Directing HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE, Part Two

Peter Hunt on directing the forgotten Bond, George Lazenby.

By Edward Gross     November 18, 1999

[In Part One of our retrospective interview, Peter Hunt discussed his tenure as an editor on the first three James Bond films: DR. NO, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, and GOLDFINGER. In Part Two, Hunt discusses the three remaining films on which he worked: THUNDERBALL, which took the series to new box office heights; YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, for which he served as second-unit director; and ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE, on which he graduated to director.]

In THUNDERBALL, James Bond has to stop Ernst Stavros Blofeld from setting off a pair of nuclear weapons that SPECTRE has hijacked. The film heralded the most potent wave of Bondmania the series has seen. 'The funny thing is that they make such a big deal about every latest Bond breaking all the records,' he muses. 'They break the records because the price of tickets have gone up. For instance, THUNDERBALL was the most successful. I don't know if you remember this, but they ran it 24 hours a day in New York. It was amazing, especially since THUNDERBALL wasn't one of the best films. Of course, at the time they could have James Bond Does Dinner as a plot and it probably would have done the same amount of business. Again, you have the luck of the timing and that type of thing, and then you come back to the point that this was the middle of the '60s, and THUNDERBALL came out a time when the Beatles were now big successes, and suddenly everyone--I presume--had a great, euphoric attitude about the British and British products. There are areas where it suddenly goes through, and we were in the middle of it by the time THUNDERBALL came out. It just automatically took off. I remember once coming to America to run the film, or something, for United Artists executives, and I was in a cab from the airport, when the cabdriver--who had heard my English accent--wanted to talk to me about a great little British film he had seen, even though he had no idea that I had anything to do with the film industry. That great little British film he had seen was called DR. NO, which thrilled me. I'll never forget that, because I found it so strangely interesting.

'THUNDERBALL was the biggest film of the lot,' Hunt details. 'Funnily enough, it doesn't matter to the audience. It's whether it captures them or not. It was the most successful at the time, and it was also the most expensive. I think the final negative cost was about eleven million dollars, which was a tremendous amount of money in those days. Of course there was a tremendous amount of underwater material, which is very difficult to edit and to make move along and make a good story out of it. Underwater by its nature is slow, and therefore trying to keep a pace going all through it is the difficult thing. Actually, I'd love to do THUNDERBALL again in the future, which, of course, they eventually did. (Hunt is referring to producer Kevin McClory's 1983 remake, NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN, with Sean Connery returning to the role of 007.)

'One thing I said at the time of THUNDERBALL and again later on, was that we had to be careful that we didn't become imitators of our imitators, because by then everybody had gotten on the bandwagon, so we had to be very careful of copying them, because that would have been a disaster. But the Bond films seem to have outlived everything and gone on and on and on, although they've changed tremendously. They're not the sort of thing that Ian Fleming wrote.'

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE truly made the Bond franchise larger than life, as Blofeld (Donald Pleasance) was capturing American and Soviet space capsules and bringing them to a hollowed-out volcano used as a headquarters in order to trigger a war between the two countries. 'There were always problems on all of the Bonds for various reasons,' says Hunt, who handled second unit directing on the film, 'because they were tremendously ambitious and it wasn't always possible to do what the written word said--what people imagined. It was a compromise, like most films are. It was a disjointed story, I'm afraid, but it was great for me, because I spent six months in Japan and did all the second unit on it, all the aerial stuff, the helicopter fight--all of that, which was great to make and get done. Truth be told, it was a tremendous training ground for me for when I came into ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE, so all that worked out. And it was a successful film. The problem with it, however, is that it was difficult to put YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE in the same style as all the others, because Bond got married--you had to make that look beautiful, and it was--and you had the settings in Japan, and all that stuff. You had a whole different culture, so it became a different style in a way, which is why it might be disjointed. It WAS a little on the fantastic side, and I think that's the thing about the film. It's a merge between the fantastic and the real and the beautiful, like the wedding, which was very realistic and beautiful, and yet we suddenly pushed into the fantasy-action material. It had two different tiers, as it were, and it didn't really juxtapose together quite evenly.'

ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE was different from its predecessors in a number of ways, not the least of which was the fact that it marked the first Bond film that did not star Sean Connery as 007, the actor being replaced by Australian model George Lazenby. The story, too, was different is that it focused much more squarely on character, with Blofeld's latest scheme--threatening the world with biological warfare unless he is granted full amnesty--taking a back seat to Bond's romance and eventual marriage to Diana Rigg's Tracy, who falls victim to a bullet in the film's final frame. As such, it is often considered number two in the series by Bond fans, right behind GOLDFINGER.

'I'll accept number two,' laughs Hunt, who made his directorial debut on the film. 'Originally, I was promised the film after THUNDERBALL, but the producers found themselves in a contractual mix-up with other directors on hand, and I got pushed out into the cold. Lewis Gilbert, whose editor I had been for many years, was signed to direct YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, which is how that came about. Actually, ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE should have come before YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE in the series of events that Fleming wrote. At the end of ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE the wife is killed, and then in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE Bond is sent to Japan to extract revenge from Blofeld, and the series went on from there. But they did it the other way around and altered the ending of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE.

