Hello, this is Sam Mendes, director of Skyfall
and this is the DVD Director's Commentary.
Lots to talk about (LAUGHS) with this movie.
And one of the first things was the debate we had about the gun barrel logo,
which was always designed,
or at least in my head, was always intended
to go right at the beginning of the picture,
but what you see here now is, of course, another version of the gun barrel logo,
which is Bond walking and then stopping and lifting a gun.
So when I put it in front of this image, it didn't work at all.
It felt like this was a repetition.
But, in the end, I think it worked out better with it at the end,
which is in itself a kind of new beginning.
One of the things we determined we would do,
myself and Rob and Neal and John Logan, the writers,
would be to drop the audience down in the middle of a mission
that had, in effect, gone wrong
and ask the audience to play catch-up a little bit, which is what is happening here.
We deliberately don't say what's happened up to this point.
We don't say where Bond is,
you only discover in a minute that he's in Istanbul,
although you hear the call to prayer right at the top over the Columbia logo.
This is where, effectively, Bond discovers that he has mislaid or lost the list.
And this figure we're seeing now, Ronson, another agent who's clearly dying
and is, in a sense, deliberately a younger version of Bond.
He effectively knows, Bond, that he is leaving a man to die
and someone who is full of promise.
And this comes up later in the scene between Bond and M.
And so, really, there's a version of Bond there in the room.
(CAR HORNS HONKING)
And then this very deliberate shift from the dark of the interior
to the noise and the light and the activity and the hustle and bustle of Istanbul,
which is a magnificent city and we loved every second shooting there.
Again, introducing a new character, Eve, played by Naomie Harris,
in a way that seems to indicate
that Bond already has a relationship with her, or at least knows her,
and, again, asking the audience to catch up.
(TIRES SCREECHING)
One of the things that I was also very conscious to do
in the action sequences of this movie, particularly in the first 10 minutes,
which sort of is an albatross, in a way, (CHUCKLING) with Bond movies,
'cause the expectations of the opening of these movies is so high,
was to create parallel action at all times,
so we never got stuck in, as it were, a linear chase,
A chasing B, Bond chasing or being chased, and that alone,
but we had here, a chase between Bond and Eve and Patrice,
but also what's happening at MI6 between M and Tanner,
and, of course, when Bond and Eve are separated,
a three-way sequence, which is all being built to a single climax.
(MAN SHOUTS ANGRILY)
And the sequence as a whole, I can see as a series of Russian dolls in a way.
You think it's going to be a car chase, then it's the shootout here in the marketplace.
And then it becomes a bike chase and then you go on to the train,
and from the train, Bond goes into the digger, etcetera, etcetera.
So it's constantly shifting and developing in interesting ways.
This was actually one of the most amazing locations, the center of Istanbul.
We really took it over and they were immensely generous and supportive
in giving their local monuments over to us.
And we were suitably careful.
Yes, ma'am.
MENDES: The MI6 set was built at Pinewood and we shot it quite separately.
In fact, there are a lot of sequences in the movie
in which people are trying to communicate with each other on headsets and earpieces
that were shot a long, long time apart.
It's one of the things about a movie of this scale
is you're shooting things over such a long time.
And here, this is a nice mixture of, I think,
stunt work and Daniel and Ola, who plays Patrice so very well,
even though he never speaks, mixed in together.
Our brilliant second unit director, Alex Witt,
and head of stunts, Gary Powell,
have spent a long time up on this roof with bikes
doing this sequence in tiny pieces
and, in the end, it's a combination of stunt work shot on the roofs themselves,
a camera-helicopter,
green screen for the occasional close-up, head replacements, all sorts of things used,
and hopefully at the end it seems pretty seamless,
but given the fact that it was shot over a number of weeks
and the weather changed constantly,
is also brilliantly timed by Roger Deakins, obviously, our great cinematographer.
We shot a lot of stuff up on that roof and a lot of stuff down in the Grand Bazaar.
And, in the end, it just was surplus to requirements.
The sequence ended up being around 11 minutes, something like that,
which is right on the edge of being too long, I felt,
and we were very hard on stuff
that didn't seem necessary or outstayed its welcome
or in any way fetishized the action.
I think there's a great tendency to be bigger, louder, faster
and to sort of forget the story.
Almost as if the story stops and the action begins
and then the story doesn't start again until the action's over.
Spent a long time on this bridge, a long time conceiving this whole chase.
I suppose we must have spent a third of the time on the whole movie
working on the first 10 minutes.
And the transition from the bike to the bridge, I think,
is one of the things I like most, actually.
I like that jump,
a lot of which is Daniel hitting the roof of the train and rolling.
And also Andy Lister, who is a brilliant stunt double for him.
Here, you have this, I suppose, cat-and-mouse game on top of the train.
I felt like the action sequences, pretty much like the movie as a whole,
needed to breathe in and breathe out, so that it wasn't relentless
and there were these moments where you could see
exactly what was going on in someone's head
and there were stealthy chase bits, like this, for example,
rather than just full pelt the whole time.
We chose, I suppose, Roger Deakins and I,
even though we rarely talked about it, actually,
because I think we just assumed this is how we would go,
to shoot this movie as a whole in a classical way.
By which I mean very little handheld camera,
and also limiting ourselves often to one or two cameras,
where I think the expectancy was that we would use more
and to be much more particular
about how we light and frame, and a little less random.
So what you see here actually is not an enormous amount of moving cameras.
They're on moving items,
obviously the camera's on a train that's moving,
but they're locked off a lot of the time or they're still
and a lot of the time was spent in getting these cameras to be still enough
and not be constantly bouncing around on items that we were shooting on.
This was an idea here on the digger that came out of a series of meetings
between the heads of departments.
And this is where teamwork is crucial
and I couldn't possibly have done this movie
without people like Chris Corbould, head of special effects,
Gary Powell, head of stunts,
and everyone else who were in those rooms,
as we debated and turned over every possible option in an action sequence.
And someone eventually said, "Well, what if there's heavy machinery on the train?"
And then someone said, "What if he gets in it?"
And then someone said, "Why doesn't he drive it?"
And then this idea of uncoupling the cars emerged,
and then this tremendous idea, that I thought anyway,
of reaching out the arm of the digger to jam itself into the roof of the carriage
and Bond walking across the arm itself.
Now, who had those ideas and at what point?
It's almost impossible to say,
but I can say that I was supported throughout by a brilliant team,
including all those people and many more
and then what we came up with,
I think, has got a real... I don't know, there's a lot of invention in it.
At the same time, I hope it's staying vaguely within the boundaries of the real.
We shot the whole sequence in three different places.
Istanbul,
Adana, which is further east and near the Syrian border,
about an hour from the Syrian border.
And then further into the mountains here.
So we took it from the city to the outskirts of the city
and out into the magnificent Turkish landscape
that was new to me, but really extraordinarily beautiful.
And what you see here is Daniel on top of the train.
That won't surprise you, but it certainly surprised me on the day,
because he did some things here
that, frankly, were right on the edge of being insane (LAUGHS)
and this is one of them.
As they emerge out of the tunnel and are fist-fighting on the top of the train,
he was connected by a tiny little wire and nothing else.
And that bridge that you see, there is a massive drop below it.
And when you're standing on top of the train, you can't see the bridge itself,
so it really does feel like you're traveling through the air.
And when you're going fast, it's pretty scary.
I don't get vertigo, but I felt it when I was standing on that train.
And he was magnificently brave and inspiring to the crew.
So here you see all three strands of the story coming together.
You see Eve, who's now made it up on top of the mountain
and is ready to shoot, but can't get a clean shot onto Patrice.
You get the tension building up,
as they've lost everything except the speakerphone at MI6
and, of course, you've got Bond fighting on top of the train.
So all those things are going simultaneously.
I'm gonna lose them.
Can you get into a better position?
MENDES: The idea behind this whole sequence was, of course, you expect...
It's Bond, you expect him to have a triumphant moment, triumphant finish,
but, instead, M orders her to take the shot and she takes it and she shoots Bond.
And this is, effectively, the beginning of the story,
Bond dying, as it were,
disappearing and then reappearing to find everything changed.
And this moment, where M and indeed Eve and Tanner and everyone at MI6
effectively think that Bond is dead.
This is the first of a series of very skillfully animated Translights.
The city that you see beyond Judi is created in post
and we were on a stage here at Pinewood.
And the crossfade between the sound of the water...
The rain outside MI6 and the water in the waterfall
was something I had in my head from the very beginning.
This shot of Bond sinking down was taken in the water tank,
the underwater stage at Pinewood.
And then we segue, I hope seamlessly, (LAUGHS)
from Bond sinking down underwater
into this tremendous, I think, opening credit sequence
done by Danny Kleinman and Framestore in London.
I gave Danny a pretty rough brief,
which was that Bond should go down into the water
and effectively travel into the underworld.
Kind of cross the River Styx,
almost like Alice going down the rabbit hole.
And on some level, we should experience the story of the movie
in Bond's unconscious, as it were.
And he took that and brilliantly ran with it.
I pushed him hard to keep the thing moving forward,
keep the camera moving forward, traveling the whole time,
so we felt we were on some kind of a journey.
And Danny delivered a series of storyboards,
which I gave notes on and he made adjustments to
and then he animated the storyboards.
I gave notes on those,
but what he came up with in the end and the final version is really tremendous.
And, of course, he was aided in that
by a fantastic song written by Adele and Paul Epworth.
They were immensely helpful, really, from the very beginning.
They came in to meet me
and Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, the producers.
They were delightful and eager to write a song.
And the deal was that if either we or they didn't like it,
then we would just scrap it.
Adele went away, read the script, I told her the story
and one day, about three, four weeks into shooting,
this song turned up and it was perfect, really.
Atmospherically, the mood, the lyric, everything was just bang-on.
And so Danny was able to work with the music in his ears
and structure and judge the rhythm of the whole sequence to the music,
which I think really helped him and us and everybody.
But I can't say enough about Adele
and how delightful she was from the very beginning.
And she was concerned, I think, about writing something that wasn't personal.
I think she said, "Look, my songs are personal for me
"and they're about myself or my life. How does one write a Bond song?"
And I said, "Well, look at Nobody Does It Better,
"which is an incredibly personal song,"
and, really, Carly Simon, presumably not entirely writing about Bond,
but in the end, she wrote something, Adele, that was remarkably specific to the picture.
And what you got here is this traveling through Bond's wound,
which recurs during the course of the picture.
And also you've got these images of Skyfall, the house,
and Bond as a child earlier on looking through a crack in the wall
and then here, Bond as an adult.
And the director credit right in the middle of Daniel Craig's eye.
(MENDES LAUGHS)
And we fade up on the traditional establishing shot, as it were.
I say "traditional," it feels like Bond is a world of establishing shots,
captions, and it seemed to me to be a good old-school piece of storytelling.
Now, when we tackled this movie,
we all, Rob, Neal, and especially John Logan and I,
went back to the last trilogy of Fleming novels,
which are very dark, strange stories about Bond
at his most depressed, suffering from what he calls "acidy,"
which is a combination of depression and cynicism and self-loathing.
People ask about taking Bond into darker areas,
but the truth is that it's all in Fleming.
Just that the movies were never really able to go as dark as the books,
particularly when they first came out.
