Skyfall (James Bond 007) (Skyfall)

Hello, this is Sam Mendes, director of Skyfall

and this is the DVD Director's Commentary.

Lots to talk about with this movie.

And one of the first things was the debate we had about the gun barrel logo,

which was always designed,

or at least in my head, was always intended

to go right at the beginning of the picture,

but what you see here now is, of course, another version of the gun barrel logo,

which is Bond walking and then stopping and lifting a gun.

So when I put it in front of this image, it didn't work at all.

It felt like this was a repetition.

But, in the end, I think it worked out better with it at the end,

which is in itself a kind of new beginning.

One of the things we determined we would do,

myself and Rob and Neal and John Logan, the writers,

would be to drop the audience down in the middle of a mission

that had, in effect, gone wrong

and ask the audience to play catch-up a little bit, which is what is happening here.

We deliberately don't say what's happened up to this point.

We don't say where Bond is,

you only discover in a minute that he's in Istanbul,

although you hear the call to prayer right at the top over the Columbia logo.

This is where, effectively, Bond discovers that he has mislaid or lost the list.

And this figure we're seeing now, Ronson, another agent who's clearly dying

and is, in a sense, deliberately a younger version of Bond.

He effectively knows, Bond, that he is leaving a man to die

and someone who is full of promise.

And this comes up later in the scene between Bond and M.

And so, really, there's a version of Bond there in the room.

And then this very deliberate shift from the dark of the interior

to the noise and the light and the activity and the hustle and bustle of Istanbul,

which is a magnificent city and we loved every second shooting there.

Again, introducing a new character, Eve, played by Naomie Harris,

in a way that seems to indicate

that Bond already has a relationship with her, or at least knows her,

and, again, asking the audience to catch up.

One of the things that I was also very conscious to do

in the action sequences of this movie, particularly in the first 10 minutes,

which sort of is an albatross, in a way, with Bond movies,

'cause the expectations of the opening of these movies is so high,

was to create parallel action at all times,

so we never got stuck in, as it were, a linear chase,

A chasing B, Bond chasing or being chased, and that alone,

but we had here, a chase between Bond and Eve and Patrice,

but also what's happening at MI6 between M and Tanner,

and, of course, when Bond and Eve are separated,

a three-way sequence, which is all being built to a single climax.

And the sequence as a whole, I can see as a series of Russian dolls in a way.

You think it's going to be a car chase, then it's the shootout here in the marketplace.

And then it becomes a bike chase and then you go on to the train,

and from the train, Bond goes into the digger, etcetera, etcetera.

So it's constantly shifting and developing in interesting ways.

This was actually one of the most amazing locations, the center of Istanbul.

We really took it over and they were immensely generous and supportive

in giving their local monuments over to us.

And we were suitably careful.

Yes, ma'am.

The MI6 set was built at Pinewood and we shot it quite separately.

In fact, there are a lot of sequences in the movie

in which people are trying to communicate with each other on headsets and earpieces

that were shot a long, long time apart.

It's one of the things about a movie of this scale

is you're shooting things over such a long time.

And here, this is a nice mixture of, I think,

stunt work and Daniel and Ola, who plays Patrice so very well,

even though he never speaks, mixed in together.

Our brilliant second unit director, Alex Witt,

and head of stunts, Gary Powell,

have spent a long time up on this roof with bikes

doing this sequence in tiny pieces

and, in the end, it's a combination of stunt work shot on the roofs themselves,

a camera-helicopter,

green screen for the occasional close-up, head replacements, all sorts of things used,

and hopefully at the end it seems pretty seamless,

but given the fact that it was shot over a number of weeks

and the weather changed constantly,

is also brilliantly timed by Roger Deakins, obviously, our great cinematographer.

We shot a lot of stuff up on that roof and a lot of stuff down in the Grand Bazaar.

And, in the end, it just was surplus to requirements.

The sequence ended up being around 11 minutes, something like that,

which is right on the edge of being too long, I felt,

and we were very hard on stuff

that didn't seem necessary or outstayed its welcome

or in any way fetishized the action.

I think there's a great tendency to be bigger, louder, faster

and to sort of forget the story.

Almost as if the story stops and the action begins

and then the story doesn't start again until the action's over.

Spent a long time on this bridge, a long time conceiving this whole chase.

I suppose we must have spent a third of the time on the whole movie

working on the first 10 minutes.

And the transition from the bike to the bridge, I think,

is one of the things I like most, actually.

I like that jump,

a lot of which is Daniel hitting the roof of the train and rolling.

