James Bond's Rebirth: Watch a 1995 'GoldenEye' Featurette About Rebooting 007
Thanks to movies like Casino Royale, Skyfall and (we hope) the upcoming Spectre, there’s never been a better time to be a James Bond fan. But it wasn’t always this way. In the early ’90s, the franchise lay dormant and irrelevant, the casualty of too many sub-par movies and general creative mismanagement. But then fresh hope arrived in the form of GoldenEye, which officially started shooting 20 years ago in January 1995 with a new 007 (Pierce Brosnan), a new director (Martin Campbell) and a new mission: to make Bond matter again.
Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye
As evidenced in this vintage 1994 featurette above, filmed a few months before production began, that wasn’t a task the GoldenEye crew took lightly. (As per longtime Bond producer Michael Wilson’s opening voiceover, this is a slightly altered version of the original video, which was produced for theater owners at the time; due to licensing issues, behind-the-scenes footage has been substituted for earlier alternate scenes.) Abandoning their previous home at England’s storied Pinewood Studios, the production team re-convened at an abandoned Rolls-Royce factory called the Leavesden Aerodrome located to the north of London and set about turning the million-plus feet of floor space into a studio big enough to house James Bond’s comeback.
Walls were knocked down, new offices — including a plus-sized dressing room for Brosnan — were built and production designer Peter Lamont oversaw the construction of two giant stages where all the action could take place. (Later, after Bond moved out, Harry Potter moved in — all eight Potter movies were filmed at what is today known as Leavesden Studios.) “We have a new Bond, how do we update it, how do we make it better than the previous Bonds?” Campbell remarks towards the end of the video, going on to answer his own question by saying “I think the thing to do is tell a damn good story, make the effects as terrific as you can, relate it to that story and go from there.”
Of course, today we know that all that hard work paid off. Upon its release in November 1995, 11 months after its January start date, GoldenEye became a worldwide smash hit and still ranks among the most creatively and commercially successful Bond movies ever made, paving the way for the Daniel Craig era we all enjoy today. (It’s certainly Brosnan’s strongest outing in 007’s tux, although there are those of us who maintain that Tomorrow Never Dies gets a bad rap.) That makes it all the more fascinating to look back at a time when the franchise literally had to rebuilt from the ground up, in an empty warehouse that was transformed into an incubator for James Bond’s revival and rebirth.
Watch a teaser for GoldenEye:
Image credit: @Everett Collection