But here we have this idea,
which is sort of hinted at in You Only Live Twice
of Bond dying and coming back as somebody else.
And Judi Dench as M, alone in London and feeling Bond's absence,
which I think you can sense in that shot in the car window,
and being introduced or having to go and meet
the new head of the Defense and Security Committee, Gareth Mallory,
played by Ralph Fiennes.
We had a lot of discussions, Ralph and I, about how to graduate his performance
or grade it, if you like, from scene to scene,
because, of course, I was very keen
that the audience saw and understood this character
as somebody, at best ambiguous, and at worst a cold fish,
and a difficult and steely presence in the film.
But I think one of the great strengths of Ralph's performance,
and it's so precise and so detailed,
is that you gradually realize, of course, he's not at all what he first appears
and in each scene you learn something new about him.
Here, he is at his most tenacious and steely
and effectively he's sacking Judi Dench, as M.
And from here on, you feel that this could well be
and might well be, I hope, M's last hurrah,
that it's all coming to an end.
We were very conscious, I think,
because we knew what we were heading towards at the end of the picture,
which is, of course, M's death and replacement,
that we were to lay that in as early as possible,
prepare an audience, if you like, for it.
And also at a certain point tease them with it,
because I think most of the audience feel like maybe
when Javier Bardem's character, Silva, arrives in the inquiry,
that he's going to kill her.
But that's a false ending, as it were.
Here is the splendid Rory Kinnear as Tanner. Fine, fine actor.
I'm very lucky to have had him in such a small role,
but I think Tanner is a character that could definitely go somewhere in future movies.
And we decided that this story of revenge, effectively,
is a very specific, personal story between Silva and M.
The way he first communicates
and the way he first tries to inflict humiliation, as it were, on M
is through this piece of cyber-terrorism.
And it was very important throughout that we got the graphics right,
because the graphics seemed to me to be part of Silva's character.
And also you're trying to guess at who is doing this
based on what you see on a series of computer screens.
So it took us a long time,
but Andrew Booth at BLIND did the graphics, did a brilliant job
and I think we got this combination
of darkly comic, weird, I hope we did,
which is in a sense
the first appearance of Javier Bardem's Silva.
And then I was very conscious
that this was done in an almost plain way, this explosion.
In order to achieve this,
we built a third-scale model of MI6 on a stage at Pinewood, miniature units,
and Steve Begg, our brilliant head of visual effects
and Chris Corbould, head of special effects,
combined to shoot it and then we dropped that in,
but I wanted, as always with this movie,
to base as much as possible on real, physical special effects
and as little as possible on visual effects
which are there really to supplement and enlarge,
magnify, if you like, what's already there.
Bond has a tradition of doing things for real and I wanted to take that to the next stage.
And then we discover where Bond really is.
Initially, you might think he's in good shape,
when you see him making love to a beautiful woman,
but you can tell from this one shot and the shots that follow that he's still struggling.
You see his wounds, you see his state of mind, I think,
and even though he's dropped down
in this beautiful, rather desolate beach on the coastline of Turkey,
he's clearly a solitary and lonely figure.
And we wanted to, again, give us the time
to sense what Bond's life might have been like for the last couple of months.
M says... Or rather, Mallory says,
"It's three months ago, you lost the list."
So he's been there for a while
and it's that strange mixture of romance of a location,
but also enough reality to make it, I don't know, quite bleak.
And we looked for a game that he might be playing
that indicated his state of mind,
the darkness and the place that he had descended to,
and we came up with this little game.
There's vague echoes of Chris Walken in The Deer Hunter.
Nothing quite so serious, but this scorpion
that he's balancing on his hand while he drinks
and earns a bit of money on the side.
Over by Daniel's left there, you see our associate producer, Gregg Wilson,
who's sporting a little goatee that he grew for that scene.
And then we cut to the same bar in the morning, the cold light of day
in this rather beautiful shot that we managed to achieve
in the late part of the day, which is Bond in silhouette.
Starting drinking again.
And then a pre-recorded news announcement
done by Wolf Blitzer, splendid CNN reporter.
As much as possible with graphics and all television news in the movie,
I did them all before the scene,
so that the actors had something to respond to that was real.
It's just much easier to do it for them
and much easier to judge, for me, as well.
So this was all shot live.
And we have this moment where Bond...
I think that's a fine bit of acting by Daniel.
The way he looks at it and the way he seems alive,
awake for the first time in weeks, perhaps.
And this beautiful camera move, which was a Roger Deakins idea.
I had a static camera in my head and he said, "What about this?"
And we tried it and I thought it had a real grace to it,
there's something epic about it. And the reveal of M...
We shot this interior at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
And we had other scenes there, a funeral and what have you,
that we ended up taking out.
And this interesting piece of trivia here.
This is the exterior of John Barry's house.
John Barry, of course, the great composer of many Bond scores,
recently, very sadly, deceased, but they allowed us to use the outside.
The interior is built onstage at Pinewood.
There's an interesting story attached to this scene, really,
which is that I shot it once and I thought I got it wrong.
I had to hold my hand up and say
I thought I had staged it badly and it was a bit safe
and I also felt it was too long and a bit polite.
And when I watched it in dailies and got into the cutting room,
I asked Barbara and Michael if I could shoot it again,
'cause I felt it was a pivotal scene, really,
and I felt that Bond wasn't in enough pain and also they were too nice to each other.
So much of this movie is about the relationship between Bond and M.
It's very important that it's not resolved in this scene
and I suppose the big note from the previous version
was that they seem to end up being good friends again.
And here, you feel, of course,
the respect and the relief that M has that Bond's still there,
but I think it's one of the best bits of acting from Daniel in the movie.
The pain you see, lack of vanity, for a start,
and looking how he does in the scene, which is pretty shot.
And particularly the way he says, "Well, I'm here,"
a sense in which he almost can't believe he's back.
He knows perhaps he shouldn't be, he knows perhaps he might be finished
and he says himself as just now, "So we're both played out."
Good question.
MENDES: And she says, "But if you thought that, why did you come back?"
And that seems to me a pivotal moment,
but even at the end of this scene,
Bond himself is not sure he's made the right choice
and I think, right the way through to Macau,
he's still in a state of questioning
what he should be doing and whether he's doing the right thing.
And a shower might be in order.
MENDES: And I think one of the things that was strongest about Daniel
was he was prepared to play, in a sense, his own age in the movie
and in a movie that is in part a meditation on age and loss and mortality,
I thought that was very important.
And I think no Bond has been asked to stand around,
while so many people call him old and finished and done.
But, of course, that's why I think,
or at least I hope, why an audience
gets behind Bond's story in perhaps a different way,
sense his vulnerability, his weakness.
Almost as if he has to restart, re-train and re-learn how to do it,
and who he is.
We shot this scene in Smithfield Market in London.
That rather beautiful circular ramp going downwards and cobbles.
And a lot of this movie, of course, takes place underground
and we did see a lot of underground London, one way or another.
This is a separate location that we shot, as if it was a continuation of the tunnels.
And one of the things I was very conscious of
was working with Dennis Gassner, our magnificent production designer,
on creating a sense of a very powerful atmospheric underground London
that has echoes in it of The Ipcress File, Get Carter,
even The Third Man at times,
but is very specifically
a way of giving London a dark and threatening, mysterious atmosphere.
So you see him transition there from a location
onto this corridor that was built as an extension to the set
on the 007 stage at Pinewood,
where we built the whole drop-down office floor here.
The "new MI6," as Tannerputs it.
And yet another example of
Bond returning back to England to find everything changed.
M is no longer giving the orders, MI6 are in a different place
and, of course, in a minute he'll meet an entirely new Q.
But here we have this training sequence,
which I sort of shot and designed, along with Roger Deakins,
to be almost a montage.
As if it's one continuous speech by Tanner
in which he's delivering the information.
There is quite a lot of information here, about who they think
or who they are guessing is the person who's attacking M.
But at the same time, we're pushing Bond to the limit physically.
And shooting this scene, Daniel really...
(MENDES LAUGHING)
He did all this a lot, a lot of pull-ups and a lot of push-ups.
And shortly after what you see here, he turned to me and went,
"I can't do any more."
He had a good workout that day.
But he really did push himself and, again, you feel it in Daniel's performance,
which is one of the reasons why I think it's so very good.
(PANTING)
This was shot...
This was not built, these were shot in the Old Vic Tunnels under Waterloo Station.
Those tall arches and that sense of the cavernous depths,
the sense of which you can't ever quite see the walls
and the extremes of the rooms that they're in, I think was very important.
But Roger lit it with either square or straight neon lines,
which give it a real...
Sort of seem to bear down on the space a bit.
A bit more pressure.
As Stanley Kubrick proved in Dr. Strangelove,
good overhead lighting can hold a master shot for much longer
and then bring a kind of tension into the frame.
And here they are again, in a minute you see them,
those overhead lights bearing down on that table,
at which sits Nicholas Woodeson, the doctor, Dr. Hall.
This was an idea I had when I was working with John Logan,
this word association game,
and it came back brilliantly written, I think, by John.
And equally well played.
It seemed to me a beautiful, mouth-watering prospect
doing a word association game with James Bond.
I couldn't resist it,
and that actually turned into the basis of the first trailer,
which I thought was really successful.
But it's also, of course, the first time
we introduce the name of the picture, which is Skyfall.
Which, of course, now I'm assuming you've watched this movie once
and you're now strong enough in body and mind
to watch it again, listening to me droning on.
But you probably know it's the name of his childhood home,
and she, of course, M, knows that.
But Bond is not prepared to go there, talk about it.
And one of the most difficult things in the movie,
knowing that we were going to go back to Bond's childhood home,
was how much he was prepared to talk about it
and how much Bond, as a character, can speak about his past.
Or, indeed, speak about anything to do with his personal life.
And the truth is, he says very, very little,
maybe two lines, less than two lines about his past,
and that is to say to M, "You know the whole story."
He never really says it himself.
This is a very beautiful piece of lighting by Roger.
Again, all this was in the Old Vic Tunnels.
And this is, in a sense, a big turning point in the movie,
which is when he decides to cut out the shrapnel
from his wound
and give it to Tanner to be analyzed.
And from there the story kicks off in a way,
because they trace it back to a very specific weapon,
and from that to the person who fired it.
And that sets us off on our mission.
Again, looking at these scenes,
the depth that we were able to create on the 007 stage,
and the sense of atmosphere, I was very happy with,
in the MI6 central atrium, if you like.
And, again, the movie depends, I suppose,
on seeing Bond alone quite a lot,
particularly in the first act of the film,
sensing his loneliness and his isolation
and his questioning of what he's doing.
And in that respect, I think it shows more of Bond to the audience
than any of the characters get to see of him.
Which, again, I think, builds up a very particular relationship
and that little shot there, I think, is very important
of him standing alone, waiting, looking at his watch,
sort of not being given access
in the way that he has traditionally had in the past,
which again makes him more of an outsider.
But one of the ways back in is through his relationship with Eve,
played beautifully by Naomie Harris.
It's not an easy part to play.
She spent months and months (CHUCKLES) driving that gray Land Rover
in various parts of Turkey.
But she kept her concentration and her character throughout.
And her patience, which is not easy.
