madly happy and to bolster their morale they showed them about 35 to 40 minutes of cut footage including the opening sequence which at the time was fantastic it was just bond you know racing through and you think it's a real action adventure then you discover it's a training exercise but it was all done to a ticking stopwatch and it really worked later in i think one of the worst decisions in post-production history they put a song over it [Music] it was so counter-productive to what we'd gone for which is dick said an action sequence with a ticking clock we do this and then over as a as a love song never say and ever again and we thought that was absurd and of course it obviously it's still there heading north africa palmyra down here where is that we had to shoot in five countries now to keep track of all that is very difficult and jack was not a really working producer this had not been his first movie he would have done a better job in terms of corralling the script and the director but this was the first one where suddenly if the trucks didn't show up everybody was turning to him as opposed to him being the guy on the phone screaming at somebody else saying why didn't the truck show up and i can't blame him because he was in the courts all the time in london there was a big lawsuit going on between the other company that was doing their bond and so jack schwartzman was most of the time in court so there was no one in charge but the line producer which is a big job for a line producer because he had to make decisions that no line producers should make money was very short i mean for the budget it was going to be a battle all the way this was a difficult way to start a picture especially a film that had great expectations with the audience and that was going to cost a lot of money he said to me you know at the time looking back on the experience he really needed to have more help more seasoned tougher help in making certain producerial decisions as the movie was going on the film depended on the climax underwater the book did also i knew that i had to do the underwater stuff this was a problem how do i not do the thunderball film and yet make the film and that it'll be a proper climax from what came before and underwater while it sounds attractive is really a terrible medium reaction preacher because everything is in slow motion you can't move fast underwater all they do is they go up and sort of grapple with each other and cut each other's air hoses and stuff it's very boring i don't think the ending is one of the best endings of a bond film i think the ending is a letdown i think it becomes very mechanical at the end and i don't think anybody had really paid the ending much attention i think people's there have been so many problems that i think people get tired i mean this is this is what happens very often with scripts that endings do not get the same amount of attention as beginnings do and i think this was true in this case we finished shooting in spain and i went back to london where we were cutting the picture i spent quite a long time in the editing room with kirsch who'd got to that stage where i don't know where i am with this and and we're quite useful in cutting a lot of stuff out a lot of it was underwater action stuff we had some pickup shots in the cave i was bored with shooting this kind of thing men crawling along shooting machine guns and all that never had a moment of pleasure after that i was tired of the way the picture had to be made in pieces with different writers with holes in the script that had to be filled on the set if i had a chance i'd love to reshoot the picture and get the script right and do it properly you know when you make a film it's always a combination of angst and fun especially when you're on location in europe the angst being that you have budgets you have scripts you have schedules you have bankers you have insurance companies you have lawyers and you have them on the one side on the other side you are on fantastic locations and really making magic and that's what we did i don't fault the actors in the picture i fought what i had to work with it was a great experience i know that jack loved it and the more he got into it the more it was obvious to him that he was going to be able to pull it off and the more he knew he was able to pull it off the happier he was at that point there had never been an independent film produced that had made that amount of money when you combined the warner brothers and you combined the overseas success of the picture the only good memory was sean if he hadn't been the bond i don't think the picture would have been finished he is the one that made it pull through just by his good nature and his steadfast control of his character of bond he was bond and he made the thing happen and i give him credit for the picture being finished you

Channel: Hollowshape

Views: 51,859

Keywords: Never Say Never Again, James Bond, Sean Connery, Kevin McClory, Irvin Kershner, Filmmaking, Hollywood, Ian Fleming

Id: NN93barjN_c

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 20 2021