Sam Mendes on Returning to James Bond: “Never Say Never”
As executive producer on HBO’s The Franchise, Mendes is using his blockbuster experience to help skewer another iconic movie franchise.
With Skyfall, Sam Mendes refreshed one of the most enduring film franchises and brought it into the 21st Century. The movie updated James Bond in a way that balanced reverence for 60 years of history with a cool new look and feel that stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the most cutting-edge action movies. After following it up with Spectre, Mendes moved on to his equally illustrious theater career before shifting back to cinema with 1917.
Now, he’s executive producing The Franchise, an HBO comedy series poking fun at the Hollywood action movie machine. And while The Franchise is primarily a satire of Marvel and DC’s dueling cinematic universes, Mendes experience on 007 clearly helped him get into the right headspace. So perhaps it’s not a surprise that when I asked if he’d ever consider making another James Bond movie, he seems reluctant at best.
“Never say never, to quote the man, but I would doubt it,” Mendes tells Inverse. “It was very good for me at that moment in my life. I felt like it shot me out of some old habits. It made me think on a bigger scale. It made me use different parts of my brain. You have to have a lot of energy.”
Mendes co-created The Franchise with Succession writer Jon Brown and Veep creator Armando Iannucci.
While Mendes undeniably has blockbuster movie chops, The Franchise is tackling the apex of the blockbuster market: superhero movies, where whole sequences are created in post-production.
“Bond still exists in the real world. I had maybe three or four days of green screen shooting on that movie, and it felt like three or four months,” he says, adding that he’s not a fan of filming against a green screen. “There's something so difficult and airless about that environment. You've got nothing to react to, you're not standing in the real world.”
The Franchise’s Eric Bouchard (Daniel Brühl) reflects Mendes’ thoughts on franchise directors — he’s often in over his head.
But if there’s one thing his Bond experience gave Mendes, it’s empathy for the directors who work on big-budget franchise movies like the ones parodied in The Franchise.
“You're so used as a director to being the initiator, being the person who's there on the ground floor,” he says. “To walk in and to have an actor who's played the role twice before and knows it better than you do, and people who know the world better than you do, you have to try and play catch up. That's a very odd place to put yourself as a director.”
Mendes also shares his concerns that cinematic universes like Marvel could drag the entire industry back to the days of Old Hollywood when directors were just hired hands to usher a project to completion.
“They don't want people who have a big track record,” he says.
Perhaps that is why he’s grateful for the experience with the Bond series, but doubts he’ll return.
“They want slightly more malleable people who are earlier in their career,” he says, “who perhaps are going to use it as a stepping stone, and who are more controllable by the studio.”