But, of course, there's a conversation here,
which we come back to at the very end of the movie,
and he says, "Fieldwork is not for everyone."
And she obviously takes it in, she's listening to him.
Then you better keep moving.
MENDES: And there is that lovely
"I've still got it" grin from Daniel (LAUGHS) as he walks away from Eve.
And then this introduction, also, of something that,
again, returns at the end of the picture,
which is the bulldog, which you've already seen in M's office before it blows up,
and you see again in this scene, of course, returns a third time.
It's a symbol of M and a private joke between the two of them.
This was a scene that was longer when we shot it
and I nipped and tucked a lot
to try and tell the various stories that are going on here.
Because, really, Mallory knows exactly what he's doing,
Ralph Fiennes' character.
He's pushing Bond and M to the point
where they have to justify Bond's existence
as a secret agent in the field.
He wants to hear
why they think it's a good idea.
He wants to make them fight for it.
So it's a kind of good bit of leadership in a way.
But I think when you first watch it, you think he's just being nasty.
His job is to be mean to Bond and he wants to get rid of him,
because he's perhaps a little bit threatened by him
or in competition with him, you're not quite sure.
But, in reality, the strategy that he's using is to make them fight for it.
And I think Ralph plays that very beautifully.
There is a sense of some other strategy going on behind the bravado.
And he does exactly what he intends.
He makes M stand up for Bond and he makes Bond stand up for himself.
And once they've done that, he leaves.
And his parting shot is,
"Don't cock it up," which always makes me chuckle.
And I love the look that Daniel gives him as he leaves here, sort of slightly amused.
"He's not all that meets the eye" look.
Which I think we begin to discover is the case later on.
And then, in a sense, story kicks in,
which is the analysis of the shrapnel fragments
and where it leads Bond,
which is to Ola Rapace, as Patrice, again.
And the beginning, in a sense, of our plot,
which is that he's clearly working for somebody
and they have a tip-off as to where he's going to be
and he's given a very clear brief,
a mission, in a sense, in the old-fashioned way, by M.
I say "old-fashioned," because for many years
I suppose M and Q were asked to play
the exact same scene with Bond from movie to movie.
M gave Bond the mission and explained what the story would be,
in a sense to the audience,
and Q would immediately follow that scene
and there was a lot of, "Pay attention, Bond,"
and he would hand him the gadgets or the weapons and off he would go.
So, in a sense, we aren't doing that here.
We're doing this as M giving Bond the mission
and the next scene, of course, is Q.
But, of course, there is a twist on both scenes.
Here, the big twist, and it's something that I was very keen on from the beginning,
is that she, M, lies to Bond about passing the tests.
In fact, he hasn't and even he doesn't know that.
And I love the little throwaway line before Judi leaves
and the look on Tanner's face.
But Bond is confident he's passed
and it's only really when he gets to the Dead City
and meets Silva that he realizes that he's failed
and that M has just taken a big risk on him.
(FOOTSTEPS APPROACHING)
And this was something that John Logan came up with,
the meeting in the National Gallery.
And the image of The Fighting Temeraire, which is the
JMW Turner painting that hangs there.
We had to re-hang it slightly, (LAUGHS) so it was in the right place on the wall.
But, of course, it's exactly as Q says,
the big old ship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap.
And he sees it...
Obviously, we play that as a metaphor for Bond.
The aging hulk being taken to the scrap yard.
And Q says, "What do you see?"
And Bond says, "A bloody big ship."
The irony is completely lost on him. (CHUCKLES)
My complexion is hardly relevant.
Well, your competence is.
MENDES: And then there is this wonderful scene,
which John Logan wrote,
which I think is a kind of mini-classic for me.
I just think it's a really great bit of writing
and it's a beautiful piece of acting by Ben Whishaw and Daniel Craig.
In a movie that, thematically, I suppose, is about the old and the new,
here they both are.
And they can learn something from each other, perhaps.
There is a sense of mutual respect
that emerges out of the little combative dialogue
that begins the scene.
We talked a lot about gadgets in Bond.
I love gadgets, I love the gadgets in Bond,
but we have to face the fact that most gadgets are available
to you now in the Apple Store or similar shops.
And there's barely anything that you can imagine that doesn't really exist,
unless it's something to do with weaponry.
So we decided to go back to basics,
to have something, but not a lot,
and to make play of that, in a way.
So the Walther PPK, of course, is Bond's traditional gun,
but it's got a twist. We redesigned, along with Walther,
the handle of the gun, and it's imprinted with Bond's DNA,
so it only recognizes him as its owner.
Seems to give it a little bit of a personality.
And then this wonderful line,
which when one watches it with an audience gets a big laugh,
which is, "Were you expecting an exploding pen?"
"We don't really go in for that anymore."
Ben manages to convey a kind of
mildly patronizing, and yet remains somehow warm.
An air of slight superiority.
And then, of course, Bond quoting The Tempest by Shakespeare,
"Brave new world," and then cutting to that very thing.
The brave new world of Shanghai,
an extraordinary city that I was lucky enough
to visit on two or three occasions
in the prep for this movie.
But then we shot... Actually shot it not in Shanghai,
obviously we shot these establishing shots,
but this is the aerial unit under the tutelage of Alex Witt.
And here we are... This pool actually is somewhere entirely different.
It's in Docklands in London and we dropped the cityscape in beyond.
One never knows exactly how many of the tricks
to give away in these commentaries,
you don't want to de-mystify the entire thing.
But there is no question that we had a much better time
shooting the interiors of Shanghai not in Shanghai,
because, of course, what we were trying to do,
particularly in the fight in the high-rise,
was something that would've been impossible on location.
(INDISTINCT ANNOUNCEMENT OVER PA)
So this airport scene
is in fact taking place at Ascot Racecourse,
the new stand.
A rather magnificent building of several stories,
a great number of enormous escalators,
which we filled with some very well-chosen extras.
But this here is a shot of the real exterior of Shanghai Airport.
And this was actually a rather complicated little sequence,
it ended up being four or five shots.
But this pursuit, which felt to me like "shoe leather," as they say,
when they are... A phrase that means
unnecessary journeying and exposition, perhaps.
But we were able to cut it right down.
So we just wanted the idea that he was pursuing and there was a sort of,
again, a little bit of cat-and-mouse.
And the building itself that you see here,
the base of this building, is in the City in London.
We shot this on a Sunday night, a very cold Sunday night.
Sometime in January.
And this long move...
Roger Deakins and I talked about a couple of the camera moves in Chinatown,
Polanski's masterpiece, this very simple establishing of the building
and the car driving up to the building,
was something I wanted to try and achieve.
And then this little moment between Bond and the gun.
This little half-smile he gives.
A little memory of Q and then he turns and sees
that Patrice has killed the security guard
and the game is on.
We thought long and hard about this whole sequence.
I wanted it to be wordless.
It's scored very brilliantly by Tom Newman from beginning to end.
In order to achieve what we needed to do in the upstairs of the building,
we had to build the entire floor of the Shanghai office building
and the building opposite on the 007 stage at Pinewood.
And in order to do that, we built it in miniature first.
The graphics department came up with all the LED screens and all the neon
and we put the glass panels in.
And then we shot it on a lipstick cam.
This also was, if you can believe it, built.
We built four stories of elevator shaft, it was too dangerous to do on location.
And Daniel leapt up and grabbed hold of the underside of the elevator.
And then these tighter shots of him,
Daniel and Patrice moving, we shot live,
and then this is a visual effect extension of the building.
And this is shot on green screen.
So we've tried as best as we can to meld them together.
And I think one of the great things
that the visual effects department and Steve Begg did here
was create a sense of the city that you can see outside the windows
as they ascend in a kind of... As natural a way as possible.
By which I mean you don't have that thing of it being
in sharp focus that sometimes happens in visual effects.
And now we are entering our big stage set in Pinewood.
This is a slight echo of Vertigo, Hitchcock's Vertigo,
in both the framing of that shot and also the scoring,
which has a distinctly Bernard Herrmann flavor to it.
And then, again, this continued cat-and-mouse game
as they creep across the floor.
And now we enter
the set at Pinewood.
And this is...
Suffice to say, this was the most dangerous and difficult set to work on,
because people kept walking into (LAUGHING)
panes of glass, not surprisingly.
If there was a reflection on a pane of glass just beyond the one in front of you,
the glass itself would disappear.
And so a lot of people, including myself,
walked into glass, luckily no serious injuries.
But a lot of bruised heads.
This sequence was shot... We did a lot of coverage,
partly because we couldn't quite predict and anticipate
the way the reflections were going to behave.
But because we kept seeing interesting and fabulous shots,
it was very tempting to keep shooting
and seeing what would happen with the reflections and the building opposite
and Bond reflected a number of times in different ways.
This was something, though, that we were very sure to get,
which is the moment that Bond stops, feels he's been seen,
but is in fact covered by a reflection.
And in a weird way,
it's a sister shot to one of the shots I did in Road to Perdition
with Daniel Craig, in fact,
in which the boy thinks he has been seen by Daniel's character,
but, in fact, Daniel is looking at his own reflection.
So we talked about that a little bit.
And one of the reasons why it's got the shape that it has
is the particular genius of Stuart Baird, the editor,
who has managed to create tension
out of something that could've potentially been quite languid
and dreamy and poetic.
And the back-forth between what Patrice is doing and what Bond is doing
is actually far greater than I had imagined when I shot it.
One of the things that we liked
was the noise of the glass cutter and the tension that that added.
But I also think it's one of Tom Newman's finest pieces of music.
A strange sort of surging and building and dying score here
that creates a very odd tension,
as we're trying to work out what Patrice is doing
and what he's doing with the man opposite in the building
into which we're looking now.
And then we're building to this moment when I was...
I was very keen that we did this fight here in a very stylized way.
By which I mean not in cuts.
But once the fist fight starts in earnest, this long push-in
on the silhouettes fighting in the window with the jellyfish beyond
and these muzzle flashes that briefly illuminate Bond and Patrice's faces,
as they fight right on the precipice of a 79-story drop, or whatever it is.
And then this is one fluid camera move,
of course, which tips over the edge,
as Bond flips Patrice over
and asks this crucial question,
which really is a reminder for the audience about what he's actually doing,
which is, "Who's got the list?" and "Who are you working for?"
Because the story, at the end of the day, is really about...
As Patrice is our lead,
so it's very important that he finds it out.
Of course, it's too late, he's gone.
And then this is the first appearance, really, of Bérénice Marlohe's character,
Severine.
Behind her is this painting...
I can't remember exactly what it's called.
Anyway, Giacometti.
And one of the most famous stolen paintings in the world.
And still no one knows exactly where it is.
So maybe someone listening to this commentary stole it.
If you did, give it back.
This, I suppose, (LAUGHING) slightly tenuous connection here,
which is that Patrice's payment is in the form of a casino chip.
And the casino chip says "Macau,"
and that's his lead.
Now, actually, Bérénice's character first appeared at the airport
and there was a bag switch.
You see her and Bond sees her give the bag to Patrice,
but we cut that scene out.
We felt this was a much better scene to meet Severine for the first time.
When he sees her across,
and we ourselves, the audience, don't get close to her yet.
And then we shift, of course, to M's house.
