On Friday 3rd November 2006, just hours before the international media were treated to the first official screening of Casino Royale, Promax UK – an annual conference for those working in broadcast advertising and marketing - invited composer David Arnold, title designer Daniel Kleinman and author Charlie Higson, to participate in a panel discussion titled James Bond: A Legacy Of Excellence at London’s Mermaid Theatre.  It was a unique discussion - particularly in order to listen to individuals from the opposite ends of the OO7 spectrum – film and literary - share their thoughts and anecdotes together.

The session was sponsored by The James Bond International Fan Club and chaired by KKBB contributor and noted film author and journalist,  Matthew Field.

What follows are extracted highlights of Charlie Higson’s contributions to the discussion.

MATTHEW FIELD:  We’re also joined by writer and performer Charlie Higson, who is currently writing a series of novels based on the childhood exploits of James Bond. Charlie first came to public attention in the BBC comedy The Fast Show.  His first two Young Bond books, ‘Silverfin’ and ‘Blood Fever’, have been huge hits and currently works on the hilarious BBC Radio 4 comedy show, Down The Line. (Applause)

MATTHEW FIELD:  It’s a dream job isn’t it – working on James Bond? Were you [a fan] of the movies and books whilst you were growing up?

CHARLIE HIGSON:  Not really no. (Laughter). We wouldn’t be here would we, if we weren’t?  I think we’ve all grown up as kids going to see James Bond films thinking ‘This is just brilliant.’ Yeah, I think we’ve probably all became his fans.

MATTHEW FIELD: Creatively, does it get harder … - thinking what you can do next?

CHARLIE HIGSON: The great thing about working on Bond is that you’ve got this fantastic set of elements to work with. He has been around for over fifty years now and it’s totally part of our culture. You’ve got all these fantastic building blocks that you can knock about with. You can have echoes of what’s gone before but you can build something new with it - which I think is what we’re all doing. Danny’s title sequences nod back to what Maurice Binder was doing with his sequences. David’s work echoes that of John Barry and of course still uses The James Bond theme. You’ve got all that fantastic stuff that you can use and yet you can still build something new and exciting with it - which is fun.

MATTHEW FIELD: Audiences’ perception of who Bond is, is from the films. Charlie, when writing your books, how do you ensure you don’t disappoint your readers without losing sight of who the literary Bond really is?

CHARLIE HIGSON: It’s quite tricky because I’m writing books for children. If you think about the main things that James Bond is known for - driving fast cars, having sex with lots of women, killing people, drinking vodka and certainly in the old days, smoking heavily - you can’t do any of those things in a kid’s book. So it was kind of ‘How do I keep him as James Bond but try and get those elements in?’

My brief was very much to go back to the literary James Bond, to Ian Fleming’s books and not try and fit in with what they had done with the films. There was definitely a worry, with everybody involved and particularly at Puffin, in that kids would think, ‘Well this isn’t James Bond’ because the books are set in the early thirties, he’s thirteen, he’s not a secret agent, he’s not a spy kid - he’s just an ordinary school kid’. But by putting in enough of those elements that I was talking about before, it becomes James Bond. You put the Bond villain in and a Bond girl and there’s a basic Bond storyline. Bond meets the villain, they have some kind of competition, usually Bond beats the villain in the competition and they then meet up again. Bond tracks him down, he gets captured, he gets tortured, he escapes, he comes back and destroys everything and along the way he gets to shag a couple of women.

MATTHEW FIELD: How much freedom did the Ian Fleming copyright holders give you, in terms of your creativity?

CHARLIE HIGSON: Their original idea behind the project, was to remind people of the literary side of James Bond - the fact he originally appeared in these books written in the 1950s by Ian Fleming. They had various continuation authors working on them and they wanted to start again afresh. Their brief was they wanted to get proper writers to come in and write some new books. They couldn’t find any, so they asked me! (Laughter) They have an ongoing plan to do some more adult books, but the first thing they wanted to do, was to do some kids books because it was an area where they felt they could do something new.

MATTHEW FIELD:  With each new book that you write, are you conscious you’re shaping a character who becomes the man Ian Fleming described rather than the character that we see on screen?

CHARLIE HIGSON: Yes, very much and this ties in with what David has being saying about the new film Casino Royale where they are trying to show Bond becoming Bond. The fun for me and the interest for me in these books, was not to start with a kind of mini-Pierce Brosnan in a little tuxedo, but to start with a real boy, an ordinary 13 year old boy. It starts with his first day at school. He’s quite a lonely kid because his parents have died - which is something that Ian Fleming tells us. He’s been brought up by an aunt, he’s going to this fairly scary new school and I wanted to show through the five books, similar processes they are doing with the new film - starting to grow into who he becomes. With the various extreme things that happen to him, he becomes more cynical, more hardened. But essentially we do see him as James Bond.

A lot of the adult Bond fanatics, of which there are thousands, millions of them out there, you only have to look at the websites, were quite dismayed by this idea to start with. They sort of said, ‘I don’t really like the first book because he’s not really James Bond - he gets a bit bullied…I want to see James Bond - the man with the theme music playing’. But the kids haven’t said that. The kids like the fact that you’re dealing with a real person and you can see him working his way towards the moment where the theme music will kick in, which is roundabout the last page of book five.

MATTHEW FIELD: In conclusion we couldn’t have a conversation about Bond without me asking you all who your favourite James Bond is….

CHARLIE HIGSON: We’re all going to say exactly the same thing, my first film, I remember going to see in a cinema was Thunderball. David you remember You Only Live Twice, and I should think Daniel would probably say the same thing. So it has to be…George Lazenby! (Laughter)  I took my kids to the shoot at Pinewood and they were desperate, ‘We have to see James Bond, we have to see James Bond.’ They knew Pierce Brosnan wasn’t James Bond and they knew it was the new Bond but they didn’t really care about that - they just wanted to see James Bond and they were happy they saw Daniel Craig and he was James Bond. It just worked. There’s something about the character that is bigger than the actor. They were so excited because they had seen James Bond, whereas if I had taken them six months previously and said ‘We’re going to go to a film set and you’re going to see Daniel Craig’ they’d have told me to ‘Fuck off’.

Promax UK 2006 James Bond: A Legacy Of Excellence produced by Grant Campbell (late of the BBC 2 reality show, The Restaurant). Thanks to Nick Roberts. For more information, see www.promax-uk.org

MATTHEW FIELD is the author of ‘The Making Of The Italian Job’ and ‘Michael Caine, You’re A Big Man’, both published by BT Batsford. He has co-written his next book ‘Deer Hunters, Blade Runners And Blowing The Bloody Doors Off’ which is the autobiography of Academy Award winning film producer Michael Deeley, to be published by Faber & Faber next year. His is a contributing writer to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang magazine. Ajay Chowdhury is the editor of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang magazine.

Text © 2006, Matthew Field. All rights reserved.
All photographs © 2006, Ajay Chowdhury. All rights reserved.

The full version 7 page article and exclusive photographs appear in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang #4. The publication of the James Bond International Fan Club
http://www.007.info/ClubMagazine.asp