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‘James Bond’ Directors Celebrate 50th Anniversary Blu-ray

11 Jan, 2012 By: Stephanie Prange



LAS VEGAS — Directors and “Bond girls” turned out at the International Consumer Electronics Show Jan. 10 to celebrate the impending release of the entire James Bond film series on Blu-ray Disc for the first time.

Dubbed Bond 50 for the series’ 50th anniversary, the boxed set, released by MGM and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, includes all 22 films, some of which were not previously available on Blu-ray. The set features more than 130 hours of extras, including some new, exclusive content.

Consumers can pre-order the set, scheduled for release in the fall, at participating online retailers.

“It’s an MGM franchise that has stood the test of time,” said Mike Dunn, president of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.

This is the second year Fox has put on a directors’ panel at CES, and Dunn said the objective is “to show how technology and content are intertwined today.”

“If you’re a director, I think the most important thing is that you invest a major part of your life in creating a film, and details matter,” he added. “They matter in sound quality and the picture quality.”

Bond directors John Glen (five Bond films including For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, A View to a Kill, The Living Daylights and Licence To Kill), Martin Campbell (GoldenEye, Casino Royale) and Michael Apted (The World Is Not Enough) appeared on a panel at the Panasonic booth with former “Bond girls” Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace) and Caterina Murino (Casino Royale) introducing the panel.

“Olga and I are very happy to be here in Las Vegas as representatives of this very exclusive club known as Bond girls,” Marino said.

The directors discussed how they had felt taking the reins of such an iconic series.

“For me, it was scary as hell,” recalled Apted. “I was aware of the huge audience out there that had all these expectations, and I was just petrified would I be able to deliver.”

“I did GoldenEye with Pierce Brosnan (new to the part of Bond),” said Campbell. “There was fear and trepidation that he was gonna let everybody down and whether he could step up to the plate. … They did like Pierce, thank God.”

Glen discussed the evolution of the “second feature that preceded the film to whet the audience appetite and get them in the mood for a James Bond film,” the action sequence in which the Bond character makes a daring escape. In discussing a clip from The Spy Who Loved Me, he noted that the ski jump with parachute was “for real” with a stuntman, not CGI.

“If the shot had failed, which had a very good likelihood, then we’d have just scrubbed the whole idea of the scene,” he said.

In discussing a clip from his film The World Is Not Enough, Apted recalled how he got to poke fun at the hullabaloo over the model of the Bond car. In the sequence, a large saw assaults Bond’s new BMW.

“I got a chance to rip up a Bond car,” Apted said.

 



About the Author: Stephanie Prange


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