And yet again Silva appears, in a sense, in the form of a graphic.
And in each graphic of Silva's, the three times he appears,
there's always that skull, that death's head, which recurs.
And then we shift,
Bond's traveled to Macau and now we're there.
This set was constructed at Pinewood as well.
We shot an enormous amount of this movie in London,
either on location or at Pinewood.
And that's one of the reasons why it's so important to have
A, a great production designer, and we did, and B, a great cinematographer,
because, obviously, they mustn't look like sets.
And we did in Dennis Gassner and Roger Deakins.
So this is Eve being sent to check up on Bond by M.
You're not really sure whether she's telling Bond the truth here
or whether she's coming clean as to why she's there.
But that's all part of the game.
And we introduce an important piece of story here,
which is we raise the stakes a little bit and set the clock ticking.
There's a sense that the list is now released
and people are going to be dying now.
And that it's more important than ever that Bond gets going
and tries to find out who's doing this.
So there's a sort of upping of the ante in this scene.
How very traditional.
Well, I like to do some things the old-fashioned way.
MENDES: We tried to create, obviously,
this sexual tension between Eve and Bond,
because, of course, we know where we're headed with Eve
and she is in fact Miss Moneypenny.
We could only take it so far,
because it's a tradition, is it not,
that Moneypenny never really goes the whole way with Bond. (LAUGHS)
So we talked a lot about how far we could go
without making it seem as if they had definitely slept together.
Because I think it's important for future chapters in the movie.
Here, we did a little bit of gentle tracking from side to side,
this sense of something sexy about the way the camera is moving
and there's a kind of
love-making in the shaving itself.
And the movement of it.
And how close they are and how still they are.
(CHUCKLES)
So there's more to him than meets the eye.
MENDES: Hitchcock. One of the great lines,
I probably said it before on a commentary is,
"Shoot your murders like love scenes and your love scenes like murders."
And there's a little bit like... A little bit of
a love scene shot like a murder here.
As she cuts his throat, or doesn't.
Now that's better.
MENDES: Again, a nice line from John Logan.
"Old dog, new tricks." Which is, kind of, the slogan for the movie, I suppose.
Again, Daniel having to stand around while he's being called old.
Now, the center of this image is for real,
which is the front of the casino, the bridge,
and the dragon's heads were all shot,
if you can believe this, on the paddock tank of Pinewood,
which is a very small expanse of water.
And then everything beyond it is visual effect.
Again, it's an example of creating something for real
at the center and then expanding it outwards.
There is no shot in the movie that is entirely made in a computer.
Everything is an expansion of the real, if you like.
And these dragons' heads was an image I had very early on
and gave to Dennis Gassner, who then said,
"Well, why don't we make the whole thing float in the middle of a lake?"
And created this, as it were, imaginary casino.
Thematically, Bond, in a sense, has now got his mojo back.
And there's a sort of symbolic shaving, and then you see him in the tux.
We introduce the Bond theme woven into the establishing music of the casino.
And then this magnificent Dennis Gassner set,
built on a stage at Pinewood.
And built, in a sense, for this one shot.
Well, not just for this one shot,
but built in order to accommodate this one shot,
which is a single Steadicam shot that introduces us to the casino.
And holds in it both Eve and Bond at the same time,
so you see her walking behind him there in the background,
while they're talking.
She's walking all the way across the floor
and he is rather daringly in silhouette in the foreground,
silhouetted against the magnificently lit set by Roger.
And then we have them cross in the foreground.
And it takes him all the way to the cashier's cage,
where he cashes in, finally, the chip.
And this is a shot I like very much,
her eyes coming up above the bars of the cage,
when she realizes that those chips don't grow on trees.
That chip means four million euros, or whatever it is that he's given.
This was, of course, the second appearance of Severine.
And we wanted to try, as much as possible,
to present her in a classic femme fatale way.
A dangerous presence.
And then give her somewhere to go.
And I think one of the strengths of Bérénice's performance,
which is really good,
is that she initially appears to be one thing,
but very quickly Bond unpicks her up at the bar, as it were,
and she turns into something completely different.
She's obviously terrified
and living in fear of this man who we haven't met yet.
This was an on-set debate between me and Daniel.
I remember talking about whether he'd look at the money or not,
whether he'd just take it.
And, actually, it was worth doing it in the end.
Nice sort of Steadicam move here,
where he tells us where she's about to be by a little look across.
And then that nice move, that trade-off
from Bond to Severine and back to Bond again.
Now you can afford to buy me a drink.
MENDES: I wanted to keep this fluidity going
from the moment that he enters,
he's on the boat at the beginning, coming all the way in
and never really stopping until he got to the cashier.
And then starting again as he crossed the floor.
So we used Steadicam,
which we didn't use a lot in the movie, but we used it here to keep it going.
A sense of being alive.
We used handheld not that often.
And when we did use handheld, it wasn't always for action.
In fact, the scene between M and Bond in M's house
is a handheld scene that's very static,
'cause I just wanted it to be uncomfortable, knocked-off, a scent of tired...
Two tired, exhausted characters on the edge.
I just didn't want it to settle, somehow. It felt too set.
Also, when you shoot handheld, things move faster, generally.
Just things on set can work in a slightly more organic way.
It's the same with Steadicam, which is happening here.
There was a little scene we cut out there.
Again, we have a bit of fun with Bond talking off-camera to Eve
and then Eve appearing.
And you realize that they have been talking for a while,
and he drops his earpiece into the glass of champagne.
And here was my way of dealing with shaken, not stirred. (LAUGHS)
I thought to actually see a martini being made,
you don't need to say that line.
He just says, "Perfect."
And in order to do this, we got a martini specialist
from The Savoy.
Splendid chap. He taught us how to make a martini, properly.
Chill the glass and all that.
So there were several people being instructed on the day, including me.
And then we get this scene, which really was a pivotal scene,
in which Bond gets to the bottom of...
Finds a way of getting Severine to lead him to where he needs to go,
which is to our villain's lair, which we all see in a bit.
There was some concern from the studio early on
that we had a lot of quite long dialogue scenes in the movie.
And I think there's always a feeling
that an audience won't take that in an action movie, or what have you.
But I was very adamant that if the story was well told enough
and if the characters were interesting enough,
and, indeed, if the scenes were well written enough,
then they would hold.
And that goes for several of the scenes with M
in the first part of the movie, this scene,
and the scene, of course, in which Bond meets Silva for the first time.
They're all long, three, four, five,
and, in the last case, six-minute dialogue scenes.
And one of the things I'm most pleased about in the movie
is with the fact that when people come out,
they want to talk about that first scene between Bond and Silva, for example,
just as much as they want to talk about the action sequences.
And it just proves that if you hit those scenes,
I think, at the right time in a movie,
it's possible to sustain the tension through them,
until the next higher energy sequence, if you like.
But that was a long time ago.
MENDES: And here, I think, is a tremendous piece of acting by Daniel,
when he reads her like a book.
Classic Bond, in a way.
I don't think he would call himself a feminist.
He certainly feels himself to be in control of this situation.
And it's a classic trait from Fleming
that he's able to unlock a woman with one speech or a touch.
Not sure it's entirely credible in life, (CHUCKLES) but we want to believe.
Will you?
Someone usually dies.
(LAUGHS)
MENDES: And there's a wonderful neurotic edge
to what Bérénice is doing in this scene.
A kind of trembling tension
and a mixture of desire and fear, which I think is really good.
She had an image in her head of a dragon.
The talons and the claws and the smoke.
And I think you can see it in the performance.
You can see her.
From her fingernails to her jewelry to the way she exhales her smoke.
It's the Floating Dragon Casino
and there's a dragon inside.
More than one, in fact. There's her.
And, of course, there's the Komodo dragons,
which we'll see in a minute.
I felt there was a place in the movie
for something of the old style, of which I call...
Which, I mean, a kind of Roger Moore,
slightly more fun action sequences.
Maybe, or perhaps a bit more tongue-in-cheek.
One of them was the Komodo dragon, or dragons.
And we talked about this
and it was very important to me that you don't see too much of them.
And that it's over a sequence quite swiftly.
Of course, this was Gary Powell's idea, actually,
taking on the three men with the suitcase full of euros,
which, by the way, weighed an absolute ton.
And I think it worked out really well.
This was not something I'd done before,
which is stage a sequence around a computer-generated animal,
which people, in this case, are pointing at and looking at,
without it actually being there.
And it made me... How can I say this? Not want to do blue-screen pictures
and deal with computer-generated creatures in the future,
because it's very, very difficult to judge.
And I think, in the end,
it's pretty good visual effects work on the creature itself.
(GRUNTS)
(SCREAMING)
And we had to...
Obviously, we were pulling Tank there,
our splendid heavy from Shanghai,
on a wire.
And here we had Daniel jump off a real stuffed Komodo. (LAUGHS)
We animated it afterwards.
And then Eve re-appears.
And then we've got a couple of more classic Bond one-liners.
"Put it all on red."
And then, "It's the circle of life,"
which he says in response to the screaming of the man down in the pit.
And one of the things Daniel and I talked about
in pre-production a lot
was trying to get some of the humor back in
that he felt might have been lost in the last movie or two.
It's one of the most difficult things, actually,
to not do it in a gaggy way,
but to make it organic, or as much as possible, organic.
That's something we wrestled with throughout.
Yes!
MENDES: And then we shot this little boat scene on the dock
in Turkey, actually.
Although, it's obviously designed as the South China Sea,
and as is the yacht itself,
as it's cutting through the waves shortly after this.
And here we have Severine disappointed to discover that...
Well, she thinks Bond will not be there.
And we cut to herself in the shower, afterwards,
and, of course, trying to find a way to shoot this,
so Bond doesn't look like a sex pest. (LAUGHING)
It was an interesting challenge.
But, initially, I think
you should feel a slight sense of danger and threat
when you see that shadow in the foreground.
And then he steps in with her.
And this is a nice couple of bits of John Logan.
"I like you better without your Beretta."
"I feel naked without it,"
is a good bit of...
I think one of the things I like most about what John did on this movie
is he wasn't scared of writing lines
that were potentially corny, if you know what I mean.
The bigger scenes
and the grand-standing,
sometimes is required in a Bond movie,
was not something that he would shy away from.
And so I could take it and, perhaps, cut it back a little bit,
which I'd much rather do than have to, as it were, pump it up.
This was something we shot in pre-production,
this little piece of video footage.
And it was something that we didn't initially use,
but we added into the scene
to give it a kind of, again, intensity,
and make the stakes a little bit higher.
And this, in a sense, is the beginning of...
Mallory beginning to understand or appreciate M
for what she's able to do.
It's the beginning of her taking him on in a more persuasive way.
It's picked up again in the inquiry,
when she refers back to something he says here about,
"There are no more shadows."
She answers that in a scene later on in the movie.
And those little moments between characters...
So more than one thing is happening at once, if you like.
I thought they were very important.
And then we move from M saying, "The shadows,"
to the opposite, which is this bright sunshine
and the boat cutting through the waves.
And our first sight in the distance of Silva's Dead City.
This was a magnificent boat.
We wanted a more traditional yacht,
and we were able to find this,
and it was two of the more pleasant days on this movie,
out in the Turkish Mediterranean,
with those islands behind us, all in the sunshine.