And also Andy Lister, who is a brilliant stunt double for him.

Here, you have this, I suppose, cat-and-mouse game on top of the train.

I felt like the action sequences, pretty much like the movie as a whole,

needed to breathe in and breathe out, so that it wasn't relentless

and there were these moments where you could see

exactly what was going on in someone's head

and there were stealthy chase bits, like this, for example,

rather than just full pelt the whole time.

We chose, I suppose, Roger Deakins and I,

even though we rarely talked about it, actually,

because I think we just assumed this is how we would go,

to shoot this movie as a whole in a classical way.

By which I mean very little handheld camera,

and also limiting ourselves often to one or two cameras,

where I think the expectancy was that we would use more

and to be much more particular

about how we light and frame, and a little less random.

So what you see here actually is not an enormous amount of moving cameras.

They're on moving items,

obviously the camera's on a train that's moving,

but they're locked off a lot of the time or they're still

and a lot of the time was spent in getting these cameras to be still enough

and not be constantly bouncing around on items that we were shooting on.

This was an idea here on the digger that came out of a series of meetings

between the heads of departments.

And this is where teamwork is crucial

and I couldn't possibly have done this movie

without people like Chris Corbould, head of special effects,

Gary Powell, head of stunts,

and everyone else who were in those rooms,

as we debated and turned over every possible option in an action sequence.

And someone eventually said, "Well, what if there's heavy machinery on the train?"

And then someone said, "What if he gets in it?"

And then someone said, "Why doesn't he drive it?"

And then this idea of uncoupling the cars emerged,

and then this tremendous idea, that I thought anyway,

of reaching out the arm of the digger to jam itself into the roof of the carriage

and Bond walking across the arm itself.

Now, who had those ideas and at what point?

It's almost impossible to say,

but I can say that I was supported throughout by a brilliant team,

including all those people and many more

and then what we came up with,

I think, has got a real... I don't know, there's a lot of invention in it.

At the same time, I hope it's staying vaguely within the boundaries of the real.

We shot the whole sequence in three different places.

Istanbul,

Adana, which is further east and near the Syrian border,

about an hour from the Syrian border.

And then further into the mountains here.

So we took it from the city to the outskirts of the city

and out into the magnificent Turkish landscape

that was new to me, but really extraordinarily beautiful.

And what you see here is Daniel on top of the train.

That won't surprise you, but it certainly surprised me on the day,

because he did some things here

that, frankly, were right on the edge of being insane

and this is one of them.

As they emerge out of the tunnel and are fist-fighting on the top of the train,

he was connected by a tiny little wire and nothing else.

And that bridge that you see, there is a massive drop below it.

And when you're standing on top of the train, you can't see the bridge itself,

so it really does feel like you're traveling through the air.

And when you're going fast, it's pretty scary.

I don't get vertigo, but I felt it when I was standing on that train.

And he was magnificently brave and inspiring to the crew.

So here you see all three strands of the story coming together.

You see Eve, who's now made it up on top of the mountain

and is ready to shoot, but can't get a clean shot onto Patrice.

You get the tension building up,

as they've lost everything except the speakerphone at MI6

and, of course, you've got Bond fighting on top of the train.

So all those things are going simultaneously.

I'm gonna lose them.

Can you get into a better position?

The idea behind this whole sequence was, of course, you expect...

It's Bond, you expect him to have a triumphant moment, triumphant finish,

but, instead, M orders her to take the shot and she takes it and she shoots Bond.

And this is, effectively, the beginning of the story,

Bond dying, as it were,

disappearing and then reappearing to find everything changed.

And this moment, where M and indeed Eve and Tanner and everyone at MI6

effectively think that Bond is dead.

This is the first of a series of very skillfully animated Translights.

The city that you see beyond Judi is created in post

and we were on a stage here at Pinewood.

And the crossfade between the sound of the water...

The rain outside MI6 and the water in the waterfall

was something I had in my head from the very beginning.

This shot of Bond sinking down was taken in the water tank,

the underwater stage at Pinewood.

And then we segue, I hope seamlessly,

from Bond sinking down underwater

into this tremendous, I think, opening credit sequence

done by Danny Kleinman and Framestore in London.

I gave Danny a pretty rough brief,

which was that Bond should go down into the water

and effectively travel into the underworld.

Kind of cross the River Styx,

almost like Alice going down the rabbit hole.

And on some level, we should experience the story of the movie

in Bond's unconscious, as it were.

And he took that and brilliantly ran with it.

I pushed him hard to keep the thing moving forward,

keep the camera moving forward, traveling the whole time,