The latest Bond movie, Spectre, begins with a flurry of spectacle, but it also aims to offer atmosphere, beauty and scale, writes Renaye D Mensseh.
Director Sam Mendes likes to mix things up. He opened Skyfall, 2012’s $1.1-billion global box office smash, with a thrilling action sequence that travelled many miles across Western Turkey, involving motorcycles, a duel atop a moving train, an enormous digger and some tense sniper action from Miss Moneypenny. For Spectre’s pre-title sequence, he wanted something very different.
“When we did Skyfall, we created a very linear action sequence, a real chase that went from one location to another, very fast, and we ended up shooting over a long distance – Istanbul, Adana and the mountains,” says Mendes.
“Spectre was the opposite. I wanted to drop the audience right in the middle of an incredibly atmospheric, hot, dusty, exciting environment.”
He chose a raucous Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico City, which not only offers the audience a visual feast – with thousands of beautifully dressed extras and enormous skeletal puppets – but also a spectacle that echoes the movie’s central theme.
“The celebration of the dead has a link, thematically, to the rest of the movie,” he explains. “What they say of the Day of the Dead is los muertos vivos estan – the dead are alive. Thematically, that is what the movie is about. That hopefully elevates the sequence into being more than just spectacle.”
When putting together a big-budget event picture such as Spectre, especially when it exists in a broader franchise, there is always a danger that filmmakers could fall into the trap of choosing spectacle for its own sake.
“The great danger with Bond is that you have action for action’s sake, and you end up simply striving to be bigger and louder,” Mendes concedes. “But what I wanted to do here was to create something that had atmosphere, beauty and scale. The point was that the character was lost in this kind of vast labyrinth, briefly, and I hope the audience will be fully immersed in it as well.”
For full report by Renaye D Menasseh, see Mail & Guardian
Spectre opened in South Africa on November 27
PHOTO: Bond film director Sam Mendes. (Jonathan Olley)