And here I was very conscious of
not presenting the city in a way that was static,
because, obviously, it's visual effect and doesn't exist.
But it is based on a real place called Hashima
in the coast of Japan,
which is an abandoned city that floats in the sea.
And a lot of these sets
were constructed around photographs of that particular location,
which we visited and is impossible to shoot in,
because it's dangerous.
But I loved this notion
of a city that was recently, if you like, modern.
It was a 20th-century city
that had somehow been abandoned and turned to rubble and dust.
And what you see here, they're actually walking along,
is a street constructed, again, at Pinewood, and built by Dennis Gassner,
with visual effects extensions behind them,
and shot, if you can believe this, in early March.
We were blessed with four days of sunshine.
We ran outside and shot as much of it as we could.
Well, all of it, really.
And it finally leads Bond,
this labyrinth through the casino, across the ocean, into the Dead City,
and finally to the opening of the doors of an elevator.
And out steps Silva.
Hello, James.
MENDES: And when John Logan first delivered this scene,
Bond was knocked out on the yacht by a heavy,
and woke up to find Silva sitting opposite him in this room.
And we only discover the city when he exited.
And when I was working on the script,
I had a very strong sense that we needed to give him an entrance.
And that entrance would lead into the speech.
And then I felt that we needed to do it in one.
I don't quite know why I felt that,
but I just did, and I was always very certain about it.
And we didn't shoot it any other way.
There was no coverage.
I warned Javier that that's what we would be doing.
And he looked at me, with a slightly worried expression,
because, in addition to being a two-minute speech,
of course, to state the obvious, English is not his first language.
And he's playing a very, very verbal character here.
And I think that's one of the more remarkable aspects of his performance,
is how well he uses language
and how well he uses or expresses
nuance and subtleties within the language,
which is not his own.
Amazing, really.
One of the things Javier did was translate the script back into Spanish,
rehearse it in Spanish,
and come back to me with specific requests about word changes
and adjustments in punctuation, all sorts of things.
And when he came and when he arrived on set,
he was fully, fully prepared.
And also, having talked to Javier in pre-production about all the details,
he said, "I've got a few ideas.
"I want to try to change my hair color and my eyes
"and my face and my silhouette."
(LAUGHING) And I said,
"Well, you can if you want, but I'm not sure you need to."
And he said, "Just let me try."
So I thought, "I trust him. He'll have a go.
"But I'll probably say no to one or all of those things."
And he turned up to the screen test,
or the camera test, rather,
and he walked on set and nobody recognized him.
That was the first thing, nobody knew who he was.
And when he went in front of the camera and I called, "Action,"
he turned to look right into the lens,
he didn't speak,
and looking back was another person.
And it was clear that everything that he had done was going to work.
It just needed minor adjustments.
And so that's where we took it.
But he based it on something
that I think we talked about in prep,
which is that Silva is, in a sense, Bond's doppelganger.
He's his double.
And I always had an image of a fallen angel.
There's a reason why he's dressed in white, Bond's in black.
He's kind of a negative image of Bond, which you can see in this shot here.
He's what Bond would have been or could have been had he turned bad.
And, of course, he was abandoned/betrayed by M,
which you could argue Bond has been in the first reel.
So there are all sorts of parallels.
And I think that interested Javier and me and Daniel.
And these were two of the, if not the two,
most enjoyable days on the picture, shooting this scene.
Two great actors at the top of their game.
Two characters fucking with each other, (LAUGHING) basically.
Or are they trying to fuck each other? You don't know.
It's certainly a power game, one way or the other.
And I needed to persuade Javier to be a bit more extreme
in this process of "seduction," in inverted commas.
Which is what he's doing here.
And some of what he does is so delicious.
They did get the giggles doing this scene a couple of times.
But I think the way Bond handles him is brilliant.
He's unflinching
and extremely amusing.
And, again, one of the biggest laughs when you see it with an audience
is when Bond says, "What makes you think it's my first time,"
which is a great line from John Logan.
I wanted to create within this room,
by the way, a kind of temple of hacking.
Those computers that you see in the foreground
are based on a lot of research we did into computers of real hackers
and some of the talking we did with those hackers,
which was, I have to say, some of the more fascinating research
that we did in the process of doing this movie.
There was a debate about this shot of Silva touching his legs,
about whether it was too much.
And I was always keen on it.
Can't have too much of a good thing.
All that physical stuff... so dull, so dull.
MENDES: And we have another series of lines
about Bond's age and his impending pension,
his weakness, his knees, etcetera.
Not to mention the fact he's just failed the test
and is psychologically damaged and addicted to pills and drink.
Apart from that, he's a perfect human specimen.
At least here there are no old ladies giving orders and no little...
MENDES: However, we had a wonderful time allowing, in a sense,
Silva to attack and desecrate MI6
and to put the obvious statement,
which is that it's past its sell-by date and deserves to be scrapped,
so that M, later, and Bond in his actions can prove the opposite.
And here, one of the things I'm most keen on is Javier's line,
"England. The Empire! MI6! You're living in a ruin as well."
Seems to me, he's living on a kind of communist island,
which is already within 50, 60 years been reduced to rubble and dust
and he draws a direct parallel
between that and the Empire and England's glorious past.
And then a great line from Bond,
when Silva says, "What's your hobby?" And he says, "Resurrection,"
which is not only about the character,
but everything to do with the franchise somehow.
And this, the 50th anniversary of the Bond movie,
he's still going stronger than ever.
(MAN SINGING IN FRENCH, PLAYING OVER SPEAKERS)
Now we come out into this courtyard.
I shot this little shot of the speakers,
because I had a feeling I was going to use music in this scene
and I actually had in my head a Jacques Brel piece.
It ended up being a piece of music by Charles Trenet.
I don't know why I had this idea of a French song,
but it was always in my head,
the kind of playfulness and strangeness of that song
echoing through that empty courtyard.
And this memory of communism,
this giant statue fallen and Severine tied to it.
For the sharp-eyed amongst you,
you'll have noticed that the 50-year-old Macallan is dated 1962,
which is, of course, the date of Dr. No, the first Bond movie.
One of only a couple of little in-jokes
about the age of the franchise and the age of the people involved.
Darling.
Darling, your lovers are here.
MENDES: And I love the way Javier does this with Severine with great tenderness,
a kind of passionate romance, very strange.
He never really gets very angry in the movie.
He smiles a lot of the time and he never really runs, maybe for 20 seconds,
and yet, it's amazing how scary someone can be
when they don't lose their temper.
So, here, the pressure's on for Bond to play this insane game.
We had an idea that there was space here for a Fleming-like game.
Bizarrely, in You Only Live Twice, I think it is,
they played Rock Paper Scissors. (LAUGHS)
This is slightly more dangerous, but it's no less psychological,
and the courtliness of it, the ritual, seemed very appropriate
and the slight camp seemed very appropriate for Silva
and in the way that Javier was taking him.
And, of course, Bond, you think, is back
to how he was in the firing range at the beginning when his hand is shaking,
but it turns out that he's pretending.
He deliberately misses
and, of course, the line that he delivers
after Silva kills Severine in the most callous way
is designed to relax them for a second before he pounces there,
and this took about a day, (LAUGHS) shooting these tiny pieces.
It really is, "Action, bang, cut." That's how those days go
and the only time you ever achieve a kind of fluidity and speed
is in the cutting room, but it just needed to be a bit balletic,
but it needed to have detail and be very precise.
I don't like jump cuts and I don't like random cutting.
It all had to fit together like a jigsaw.
And in that, I was aided by, as I said before, our brilliant editor, Stuart Baird,
and then this reveal of the radio,
which, of course, you've seen Bond activate earlier.
And there is the city seen from above,
which was shot for real, but the helicopter is visual effect.
Again, tremendous work by Steve Begg,
and, by the way, all the visual effects houses,
the many visual effects houses in Soho, London who worked on this movie.
All of whom did spectacular work in the subtlest way
and one of the pieces is visible now.
The glass defrosts in front of your eyes
and we reveal Silva in his cell.
A great set by Dennis Gassner,
I think, a re-use of the office floor of MI6 and a redressing of the space,
putting in this hexagonal glass cell.
And the strange effect it has on Silva's voice inside the cell.
These weird echoes,
and the sense that Bond is watching Silva and trying to...
Seeing parallels, as it were, between himself and Silva
and the situation that he got himself into with M.
And this is the scene, of course, that reveals what is behind all of this.
(SIGHS)
It's also the first big scene we shot with Javier.
And in addition to being mesmerizing in it
and giving me many, many options in the cutting room,
many, many different performances, all of them brilliant,
he also, rather winningly, when we first shot it,
stopped in the middle of the scene, started laughing,
and said, "I can't believe I'm sitting here. That's Judi Dench and Daniel Craig."
(MENDES LAUGHING)
Revealing himself as the big softie that he is.
He's a delightful, delightful man
and I think we all, Daniel and Judi included, loved working with him.
He's also very, very funny and some of that sense of humor, I think,
some of that mischief, you can sense in the performance.
But there's this very strange lighting,
this other-worldly top lighting that's coming from the cell,
which really gives the whole scene a very eerie atmosphere.
And, of course, we're building to the point
where he reveals the damage that was inflicted,
in a sense, by M when she abandoned him.
Life clung to me like a disease.
MENDES: So you could say
that one of the things that Javier had to cope with that was most difficult
along with the hair and the eye color, and the fact that he was putting contacts in,
is the fact that he was wearing false teeth the entire time,
because he was, in fact, wearing very thin veneers over his own teeth,
because he needed to remove them in this scene, but also because he needed...
Once you realize that in fact what he's got in there are false teeth,
you needed to realize that what you've been looking at
was a perfect set of fake teeth.
And I love how little M gives him in this scene,
how much she refuses to give ground
and how much he is disappointed by that or appears to be.
Of course, you could argue that what Silva is doing, both on the island and here,
is he wants to be captured and there's already a plan in action,
which is that he's got his laptop captured by Q
and he's already planned to hack into the MI6 computers.
And here is this moment where Javier reveals his teeth, or lack of them,
and the noise that happens when he takes off his cheek bones
is something that I worked very hard on in the mix
with our brilliant mixers and sound designers,
Scott Millan and Greg and Per Hallberg and Karen.
A fantastic sound team working in immense detail on this movie.
Some of their best work, as always, is in the quiet scenes
and those tiny moments that land in different ways,
perhaps to some of the more expansive,
and one of them is the noise of the teeth coming out and going in.
Very particular and quite shocking, it always makes me feel slightly nauseous.
And here is the moment that M reveals exactly what has happened,
what Silva's real name is and what he did and, of course, what M did to him.
Of course, what M has done to him is not that far away
to what she's done to Bond at the beginning,
which is to sacrifice him, in a sense, for more agents, more men.
The theory being, "One dead agent is better than five or 50.
"It just happened to be you."
And so he processes it and we go back to the welcome return of Q and Q-Branch.
The new Q-Branch as conceived by us and Dennis Gassner.
Again, a version of the Underground, but this time, painted white.
The same arches, but now with all these screens and these graphics.
And this is the moment, this one,
there's a close-up when he plugs the MI6 system into Silva's computer.
In a sense, this is the moment that Silva enters their system. Now.
