What Skyfall’s Director Would Change About The James Bond Movie

After “Casino Royale,” the very best Bond movie ever made, debuted in 2006, Sony Pictures and longtime Bond custodians EON Productions delivered what is still seen as a historic blunder of a follow-up. “Quantum of Solace” was, in fact, one of the biggest disasters in 007 history, but not for the reasons claimed at the time. Despite making $591 million worldwide, claims that the film was, as Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal surmised, “a model of mediocrity,” became the dominant view, and EON got spooked.

The company went back to the drawing board, bringing on “American Beauty” and “Revolutionary Road” director Sam Mendes to helm Bond’s next outing. Then came another blow: In 2010, MGM, which had distributed all of the EON Bond films, went bankrupt.

Thankfully, the James Bond saga found its way regardless, and “Skyfall” debuted in 2012 to stellar reviews and a $1.1 billion global box office take, making it the highest-grossing Bond film of all time to this day. Still, it seems Mendes himself has some regrets about the film, and would change one specific aspect of “Skyfall” if he had the chance.

I have a distinct memory of when MGM went bankrupt, mainly because, having grown up on the British south coast, I was surprised to learn that a cash-strapped 007 would be coming to my little hometown. I remember talk of how the next Bond movie had been forced to pare down its plans to film in exotic locations and would be making more use of domestic locales. The next thing I knew, Bond was coming to Butlins.

For those that didn’t grow up in a crumbling Victorian seaside resort town, Butlins is a little vacation resort chain that happened to have a location in Bognor Regis. At the time, I remember rumors swirling about how 007 was supposed to traverse the Millennium Dome in his next film, but the producers could only afford to use the paltry Butlins recreation. At the time, The Guardian unenthusiastically delivered the news: “Bond goes to Bognor Regis.” As the outlet reported, “Budgetary constraints have meant that ‘Skyfall’ can no longer afford to film in five of its planned six countries.” But reports of Bond filming down the road from my nan turned out to be false. 007 never came to Butlins.

Still, “Skyfall” did end up shooting a lot more scenes in Britain than your standard Bond movie. Though Daniel Craig’s super spy ended up visiting both Shanghai and Istanbul in the finished film, London was also featured heavily, and the climax took place entirely in Scotland. What’s more, “Skyfall” coincided with the 50th anniversary of Bond’s debut in 1962’s “Dr. No” — the film that kicked off cinema’s most enduring franchise — and there was a distinct celebratory spirit to the film, propelled in part by an obvious pride for 007’s homeland. Of all the things wrong with “Skyfall,” it seems this is something that Sam Mendes now regrets.

There are a lot of things that, if you haven’t guessed, I don’t particularly like about “Skyfall.” The meta nods to Bond history and the strange attempt to retain the series’ then-newfound “grittiness” alongside ejector seats and an unapologetically maudlin celebration of Britain itself just didn’t work for me. On that last point, Sam Mendes is at least somewhat in agreement.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter for the 10-year anniversary of “Skyfall,” the director was asked if there was anything he’d change about the film. “I would think twice about having Bond stand on the rooftops of Whitehall, with the Union Jack flags in the breeze, given the last 10 years of serial incompetence from [London’s] conservative government,” he said. Indeed, the film ends with Bond surveying the capital from the rooftop of M’s offices as the Union Jack dances in the wind. Mendes continued:

“We look back at that time as sort of a bizarre golden era. And ‘Skyfall’ was very much of its time as a movie, and very much influenced by the fact that there was a genuine national pride about the country at that point. And it was also the 50th anniversary of Bond — there was Bond jumping out of a helicopter with the queen at the Olympics that year. So I think that pride, and the excitement around that, filtered and found its way into the movie.”

While Mendes’ regret seems to be based on his disdain for the Conservative government, I think he’s maybe right for the wrong reasons (though I have no problem with him bashing the Tories). There’s a scene in “Skyfall” that involves Daniel Craig’s Bond running through the streets of London while Judi Dench’s M (who this movie had the nerve to kill off) recites Tennyson, and it’s honestly one of the most needlessly mawkish moments in a movie that’s ostensibly celebrating Bond’s long history of stiff upper-lip phlegmatism and coy British insouciance. I’d take Bond scrambling across the Butlins dome over this nonsense any day.