What-ifs - Haggis 5 years too late?

postman pat

Well, hello all.

Nice to have found this Bond haven... Having seen the wonders Paul Haggis worked on the latest James Bond outing, I got thinking to myself - what if he'd had a hand in The World is Not Enough or Die Another Day. If you ask me, newbie to the Bond world I may be, he's done an incredible job with things over at Eon.

So my question is... what would the Brosnan films be like with Haggis behind the script?

actonsteve

The worse problem with DAD isnt so much the writing its the director - Lee Tamahori..

From listening to inteviews over the years you get the impression that to him the Bond films were Hollywood action flicks with gadgets and hot chicks thrown in. The man was more obcessed with getting continuity references and cutting edge editing ("its the future- get used to it) then a decent script.

After all, Vic Armstorng pleaded with him about using using for the surf scene saying the fans would hate it as they had always used live action. It was a bond between them and the audience. He went ahead and ignored it and produced the worse scene in forty years. So I believe DAD was damned from the beginning due to Tamahori. He was just WRONG.

And yes, with Haggis involved in the writing and Craig being a great Bond we could be in the middle of a new golden age..

actonsteve

But you must remember Lee Tamahori had massive input over the script. How many rewrites did he give Purvis and Wade?

Honey Rider

I think that what sank DAD was a combination of the director and the script. The script was terrible, which surprised me as I really liked the script to TWINE. The direction itself was also very disappointing (some of the decisions that Tamahori made were ridiculous.) Would Haggis have made a difference? I don't know. I'm not a big fan of his. Although I didn't mind his screenplay for the Eastwood film, I didn't love either CR or Crash. (I did love Due South though. ) I certainly think that DAD should have had a new director. But I'm not sure about hiring new writers as I loved P+W's work on TWINE.

actonsteve

Honey Rider wrote:

I certainly think that DAD should have had a new director. But I'm not sure about hiring new writers as I loved P+W's work on TWINE.

But I think the direction torpedoed TWINE.

The script was meaty but several characters were overwritten. The villains were written so three-dimensionally they lost all menace. Electra King suffered from too much character exposition.

But there was no cause and effect with TWINE.Why did Bull put that bomb in the safehouse? There ws no reason. And in places it was so unexciting.The chainsaw helicopter at the caviar factory is my dullest action scene in 21 Bond filsm.

postman pat

Wow, interesting comments from all.

I think Die Another Day divebombed mostly because of poor plot and well... yes, they did pluck a poor director, but I think that there could have been expansive improvement before they even cast!

The lack of creativity made Die Another Day tragic, only reinforced by its poor execution. Well... I do still maintain that Haggis should have joined the team and straightened things out earlier. TWINE - for example - had potential, but was crippled by a number of things that could have been straightened out in a script draft.

frostbitten

Yes, I think that bringing in Haggis earlier would have made a significant difference (perhaps not so much with TWINE, but definitely with DAD). The problem with TWINE is the pacing. It is a little uneven, with the excitement slacking off in some parts. (However, it is not a huge problem, IMO, as the exciting parts of TWINE are very exciting, and Brosnan's and Marceau's solid performances also made up for most of it). I suppose a clever scriptwriter can help smooth out the pacing by rearranging some scenes, but I think the blame should be placed more on the director.
With DAD, however, a poor script is definitely the cause of the film not living up to hard-core fans' expectations. Actually, I should say "half of the script is poor", because the first half is very good stuff, exploring some uncharted territories. Still, if a scriptwriter is foolish enough to bring in an invisible car, glacier-surfing (which was then horribly handled by the CGI department), and characters like Mr. Kil, then there is not much a star or director could have done to save the second half of the film from sinking like the Titanic. I'm sure someone like Haggis would have edited all that silliness out of the script and replaced it with materials that are more in the vein of the hard-as-nails first half. Then, the film would have been totally transformed, and would be a whole, cohesive product, instead of the schizophrenic movie that DAD turned out to be.

postman pat

The thing that I wonder is... would he have taken the job given the state of the franchise back at Die Another Day.

Was it the much-debated reboot idea that attracted Haggis to have his run-in with Bond? Nobody but one can really answer that, but had he tackled DAD I think it could have turned out half-decent... still with some of the direction choices, he could well have been wary of putting his name against yet another bulk-standard action blockbuster... which Die Another Day turned out to be.