And when Q says, "We're in,"
in actual fact, what's happening is Silva's into MI6.
You only know this afterwards, but one of the things I like about this sequence
is that you sense something's up, you're not quite sure exactly what.
And using the principle of parallel action that we tried to establish in the first reel,
we tried here very much to integrate the action into this sequence,
so that you really don't know
or you don't feel exactly where it starts and where it ends,
but, really, this is a long action sequence that begins around here shortly after this,
when they discover that Silva is absent,
that involves a huge chase through the Underground.
But what we're able to do is to tell three stories simultaneously.
Bond obviously chasing Silva
and Q following Bond
on a combination of CCTV and graphics
and M simultaneously fighting for her job and her life, you could say,
in this inquiry into MI6,
led by the wonderful and mercurial Helen McCrory,
playing Clair Dowar MP,
who is very gently and acerbically grilling M
and hauling her over the coals.
What we had here was something that I really felt strongly about,
which was I felt like Bond somehow needed to help Q
decode what was going on on Silva's computer.
Of course, Q has transferred what's on Silva's computer to the big screen,
so we didn't get stuck staring at a laptop apart from anything else,
but also so that Bond could be a little bit more active
and we could do what he does here,
which is to walk around and to make it not just a series of close-ups
of people huddled over tiny laptop screens.
This little moment was influenced somewhat
by a great moment in Edge of Darkness,
the original television series directed by Martin Campbell, of course,
who directed Casino Royale so brilliantly
and without whom, in terms of making Casino Royale,
we could not have possibly made this film.
It was he who reestablished the tone of Bond,
removed pastiche and made it possible
to add some of those little things back into this movie.
(COMPUTER BEEPING)
Q: Oh, no.
Can someone tell me how the hell he got into our system?
MENDES: And this is the moment, of course, that Q realizes
that Silva's hacked into the entire system and that he was the person responsible.
He realizes that and he feels like a pillock, but nothing to be done.
Now, Bond, who has already guessed ahead of Q what's happened, runs to see,
but, of course, the doors and all the security systems
have been disabled by Silva's computer, everything's open and he's gone.
He's gone.
MENDES: And that was an idea that
we worked very hard to try and make clear in post,
and in order to do that, we needed to re-cut and also change the graphics somewhat
in order to make it very, very clear
that what in fact Silva's computer is, is a Trojan horse.
It's the thing that he wanted to be captured and he wanted to be plugged into,
so that he could do what he's planned to do here,
which is escape down into the heart of underground London
and through underground London to M and the inquiry.
Q: Enter the next service door on your right.
MENDES: So this is a combination.
This particular place you just saw there that just passed us by now
is a real air vent just outside Charing Cross Station in London.
A magnificent location that was found by our brilliant location department,
but it's intercut with this tunnel,
which was built on stage at Pinewood again, and Q-Branch.
And here you see the beginning of the parallel action
and the sense of these things all happening together at different times.
We've really got four stories in a sense, Q and Bond, and Silva and M,
all happening independent of each other,
until Bond captures, or thinks he's captured Silva
in the catacombs later on.
So we built this tunnel and we extended it using visual effects in both directions.
We built a manual train, 'cause we, of course, can't have a live track,
because it would electrocute somebody.
And inside that train, there are people manually pushing,
literally running along the track with the train
and then we sped up the film and extended the train.
A combination of low and hi-tech, you could say,
and it flashes past Bond there.
Of course, that's a light moving, so that we got interactive light on Bond
and then the visual effect is the train itself in that profile shot.
And here we are in Javier Bardem's first shot in the movie
in another section of Charing Cross.
We shot a lot on the London Underground,
who were very generous during Olympic year
to let us take over various parts of Charing Cross Station
and I don't think we made that much disruption,
but we certainly used a lot of extras and we used a train, and here it is.
Where are you now?
MENDES: And I always loved the irony
of Bond being (LAUGHS) thrown into the middle of rush hour
on the London Underground, on "the Tube," as we call it.
Q: Give us a second. I'm looking for him.
MENDES: And Q making a couple of rather snide remarks
about, "It's not something you know much about," which is true.
Bond doesn't really live in that world much. It's much more Bourne's territory, I think,
but here, we wanted to really bring him down amongst the people
and we debated a lot, Stuart Baird, the editor and I,
about whether we wanted to reveal Silva dressed as a policeman
before he was revealed on the CCTV
or let that be the moment that the audience understands
that's what was in the package
and we went for this and I think that was probably the right choice.
It's that moment when you realize it's him
and then this great first take by Daniel, a kind of eye-roll and a classic Bond stunt,
which is chasing the train and just hopping on the back of it, like you do.
The splendid Tony O'Donnell there on the station platform.
I've done a couple of plays with him
and equally splendid, Hannah Stokely, playing a Tube driver.
These are people I've worked with in the theater,
along with many of the people in this movie.
One of the great pleasures for me was coming back to England
and working with people I've worked with over the years on stage and on film.
And here we are, shooting on a real, moving Tube train.
And so much of the sense of the sequences
being scenes and story, rather than merely chase,
comes from the fact that there's dialogue throughout on the earpiece
between Bond and Q,
or in the case of the first reel, Bond, Eve and M.
And in order to do that, Stuart Wilson, our splendid on-set sound man,
always had playback in the earpiece, either pre-recorded or live,
so that people were really talking to each other constantly,
because I always feel it's better and much more realistic
and there's a real sense of interplay,
it lets people pick up each other's rhythms.
Silva's escaped. Bond's in pursuit.
MENDES: And then we cut back to Rory Kinnear getting the message
that Silva has escaped and they need to get M to safety,
but she is proud as ever, unwilling to give ground
and is gonna stick it out.
Then I think this is one of the best,
and certainly one of my favorite, pieces of musical scoring in the movie,
is this violin theme that plays throughout this little section
that's got, somehow, the rhythm of the train.
It's again, a slightly Bernard Herrmann-esque energy to it.
Tom Newman has really done a great, great job on this score,
weaving in the new and the traditional, as it were.
And then we had this fun time shooting the escalator slide,
done brilliantly by Gary Powell and Ben and all the stunt boys,
but we built these rigs for Javier and Daniel that carried them down,
so that they didn't fly off the end as they appear to do in the movie.
And then this moment when Bond comes around the corner
to be confronted by 25 policemen, all looking like Silva.
And that little look that you get from Silva, that laugh,
that was indeed Javier's first shot in the movie.
And I wasn't expecting him to laugh.
He looked around and started chuckling
and Daniel was standing next to me at the monitor screen
and looked at me and said, "This is gonna be fun,"
meaning, "Away we go."
And it definitely felt that way with Javier and Daniel,
when they were onscreen together.
And then we cut back to M being harangued
and put under continued pressure by the inquiry
and finally, Mallory, who's becoming, here, just a little bit more of a hero,
stepping in and saving her.
And one of the things I liked about this whole sequence
is that pretty much every major character in the movie is involved in it in some way.
Whether it be Q or Mallory or Eve or, of course, Silva and Bond.
And here's a little nod to The Third Man,
which is the shadow of Silva on the back wall.
I don't know why, when I see bricks and archways and shadows,
I think of Carol Reed and that amazing movie.
And then this moment of standoff between the two of them.
Javier looking very handsome in his police outfit. (LAUGHS)
Never has the London police force looked sexier
than when Javier Bardem is dressed as one of them.
It's called... radio.
MENDES: And this set, which is constructed, again, on the 007 stage.
There was one set after the other going up on that stage,
but it is built around real catacombs
that was found by Locations up in North London and is a replica of it,
'cause, of course, we had to do this to it.
We had to drive two 7-ton train carriages that we had built
through and into this set and destroy it.
What you see is a real stunt, ladies and gentlemen.
Real, not visual effect,
because a number of people have said, "Well, that's a brilliant visual effect,"
(LAUGHS) and I want to say to them,
it's two million quids' worth of set being destroyed,
shot by 11 cameras,
and if it hadn't worked, we'd probably still be shooting.
(LAUGHING) So that look that Daniel gives is very real at the end.
And then we cut to just outside the Embankment Station.
There's a little private joke there.
The show that's on at the Playhouse,
which is the theater behind the car that Javier gets in,
is a musical called Assassins, which was a musical I did 20 years ago.
The first ever production of the Donmar Warehouse,
which was the theater that I ran from '92 to 2002.
Anyway, interesting what you find out if you listen to director's commentaries.
I'm frightened because our enemies are no longer known to us.
MENDES: So now we go into this final movement of this sequence,
which, I suppose, was the most difficult
and the area that I was most uncertain about in script form
and as a consequence,
the area I'm most relieved works in the movie itself,
which is the intercutting of M making this long and impassioned speech
about MI6 and why it's necessary and Mallory's reaction to that
and, meantime, simultaneously,
Silva descending on the inquiry, getting closer and closer
and Bond trying to catch Silva.
So all of these things moving to one point and at the height of it,
just at the point when it's all climaxing in a sense,
M quotes poetry, Tennyson.
The end of Ulysses, "We are not now that strength
"which in old days Moved earth and heaven;
"That which we are, we are."
That which we are, we are.
MENDES: And this shot of Daniel, who at the stage we shot it was injured
and had to run through, I have to say, quite a lot of pain on this morning.
However, it was a magnificent day, the day we shut down Whitehall.
It was extraordinary to walk down it in the early morning when the sun came up.
(PEOPLE SCREAMING)
And then, finally, Silva arrives in the inquiry.
And there's this moment he pauses fatally, relishing it perhaps too much,
and in that split second, Mallory saves M's life
and in the process, transforms our opinion of him, I suppose,
or begins to change our opinion of him.
Meantime, Bond arrives, we've got policemen shooting at policemen,
a kind of weird chaos ensues,
and then this little sequence where Bond comes to the rescue.
And trying to tell the story, trying to keep everyone alive during this sequence
was a very complicated piece of staging.
So we built this at Pinewood, because we had to destroy it
and we had to tell Mallory's story,
Bond's story, M's story, Tanner's story, Silva's story,
all these people at the same time,
and Eve as well, of course, who's helping out.
And the blowing up of the fire extinguishers,
'cause I couldn't work out how he was going to get out of this
and that was Chris Corbould's idea, head of special effects,
and I think it worked out well in the end.
Particularly because those little moments, those little character details,
whether it be Bond winking or Mallory coming to the rescue
or indeed, the way that Silva looks
once he realizes he's foiled and he'll have to retreat,
which I think is a great moment, too.
And then this little moment when Bond clocks the car
and then we cut to M a few seconds later, exiting the building
and then before she knows it, we're off and it's, of course, 007 driving the car.
Nice bit of stunt driving there, hitting the curb.
And then we reveal who the driver is.
And this, in a way, is the beginning of the third act.
Sort of the first scene of the third act,
when M says, "Too many people are dying because of me."
And they decide that they have to...
In a sense, this is also the most far-fetched narrative leap that the film makes.
We debated this a lot,
which is, he is determined to draw Silva to them
and use M as the bait
and M says that's fine, but she doesn't want to put anyone else's lives at risk
and so that's the moment that Bond decides he knows where to take her
and that is to Scotland.
Away from everything, away from technology.
"Back in time," as he says later.
And somewhere where he can dictate terms,
or at least he thinks he can.
