http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/film ... 711894.ece
Nobody knows him better: spy queen Barbara Broccoli talks about her life with 007 ... and the Daniel Craig effect
Barbara Broccoli sits sipping from a mug of tea in her office at the family firm. Had her father run a pizza parlour, she suggests, she’d now be making pizzas. Instead we’re in a six-storey building at the Hyde Park end of Piccadilly. The ceilings are splendidly high. The purple-carpeted staircase is so broad you could probably drive a small sports car down it. And the firm’s most recent recipe, Skyfall, is the biggest earner in British cinema history. Some pizza parlour.
Broccoli has been running the James Bond films for 20 years. She and her half-brother, Michael G. Wilson, took over the series after her father, the late Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, produced the first 16 of them. Since then they’ve been in charge of four Bond films starring Pierce Brosnan, three starring Daniel Craig, and have started work on the next Craig film. But without, as was widely reported last week, Skyfall director Sam Mendes.
Broccoli is well-dressed, looks younger than 52 and talks in an accent that is, she admits, a mix of her American parentage and English upbringing. She agrees — with a flicker of “must we?” — to talk about Bond. “But I won’t talk about the future,” she says, friendly but firm, setting the parameters like a true producer.
If that makes her sound a bit churlish — what else are you going to ask Barbara Broccoli about? Garlic bread? — then it should be pointed out that I’ve been invited into Bond HQ because she is producing a new West End musical, Once.
Yes, when Broccoli takes time off from masterminding the biggest franchise in cinema, she likes to do a little moonlighting. “I can take a week off, maybe two weeks at a push,” she says cheerfully. “But I don’t do well doing nothing.”
It is four years since she went with her daughter Angelica, then aged 16, to see Once at the cinema. They both loved this low-budget, low-key Irish film, a hymn to the power of music, which tracks the relationship between a thirtysomething Dublin busker and a Czech immigrant. And when Broccoli’s ex-husband, the American theatre producer Fred Zollo, mentioned that he knew someone interested in putting it on the stage, Broccoli made sure she was on the team. It is already a huge hit on Broadway after opening there a year ago, but the creators are all from the British Isles. Broccoli brought in John Tiffany, director of the National Theatre of Scotland’s hit Black Watch, who in turn brought in the Irish playwright Enda Walsh. They didn’t want to “ruin it” by making it too glossy. Even so, you cannot imagine dollar signs — or is it pound signs? — spinning in Broccoli’s eyes when she first saw the film.
“But I’m motivated entirely by passion,” she insists. “You want to do good things. You want to do great stuff. You want to work with amazing people. And I wanted to see it! The idea was to bring a lot of interesting people together who could make it special.”
So is that her role, whether in film or when producing Chariots of Fire or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the stage? Is she throwing a party? “I suppose so,” she says. “Expensive party! But Bond does take over your life for a good two-and-a-half, three years. So I feel like I decompress from Bond doing theatre.”
She goes to the theatre a lot; she enthuses about Nicholas Hytner’s regime at the National, about Helen Mirren in The Audience. Her first stage production was 13 years ago: La Cava, a musical written by her mother, Dana. “I like to say that I got my love of movies from my father and my love of theatre from my mother.”
Broccoli and Wilson always get credited jointly. Wilson is 18 years her senior, Dana’s son from her first marriage. Is there a hierarchy between them? “No, we have to agree on everything. Which, in business, we do. We don’t agree on politics or religion, we have the typical brother-sister disagreements on other things. But I can’t remember when we disagreed on something to do with work. We were educated by my father, we both have his sensibility.”
Broccoli was only a year old when her father started work on the first Bond film, Dr No, with his then business partner Harry Saltzman. She went to British schools, then to university in Los Angeles before returning to London. She feels both American and British, she says — and has the dual citizenship to back that up.
Her childhood was exotic. After school she would often pop off to the Bond set at Pinewood. In school holidays, she would follow filming around the world. Her father allowed her to sit in on production meetings. “Like a lot of kids you try to help out your dad, make tea, do bits and pieces. I wanted to be around him and that was the way to do it.”
When she was 17 she got a job in the publicity department for The Spy Who Loved Me. Later she joined the series as an assistant director and an assistant producer. Did her colleagues resent her? “Not resentment, I don’t think. But nobody likes having the boss’s kids hanging around, so you’ve got to prove yourself.” It was important to her father that she got familiar with every layer of the business. “Because when you are running a company, you need to know what everybody’s jobs are.”
Cubby taught her to listen to everyone, she says, but also to know when to stop listening and start doing. “He used to say, make a decision, even if it’s wrong. Because the paralysis caused by indecision in film-making is time-consuming and costly. So, you know” — and suddenly her accent goes 100 per cent British — “get on with it. If you make a mistake, you can deal with it. In a long-running series, 50 years, you’re going to make mistakes. We certainly have. But make them your mistakes. And learn from them. You learn from your failures more than your successes.”
Which must make it a challenge to learn from Skyfall, $1.1 billion worldwide and counting? “Yeah, it will be very difficult to compete with that film. It’ll be tough. But we’ll try.” As the producers, Broccoli and Wilson tend to be responsible for the basic idea for a film, the locations and the cast. In what is traditionally a director’s medium, they wield a lot of power. “Well, we are the custodians,” she says. They have two starting points: the personal, making sure the story stretches their hero “emotionally as well as physically”, and the political: “We think, what is the world afraid of? Where are we headed? And then we try to create a villain that is the physical embodiment of that fear.”
Talking of which, I tell her that I’ve recently watched early Bond films with my 8-year-old daughter. She likes them a lot, but she’s perplexed by some of the sexism. Broccoli nods sympathetically, before adding that there were some positive female role models then too. “But it’s because Bond films have been around for so long they get the beating. Compare them to some of the other films at the time — I mean, Christ!”
Has the depiction of women in Bond films been a natural progression, then, or something she has consciously addressed? She splutters. “Well of course I’ve consciously addressed it! How could I not? But, you know, like all women try to address it in their daily lives. We don’t put up with a lot of the stuff that used to go on, and we have to address it all the time.
“But when you have a daughter like you do and like I do, you want to make sure that they are treated properly in life, that they have all the opportunities open to them. And my father always treated me that way. He never said, ‘Oh you can’t do that because you’re a girl’. He actually thought women were far more organised and effective and capable.”
I showed my daughter Casino Royale at the weekend. The difference was palpable. “Yeah. He’s grown up.
Bond has grown up.” So though Broccoli needs a break from 007 now and then, she still adores the work. “Wouldn’t you show up for work,” she says with a cackle, “if you were making a Bond movie?”
And if the series is riding high now, she gives Craig a lot of the credit.
“He has allowed the audience to get a glimpse of the inner life of Bond. Bond doesn’t talk about his feelings very much, so everything that Daniel does he does through his acting, which is very subtle — so subtle that I think people don’t realise what a great actor he is. He conveys a lot of complex emotions without talking about them. He’s been a huge part of the success.”
And how much difference does the box-office windfall make to her? It’s useful professionally, she says: these films are expensive. “My dad was always about: put the money on the screen.” But personally? She smiles, then pauses. “You know, I’m very lucky, I’m financially very comfortable. I’m very grateful to my father for putting me in that situation. Money buys you freedom. But I don’t do this to make money. I do this because I have a passion for it and it’s a legacy that I want to uphold.” And will her own daughter, currently at college, also be upholding that legacy at some point? “She’s a very good creative writer, but she’s also interested in journalism. So she may be following in your footsteps.”
At which point I can only state the bleedin’ obvious: if I had to advise someone which of our respective family firms to gravitate towards, it wouldn’t be mine.