'In directing ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE,' he continues, 'I wanted to make it differently; I wanted it to stand out from the other films. It was my picture, not anybody else's. It was a very good story, too, and very different. I had the luck, I suppose, to have the ski chase, which we'd never done before. Up until then, and even today, distributors said that they didn't like snow pictures, because they all think they're going to be a disaster for one reason or another. This one worked out quite well. I was also very determined to stay as close to Fleming as I could. During the entire shooting schedule I had a copy of the paperback, where I had written various notes and things, and I was very insistent that we stay with the story of the book. I don't know how much it really stands apart from the others, because it's difficult for me to look at it in that way. I took the book, combined with various ideas I had of my own; we banged our heads and made the film. I didn't think about the previous Bonds or anything else like that. I knew that it was certainly a Bond film, and we had to make it into a good story.'

One has to wonder how intimidating it was to helm the first Bond film without Connery. 'I would have loved to have had him, because if we had had him, it would have been the best of the lot,' says Hunt simply. 'But at that time we couldn't, so there was really no point in wishing that we could. The producers were notoriously known for not making their minds up, and I think we were like two weeks off of shooting when one had to say, 'WHO are we going with? We're supposed to be starting, but we haven't got a Bond yet,' so it got almost to the last moment before the decision was made. The decision to use Lazenby was not left in my hands, but they did say to me, 'Can you do it with him?' And I said, 'Yes, I can. Let's go with somebody we can all agree on,' because United Artists, Broccoli and Saltzman were the ones who had to say yes or no.

'Lazenby was very good. And I had a big job directing him, even though he seems to think he wasn't directed. It was quite a job to make him Bond. But he took it and did it, and that's the important thing. I'm not questioning how difficult it was, because that's part of the director's job. You don't just stand up there and say, 'Cut, action,' and that sort of thing. You've got a lot more on your plate than that. It was a difficult job, but the answer for me was that it worked, and it worked for the producers as well.'

In BONDAGE, the magazine of the now-defunct James Bond 007 Fan Club, Lazenby was quoted as saying that he wasn't directed in the film, and that he and Hunt weren't even talking. 'I don't know why he should say that, because it's quite untrue,' responds a puzzled Hunt. 'You can't possibly have a new, young guy who has never been an actor and not talk to him. You simply can't do it. I had to tell him where to go and what to do. The whole thing with him is that he changes his mind all the time. But he had to do what I wanted him to do. Indeed, we had long conversations during and before we even started shooting. I wouldn't have gone with him if Diana Rigg hadn't assured me that she liked him enormously at that time before we started shooting, and that she would do everything to help and work with him.'

In that same interview, the actor also claimed that he and Rigg did not get along. 'I think it's a measure of the man's personality,' Hunt sighs. 'He changed about all over the place, when it all went to his head. You must remember that he was an ordinary little guy from the backwoods of Australia, and he was suddenly thrust into a very sophisticated area of filmmaking, and it was very difficult for him. I had to do certain things that directors have to do. For instance, one of the best things he ever did was his reaction when Diana Rigg is shot. We got up there at eight in the morning; I insisted he was on set; I sat him in the car and made him rehearse and rehearse all day long; I broke him down until he was absolutely exhausted, and by the time we shot it at five o'clock, he was exhausted, and that's how I got the performance. He thought that was me being unpleasant to him, but I couldn't say, 'Now, listen George, I'm going to do this because it's the best way to get you to react.' Maybe I did things like that all the way through, because I knew how to get emotions out of him, but he didn't seem to think that that was fair. You know, had George Lazenby been more sensible, and had Broccoli and Saltzman been more sensible with him, I think he would have made a very credible Bond. He was a great looking guy and he moved along very well, although he wasn't really an actor. He was a model who had not done any acting before that. I think if things had gone the other way, he would have gone on to be a very good Bond. I'm sure they're not going to worry. They've made a fortune anyway.'

Over the ensuing decades, ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE has emerged as a classic Bond film, despite the critical hits the film took at the time of its release. Offers Hunt, 'I must say that I'm always complimented, because I get good notices every time it's run on television. Funnily enough, I don't know if it's me, but I believe they're giving it better notices now than they did when it first came out thirty years ago.'

Which leads to the next question: why would the director leave the security of the Bond franchise? 'At the end of that film,' he responds, 'the producers didn't know what they were going to do, whereas prior to that we had gone on, and on and on. But the team sort of broke up and went on to other things. Then Broccoli asked me to come back for DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, but at that time he and Saltzman were fighting, and I was involved with something else. I told them that if they moved the production date I might be able to, but they couldn't and so they went with Guy Hamilton. I did, however, get a beautiful review from Pauline Kael on that film, who said, 'The one thing missing from this film is Peter Hunt.' I did have heavy involvement with six of them, which must mean, I suppose that I brought SOMETHING to the films.'

Indeed. Peter Hunt helped set a standard that redefined the action genre and has allowed agent 007 to defy all the odds as the character moves toward the 21st century. That's one hell of a legacy.