And then we cut to the lockup and this is shot in South London,
a scene of various stages of my youth.
My dad still lives in South London and I know a lot of it quite well.
This is near New Cross.
And there is everybody's favorite car, or certainly mine.
I don't know about you, but I had it when I was a kid,
the model of it, that is. (CHUCKLES) £4. 99 for Christmas.
And the combination of seeing that car and then hearing the Bond theme,
for many people, including myself, is a kind of orgy of nostalgia. (LAUGHS)
And being in an audience which spontaneously applauds at that moment
was probably one of the best moments of making this film.
And here they are, driving down New Cross high street,
bantering about the car and the ejector seat.
Where are we going?
Back in time.
MENDES: Crucially saying, as Bond does, "Back in time,
"somewhere where we'll have the advantage."
And here we are in what I like to call the "Three Hamlets Scene. ''(LAUGHS)
Three famous Hamlets all on screen together at the same time.
We have Ben Whishaw, who was a very young Hamlet,
and Rory Kinnear, who was a very intelligent Hamlet,
and Ralph Fiennes, who was a very fast Hamlet.
Ralph, of course, on Broadway, Rory Kinnear at the National Theatre,
and Ben Whishaw at the Old Vic, and all of them, great performances.
I teased them about this when they were doing this scene.
And I said they were slumming it doing commercial movies
and then they said, "And so are you."
Carry on.
MENDES: Anyway, we all had a good time
and their accuracy and specificity as actors
really made this a joyous scene
and as, indeed, it did for all the scenes they were in.
And then that little graphic journey as they plot the CCTV cameras on the route
and try to lead Silva up to Scotland.
And here we are in Glencoe, one of the most spectacular and beautiful,
bleak, but beautiful landscapes, almost primal, in Scotland.
Two lovely days we spent up there shooting this scene
and the mist and the clouds rather conveniently rolled in down the valley.
All this is obviously for real.
How old were you when they died?
MENDES: And this was a scene that we debated
more than perhaps any other scene in the movie,
which is the moment that he talks or doesn't talk about his childhood.
All he says in affirmation,
as to when M asks him, if this is where he grew up is, "Mmm."
And we shot more lines in this scene, but I took them out.
I felt he was talking too much and so did Daniel.
Bond never explains
and it seemed wrong that he should, here.
And then we took these rather wonderful helicopter shots down Glencoe,
of the DB5.
Iconic car and iconic landscape.
And then this little nod to
the opening shots of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
The helicopter that follows the car
as it goes up to the Overreach Hotel, I think it's called.
And, finally, the reveal of Skyfall,
and what it means and what it is.
We look down to the valley.
Although we shot those scenes in Glencoe for real,
here we shot this in Aldershot.
Not quite as beautiful, glamorous,
but we found a valley
that's used as army testing ground, and it has a very strange flora and fauna.
It feels very Scottish, moss and lichen everywhere.
Very un-English landscape.
And then we put the mountains in using visual effect.
And we built the interior...
So we built the exterior of the house in Aldershot in the valley
and we built the interior on stage at Pinewood.
So now we are on stage.
Brilliantly lit by Roger Deakins,
and supplemented by very subtle visual effects throughout.
And the most complicated,
I think, sequence in the movie begins here,
which is the constant shifting in and out between the exterior and...
Which is on location and we shot two months after the interior,
which are these scenes.
But it's not just because it's an interior-exterior switch.
It's because we're charting the journey
from day through dusk, into evening and then night.
And each sequence needed very specific handling
and there was a lot of near darkness.
And also we had a giant helicopter searchlight
that we had to replicate on stage.
And then match for real on location.
M, this is Kincade.
MENDES: Here is the magnificent and inspiring Albert Finney.
One of the greats.
Having Albert and Judi on set was fantastic.
Judi loved not being the oldest person
(LAUGHING) or not feeling like the oldest person on set.
And they were tremendous together.
And having a new character,
with the warmth that Albert brings and the spirit, the mischief,
I think, at this point, really gives the movie a little boost.
And one of the things that Rob and Neal and John did very well
is time the introduction of new characters throughout the movie.
Well-timed entrance of a new character can just give a little surge of energy.
And it's the same when you are actually shooting.
When a new actor arrives, it gives everyone a boost.
And this is what we've got.
MENDES: And here is this...
Of course, Bond expects to find the usual cache of weapons in the gunroom
and gets here to find they've all been sold.
As has, in a sense, the house,
when they thought he was dead.
And there is a definite air of Western about this last sequence.
It's back to basics.
There's a sense of waiting for the baddies to arrive
and knowing that all they've got to fight them with
is a tiny number of very basic weapons.
I'll do my best.
MENDES: And then there's this scene, which I'm very fond of,
which is this little moment between Bond and Kincade
and it's clear that Kincade has never really known what Bond does.
Bond, very enigmatically, simply walks away,
when he asks him what he does for a living.
And then we cut to this shot of M waiting,
and waiting and watching across the valley.
And the gradual building of tension, as they wait for the...
Silva and his men to arrive.
Thank you, Mr. Kincade.
MENDES: Now, we talked a lot about how we discussed in the movie Bond's past
and how he got here
and Fleming himself obviously created the backstory of his parents
dying in a mountaineering accident.
But we decided that Bond himself couldn't tell that story
and it was very important that he didn't try to.
So, in that respect, Kincade came in very useful.
And this speech is key when he talks about Bond going down the hole,
the priest's hole when he found his parents...
He heard about his parents' death and not coming out for two days
and when he does come out, coming out entirely changed.
And it always appealed to me
that he'd gone in as a kid and come out as Bond.
And that he never changed from that moment.
That, that was the hardened person that he became.
And I think that it says an awful lot,
probably all you need to know.
And then we have our Home Alone sequence. (LAUGHS)
I'm saying it so other people can't.
Well, they can and indeed they have.
But I was aware of it when we were shooting
that there was a danger that there was going to be a certain sense
that Joe Pesci was going to leap through the window at any moment.
But I wanted to see them using...
I wanted the audience to experience the pleasure, in a way,
the narrative pleasure of seeing things set up
and then paying them off one after the other.
And also understand how three people,
if prepared right, can take on 10 or 15.
There's a sort of old-school storytelling.
There's an old-style, back-to-basics, as I said before,
quality to this whole sequence. It seemed to ask for it.
So that's where we took it.
And, you know, even down to the last two sticks of dynamite from the quarry.
And part of the pleasure is seeing
how everything you set up in the sequence develops and pays off when the men arrive.
But, really, you're setting up that feeling of waiting.
And this scene that's about to happen,
where the three of them are waiting and M says,
"I fucked this one up, didn't I?"
Where you really feel...
Ultimately, as you look back, if you're watching this a second time,
that this is, effectively, the last scene between Bond and M.
She dies in his arms, but they exchange only two lines there.
This is the one where, somehow... They don't really know it yet,
but it's their final serious conversation.
And he somehow picks her up.
It's very unlike M to be low and I think she realizes that she's...
Well, she says it herself, she's made a mistake.
Bond says, no, she didn't.
This is what has to happen,
you do your job, you make the best choices, there's no right or wrong.
And then they hear the noise
and it's off to the races.
(DOGS BARKING IN DISTANCE)
I made an enormous change in this scene when we came to shoot it in the valley,
because I had imagined that the cars would pull up closer to the house.
And when I saw it, I thought, "This is ridiculous,
"they would never drive right up to it.
"They'd have to park at the top and walk down into the valley,"
and I had an idea of... Suddenly felt it was much more threatening
and tense and strange if they were spread out
and came in a line down the valley.
And that we, sort of, reminded the audience of the DB5,
which is about to feature quite heavily.
But it's one thing re-staging a scene when you're in a room, it's not difficult.
But when you're re-staging a scene across hundreds of yards of Scottish countryside,
there are people wandering everywhere and you have to talk on a megaphone,
it takes a whole deal... A whole lot longer.
And here is this reveal of the...
Bond is in the DB5, and... Yeah, he uses it to its fullest extent,
using the machine guns that come out from under the front headlights.
And then we shift from outside to inside and we shift from location to set.
And, of course, as I said before, we shoot this...
We shot this a month or two before we shot the exterior stuff.
So we were trying to inter-cut between the two all the time, it wasn't easy.
And, in fact, I think it's fair to say
that Stuart Baird and I spent probably more time on this little sequence,
the assault on the house before Silva arrives in the helicopter,
than we did on any other sequence in the movie,
except the first 10 minutes.
Because balancing the three stories,
M and Bond in the car,
holding Bond in that car,
and also Kincade who was in the kitchen, was very difficult
to keep everybody, as it were, alive.
And make sure that you sensed that people
were not standing around, waiting for people to walk into the house.
I think in the end we managed to find a way through.
But the truth is that, in order to do that,
Kincade was probably walking for about a minute
between when you last see him and when he arrives in the kitchen.
And in reality it's only around the corner.
But movie logic seems to... It seems to work.
As does that, I think, which is the moment that Bond appears and saves Kincade.
But one of the things that was most pleasurable
was watching Albert and Judi doing a bit of action,
(LAUGHING) handling a gun.
And I have to say, I think they did it pretty well.
And Judi has to fire a lot of guns
and she was pretty adept with the whole thing.
Not to mention making light bulb bombs
and various other things that she had to do during the sequence.
You hurt?
MENDES: And then we talked about it happening in two waves
and this sequence, really, was
the sequence that also took the most time...
Took the most discussion amongst all of us once we were in production.
It changed, and once we'd started shooting
I don't think the helicopter had even been thought of, actually.
But I felt like it needed an element of the spectacular
and I couldn't work out how to give Silva an entrance again.
'Cause I felt that's what he needed.
Because that's what he demands as a character (LAUGHS) and a man.
And, again, it's accompanied by music
and, again, it gives an opportunity for Bond to say,
"You've always got to make an entrance."
Which seems to me to be a kind of almost admiring moment
between Bond and Silva.
This was the sequence that we came up with.
After all the debate we felt that...
Or I felt that we needed an element of the spectacular,
but that somehow we had to stay enough inside the house
for it to be psychologically weird.
I wanted it to feel like they were trapped inside a giant coffin
and holes were being punched in it from the outside.
And that's where Chris Corbould and his team came in extra useful
and also Roger Deakins, it's impossible to over-stress
how difficult it is to get the lighting matching
between an exterior at dusk and an interior
before you've even seen the real light.
And to create this sense that light...
Holes of light are being punched in the wall the whole time
by these huge pieces of hardware outside.
To keep the energy going, in the sense that the light is dying all the time
and it's going closer and closer to night.
And Bond is being left more and more isolated,
particularly as Kincade here and M disappear down the priest's hole
and leave him on his own.
So this sense that...
This is a giant version of the end of Throne of Blood, a Kurosawa movie,
where his Macbeth figure is destroyed by a series of spears
that puncture this tiny little space and kill him.
It's the most incredible sequence. If you've never seen it, go and watch it.
Kurosawa was somebody I thought of a lot during this end sequence,
trying to find inspiration, really.
The way he uses action in the landscape is pretty inspiring,
along with many other things.
I do love the way that Javier...
That Silva tosses these grenades,
these fire-bombs, as if they're darts.
Little, sort of, amuse-bouches
that he's tossing into the garbage or something.
