Bond up to his tricks again in "The Spy Who Loved Me"

Interview: Roy Pickard

"James Bond was very much a male chauvinist pig in the old days, wasn't he?" smiled director Lewis Gilbert, the man sitting opposite me in his large office at Pinewood. He had just finished filming his second Bond movie, "The Spy Who Loved Me", which took him to Sardinia, then Egypt and back to Pinewood.

"I suppose he was acceptable then because the world was very much that way", continued Gilbert. "People liked him as the anti-hero without any scruples, the man who was rough with his women.

"But now? Well, he's changed a bit and a lot of it is due to women and their attitudes. They've become more free, more liberated. I don't think women would apreciate the old Bond character quite as much as they did. I mean, he's still the same masculine male, but in the contemporary Bond movies the girls have been upgraded to make them more part of the action, to meet him in his own ground as it were." "The Spy Who Loved Me", the producers confidently predict, th the biggest Bond of them all with the famous superspy up against a master villain (Curt Jürgens) who kidnaps nuclear submarines in a super tanker; up against (in more ways than one) lovely Russian secret agent Barbara Bach; and up against some of the most awesome heavies ever to appear in a Bond film, chief among them being the 7ft.2in. Jaws (Richard Kiel). On top of all this there are fantastic, enormous stunts - a Lotus Esprit that takes to water; cars being chased by helicopters; cars crashing; cars plunging through roofs of houses; submarines; explosions and a motor-cycle sidecar that transforms into a radio-directed missile.

In this, the tenth Bond movie of the series, Commander Bond is called into a tricky and explosive situation. It seems that some fiendish power is kidnapping nuclear submarines. The British think it's the Russian, who in turn think it's the American. From opposite sides of the globe top secret service operatives are called into play. For the Russians it's the beautiful and seductive Major Amasova. And for the British, of course, it's Bond.

The trail leads to Egypt where blood is soon spilled in the shadows of the Great Pyramids of Gizah and from there the plot moves to Sardinia's beautiful coastline where a Nordic shipping magnate has a marine laboratory called "Atlantis" beneath the Mediterranean. In Sardinia, Major Amasova finds herself a reluctant hand maiden of Bond; the British and Russians having jointly decided to make it a team effort in their frantic search for the villains. A supertanker named the "Liparus" attracts plenty of suspicion as it mysteriously criss-crosses the oceans, but seldom makes port. In an American hunter-killer submarine Bond and Amasova are taken toward the object of their search, and we move into the film's tremendous climax.

"One of the biggest headaches of the Bonds is that they have to increasingly outdo each other for action and spectacle", said Gilbert, who last ventured 007's way then years ago with "You Only Live Twice". "But I really do think this one is by far the most spectacular of them all". He grinned. "I'm also doing the next one, "For Your Eyes Only", so at the moment I'm a bit worried as to how we're going to outdo this current film".

Lewis Gilbert has directed both Sean Connery and Roger Moore in the role of James Bond. I asked him jusy how different they were. "There is a big difference", he said. "Sean made the part his own and quite brilliantly too. He wasn't really anything like Fleming's Bond. But he was acceptable all over the world because people who hadn't read the books then saw the film saw him as the perfect image of Bond. Roger, funilly enough, is very much like the original Fleming character. I think he plays it in a lighter vein than Sean and I think that in this particular film he has really hit it. I think you'll find it's his best performance".

That lighter vein, has, of course, been creeping into nearly all the Bond films of late. For one thing it helps the girls into the act a bit more. "You can't change Bond too much", says Gilbert, "but you can change the girls around him, make them more equal so that they don't fall quite so readily into his arms. You'll find a lot of humour as well as excitement in 'The Spy Who Loved Me', but even so the film still has the special 007 brand. The Bond formula is a strange one. It's tongue in cheek, but serious. And believe me, it's a very difficult tightrope to walk".

Some of the humour of "The Spy Who Loved Me" transmitted itself to the cast and crew working behind the scenes. "There was a car on this huge set", said Gilbert. "It ran on magnetic induction. It was a really fantastic jog. I didn't run on electricity or anything. Just on magnets which pulled it along." He looked to the heavens. "The first time we tried it, it didn't go. The second time it ran off the rail with Roger at the controls. The third time we heard Roger shouting 'How do you make it stop'? Off the rails again! So here we were with this million pound set - the world's largest sound stage with all the modern devices - and a fantastic invention that wouldn't stop."

Gilbert laughed. "You know what we did? We got six old mattresses. It was the only way. Suddently the situation hit us. Here we were on this huge set and the only way we could stop this thing was by putting mattresses at the ned of the line. Roger was great. He has a wonderful sense of humour. But he was a bit worried that the mattresses wouldn't work and that he might have to keep on going - through the wall and out the other side". That incident was funny, but just to remind me how dangerous filming a Bond movie can be Gilbert recalled how, during the fiming of "You Only Live Twice", one of his top cameramen lost a leg when the blade of a chopper cut it clean through during the filming of an aerial scene.

He has also told me of a stuntman who was badly burned during the shooting of "The Spy Who Loved Me". "It happened on the big 007 set when we blew up the operations room", he told me. "A chap got badly burned when something hit him in the back of the neck and stuck there, burning away furiously. It was nasty. He got bad burns. He's had to have quite a bit of skin grafting. "Really, you're very lucky if you don't have accident on a Bond movie. It's pretty hair-raising stuff when you've got about 400 people running around with explosives going off all around them. However much you rehearse someone is always going to do the wrong thing at the wrong time and run into a damned explosion". (...)

"Bond's appeal throughout the world is still enormous. I suppose there are plenty of reasons why he has remained so popular - he's still an anti-hero and does pretty awful things like shooting people in cold blood - but I think the main one is that no-one has made a series of consistent entertainment films on such a big scale. The Bond films have been copied and copied and copied by all sorts of films? But where are the copies today? They've all gone".