'THE name is Bond, James Bond.' Pierce Brosnan is the fifth agent 007 to deliver these lines on screen - right now he's shaking Martinis, taking the brand-new BMW roadster for a spin, and cavorting with Bond girls for about an hour outside London in a converted Rolls-Royce factory in Leavesden, Watford.
The US$50 million (HK$386 million) feature is codenamed Goldeneye, the 17th movie in the James Bond series. Bond, a character originally created by Ian Fleming and transferred to the screen by producer Albert R 'Cubby' Broccoli, is a film franchise that will never die - even though 85-year-old Broccoli is currently recuperating from major heart surgery and his daughter Barbara has taken over producing duties.
In his original incarnation, as played by Sean Connery in 1962's Dr No, Bond was a smooth-talking, Martini-swilling, bed-hopping super-sleuth - a persona which carried 007 through the 60s, 70s and began to falter in the 80s. Connery is now 64, his successor Roger Moore (who made seven Bond films) is 68, George Lazenby, who only appeared in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, has faded into obscurity, and even Timothy Dalton, who starred in the last two Bond films, has passed 50.
Time, undoubtedly, to bring some young blood to Bond - at 41, Irish-born Brosnan is a decade older than Connery was when he first assumed the role, but still manages to make a three-piece pin-striped Savile Row suit look sexy, if not quite the height of fashion.
'We have a traditional Bond script,' says Brosnan, sipping the omni-present Bollinger champagne, which the media is assured Bond now drinks (along with black label vodka). 'But there's a certain playfulness to his character - and vulnerability. That's what I'd like to bring to the role; vulnerability.' It's not a hard trait for Brosnan to command; when asked about his wife, who died of cancer after a long illness, he says: 'I am saddened that she's not here. But she's with me in spirit. She wanted me to do it.' He pauses: 'That's life.' Despite the fact that Goldeneye flits from Puerto Rico to Switzerland, St Petersburg and the French Riviera, most of the shooting (15 out of 18 weeks) will be done in bitterly cold Leavesden, with its 1.25 million square feet of interior stage space making Goldeneye the largest film set in the world. The Rolls-Royce factory had been abandoned for 18 months before Goldeneye was 'forced to create this space in less than six months because there is no other space left to film in England,' says co-producer Michael Wilson.
Cracker's Robbie Coltrane, who plays the villainous Russian arms-dealer Valentin, a role he took because 'at the age of 44 and being more than a little overweight, I realised my chances of becoming a Bond girl were extremely slim', has a complaint, though. 'I play the Russian but I don't even get to St Petersburg,' he says. 'Bloody Leavesden; that's as far as most of us will go.' Bloody Leavesden is wet and muddy and houses Goldeneye's 400-strong team; it has a 1,000-yard runway, constructed in World War II, which now holds several cardboard cutout MiG 29 jets - Goldeneye will be no True Lies, which featured real-life Harriers. 'I'm not interested in competing with True Lies or Die Hard, says the director, Martin Campbell (who made the award-winning BBC series Edge of Darkness). 'We have James Bond on our side.' The production designer, Peter Lamont, explains: 'You can buy MiGs on the black market, but they cost upwards of GBP295,000 (HK$3.6 million) a piece and Goldeneye only has a GBP3 million budget design. The radio-controlled model replicas can fly at around 210km per hour, however, and we have bought three real Czech tanks.' Adds Coltrane: 'You should have seen the guy who sold us the tanks. Unbelievable! A true bandit capitalist.' A good point, because Goldeneye is all about black-market toys: Goldeneye is actually a stolen satellite component, which, when placed in a parabolic dish in the Caribbean, will activate the world's only remaining rogue satellite and black out the planet's telecommunications. A mysterious evil named Janus is behind the plot, and Bond is sent to Russia by the new M (Dame Judi Dench), armed with Q's gadgets (Desmond Llewelyn) to seek out the Russian arms mafia (namely, Coltrane's Valentin) and stop the scoundrels. But this case brings up a tragic episode in Bond's past - the loss of his colleague, 006 (Sean Bean) on active duty.