A sort of odd image, but I think he has such a particular way of doing it.
Bond is now trapped inside
and we were trying to get the sense that, again, he was trying to smoke him out,
Silva, rather than blow him up.
'Cause what he really wants is M,
who he thinks is still in the house,
and, in fact, we know is now gone off down the tunnel.
And here we were with the real helicopter and Javier walking around the house.
The helicopter was a big piece of machinery,
it was very loud and it was blowing dust and straw up in everyone's faces.
It was blinding on the night.
Not to mention, the incredibly powerful light attached to it.
And, again, this inter-cutting between exterior and interior.
Trying to tell Bond's story and Silva's story.
And here, M and Kincade's story as they escape down the tunnel.
And we realize for the first time that M is seriously injured.
And, in fact, you could almost argue she realizes it for the first time as well.
People have asked me, "When and at what point does she get injured?"
And, of course, it's that moment she drops the gun.
And that's when she begins to bleed
and, of course, that's the wound that eventually kills her.
Javier, by the way, extremely good at managing
to get the fire-bombs through the window.
He's got a good pitcher's arm.
And here we are now, out back on location in Aldershot.
In order to replicate the searchlight coming from the helicopter,
we had to construct a giant crane that came up from the middle of the house
and hung the light over it.
And then we removed it in post
and put the... In the wide shots, put the helicopter in.
Because we needed to be able to control,
as in this shot, exactly where the light was pointing.
And then, horror of horrors.
He orders the helicopter to shoot... To fire on the DB5.
And up it goes.
And this is one of my favorite pieces of acting from Daniel in the movie.
"You can kill me, you can kill the woman,
"but don't blow up my car."
And we all know how he feels. (LAUGHS)
So this is the moment that he takes, as it were...
You can argue that's his father's desk in the study there.
He takes the match out of the box in his father's desk,
lights the blue touch paper,
and then delivers this line,
which, in a way, I always found a very satisfying line,
which is, "I always hated this place."
This is his goodbye to too much pain attached to this house,
and too much unpleasantness.
Silva doesn't see it coming,
and then this magnificent explosion.
Mixture between third-scale model,
again, built and shot by Steve Begg and Chris Corbould.
The house itself burning
and then visual effects to supplement it.
And very brilliantly cut by Stuart Baird.
So you feel... I hope that the whole thing is relatively seamless,
even though it's shot in different places in different ways.
And then this moment
that the gas explosion rips down the tunnel and Bond narrowly avoids it,
somehow extends the moment of the explosion a little longer.
And then this moment of escape by the old folks,
by M and Kincade.
Silva picks himself up outside the burning house,
which is very much burning for real, that was the set.
A lot of flame provided by the Special Effects Department.
And now we've taken it from day to dusk to evening and now to night.
Illuminated by these hellish fires behind him.
He's a vision from hell.
It's like he's in the underworld now.
Just make sure Bond's dead!
MENDES: And he sees Kincade and M across the moor.
He thinks, "Leave them to me."
As far as he's concerned, they're sitting targets,
and he's gonna chase them.
And inexorably he gains on them.
Meantime, down in the tunnel, Bond is gathering himself and recovering.
And, again, it's the principle of parallel action.
Trying to create three stories at the same time.
Bond and Silva, and M and Kincade, and juggling between them.
This is perhaps more of a conventional chase,
it's sort of A chasing B, chasing C.
And we talked a lot about going across the moor.
And it was made more complex, because at nighttime we had to shoot...
We didn't have enough... We couldn't shoot on location.
It was too cold and it was too difficult to keep the fires burning.
So what you see here was actually shot
in an interior in Longcross.
Or at least the bit with Javier that you just saw.
The bit with Daniel you just saw was shot on location.
Here, he's on location.
And here... On that cut,
we're now on Longcross, so we're now on an interior stage,
a very big one, admittedly.
Shooting on a cable cam,
because we needed to move the camera smoothly as Daniel was running at speed.
And this little section here, the killing of the guy
and... Indeed, the stopping at the banks of the frozen lake
is shot interior at Longcross.
And the chapel in the far distance is, of course, a visual effect.
So it was all very complicated.
But I think in the end of the day...
I hope, at least, it feels organic and whole.
And as Bond is risking everything,
running across the frozen lake, even as the ice is cracking,
a few shots ring out and it's Silva on the bank of the lake.
And they have their final little scene together.
Or what we think is going to be their final scene.
It's exhausting!
MENDES: And this splendid Swedish actor,
Jens steps out from behind Bond in a second.
I like that. You don't see him coming at all.
He's just standing behind him
and coming out of the mist.
And I suppose Bond takes one final risk,
which is to fire on the ice
and to send himself down into the depths
in order to escape Silva's bullet.
And before that, they see
the sight of Kincade's flashlight
and his torch in the chapel.
And then Bond takes the plunge.
And, again, we chose, as always, to take the time,
to cut back for, in a sense, a character moment.
Oh, my God.
MENDES: You can see the kind of
appalled boredom and sort of,
"How predictable he would try and do something heroic,"
expression on Silva's face.
And then we cut to the underwater fight
that took place and we shot in the underwater stage at Pinewood.
That was probably one of the most difficult days.
Because it's very difficult to communicate with the actors,
even though there are speakers underwater.
It's very difficult to direct them.
And, however,
it was... It worked out in the end
and we got something, I think, in the end.
That is helped immeasurably by a combination of Roger's lighting
and also Tom Newman's score,
which almost has the effect of holding one's breath.
And then Bond grabs the flare, fires it upwards
and uses the light of the flare to find his way out.
Or at least see his way to the hole into which he fell at the beginning.
Meantime, Silva has made it to the chapel, finally,
and we see what is at the chapel,
which is the gravestones of Bond's parents.
Named, of course, by Ian Fleming.
And highly amusing to Silva.
Silva sees the irony, that this is where it all is going to end.
And as he steps into the chapel
and M turns... Again, a fine piece of music by Tom Newman.
This strange almost choir sound.
Something a bit ghostly, religious about it.
It had to be this way.
MENDES: And, again, I suppose,
one of the scenes that took the most thought,
because so much has to happen in such a short time,
including the deaths of two of the major characters,
one of whom, after 17 years.
(MENDES LAUGHS)
And there was a certain amount of delicacy involved in staging this.
And I suppose this is
where my theater experience is most useful in scenes like this.
Trying to stage it in such a way that there is space for everything
and everybody and they don't fall,
as it were, literally and metaphorically, on top of each other.
And in that respect it's like the end of Hamlet.
There's a lot of dead bodies to be dealt with,
and they all need their own moment, their own space.
But the scene itself, rather fascinatingly,
was entirely changed by Javier.
And because we shot in order
and this was... We came to this very close to the end of the shoot.
And it was Judi's last scene for real.
It was the last scene she ever shot in a Bond movie.
And it was her last scene in the movie.
There was a great intensity on set,
but also Javier was able to suggest things in this scene
and we gradually changed it almost out of all recognition,
pretty much everything he says in this scene, Silva,
he suggested himself.
And we gave to John Logan and we re-wrote it together.
And this idea of Silva unable to do it
and then asking her to shoot both her and himself.
And willingly, as it were, committing suicide, killing her at the same time.
That was something that we felt we could probably pull off.
How unhinged Silva had become by that point.
And then this long and extended death.
What separates Silva, crucially, staging-wise from M
and gives Bond and Silva a final moment together
that is sort of personal.
And then he steps over Silva's body
and we sort of forget about him quite quickly.
And it becomes now a scene about Bond and M.
And working that out and how the key to the scene was
the journey that Silva took to Bond in order to die.
That took me a while.
Because that's the thing that separates the two
and almost makes it into two scenes, rather than one continuous scene.
In which they, as it were, tread on each other's toes.
And then we have M's final moments.
And Bond realizes it when he looks up at Kincade.
And Kincade very subtly says,
"It's no good, she's going."
And then this line that we debated a great deal.
It reminded me of the line that Paul Newman says to Tom Hanks
in Road to Perdition,
which we debated for a long time.
In which he says, "I'm glad it's you," and here she says,
"I did get one thing right."
Meaning, of course, Bond.
And then she goes.
And this was a very, very moving and sad scene to shoot,
because it was the end of Judi Dench's relationship with the Bond movies.
And it wasn't difficult for Daniel to summon up his feelings.
A great lady, a great performance,
topping off seven other great performances.
An inspiring person, Judi Dench, for everyone.
And very, very honored I was to have her last performance as M, in this movie.
Not to mention Albert Finney, as you see there.
And then this pull-back, which finishes the story in a way.
And very delicately
and at the same time muscular scoring by Tom Newman
with those horns coming in, trying to not go sentimental on it.
Not push too many buttons, but somehow give us a sense of time passing.
And then this... I had this idea of Bond on the rooftops looking down over Whitehall.
But we found this spectacular location, which is inaccessible to the public,
and yet affords the most unbelievable views of the river.
You see over Naomie Harris' shoulder there.
And Whitehall beyond Bond
and all these fluttering flags, all of which were already up and flying,
floating in the breeze, and none of which were put there by us.
And then this crucial scene, really.
And I say crucial, because we were all very worried and I was worried
about how the movie would recover from the death of M.
And how we would turn it around,
so that we would feel, somehow, at the end, positive
and a new beginning.
And we were lucky and fortunate in the weather, actually.
The sense of bright, milky winter sunshine,
which gives it its mood.
And two well-written scenes and, of course, two key revelations.
One, that Eve is in fact Miss Moneypenny.
And, two, that Mallory is the new M.
And this also return...
Very deliberate by me,
return to exactly the same set that existed in 1962 in Dr. No.
An exact replica of Moneypenny's office.
The coat rack and M behind the desk.
The only thing that's different is,
for those of you who are observant enough,
you will have seen the MI6 portrait that hangs on the wall behind M,
the new M.
Which you'll see in a minute as he enters the room.
We had another version of the scene, in which Tanner came out and said,
"M will see you now." So you would know that M was...
There was a new M inside the room.
But we decided to not say that until the last line of the picture.
And here's our new M.
Ralph Fiennes.
Again, you sense the warmth and respect between the two of them,
as Mallory makes a joke about something
that Bond said at the beginning of the picture.
That he has no experience in the field.
And then we go back to the most traditional opening of a Bond movie.
The only difference is, it's the end.
And it's the new M, and just as the Adele song begins the movie
by saying, "This is the end,"
we end the movie in a way that we traditionally would begin it,
which is with the gun barrel logo.
And the magnificent reminder that it has been 50 years of Bond movies.
And that he still ain't going away.
(CHUCKLING) He's going to return.
And a splendid medley of Tom Newman's music from the movie
follows the immortal Monty Norman James Bond theme.
One of the great pieces of movie music of history, if not the greatest,
which is allowed to simply play out.
I was channeling my inner 12-year-old, as I had to do many times in this movie.
I tried to make a film that I wanted to see.
A Bond movie that I would want to see,
but, at the same time, my 12-year-old self might also enjoy.
And I hope you've enjoyed it.
And I hope some of what I've said has been of interest to you.
And I've really enjoyed sitting here and chatting about it.
It was a little bit like a visit to the movie therapist.
So thank you for listening and thank you for watching. Bye-bye.