Nobody Does It Better: FFC Interviews Martin Campbell

by Walter Chaw I fucking love Martin Campbell’s movies.

I find them viscerally engaging and curious. They never shy away from tough subjects or sociopolitical hotspots, and, most importantly, they’re never boring. I rented his futuristic prison movie, 1994’s No Escape, on VHS just because it looked like The Blood of Heroes mixed with some sort of “The Most Dangerous Game” conceit. What I found was a taut film that felt like a lost entry in the Mad Max saga, with a vibrant, virile Ray Liotta taking on the Yojimbo role in a war between post-apocalyptic, desert-island tribes. 

I encountered Campbell again at the helm of the earlier HBO film Cast a Deadly Spell–the union of noir and H.P. Lovecraft I never knew I needed. I will always wonder if Clive Barker’s Harry D’Amour was the inspiration for its protagonist, a detective investigating the theft of the Necronomicron. Campbell twice resurrected a moribund James Bond franchise, first with Pierce Brosnan (at last) in GoldenEye and again with Daniel Craig in a reboot and reconsideration, the generally fantastic Casino Royale.

He’s back with a new film, Cleaner, starring Daisy Ridley as an ex-soldier taking on a group of eco-terrorists who are, you know, on the right side of history, if on the wrong side in terms of the murderousness of their approach. In the age of Luigi, even this is up for debate. Of course Campbell finds himself on the bleeding edge once more. Speaking with him over Zoom, however, I wanted to start with the vanguards past from which he drew inspiration. I asked him about John Frankenheimer and what Campbell’s called his favourite film, Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate.

MARTIN CAMPBELL: Oh yes, The Manchurian Candidate, Frankenheimer, the movie that made me want to do movies. It’s absolutely terrific of course. And I became a big Frankenheimer fan after–Seven Days in May, The Train. He did a slew of films there in the ’60s, The Birdman of Alcatraz, quite the run, and then his career sort of tapered off, I think, in the sort of late ’70s and so forth, but I was very influenced by him. So much so that when I first went to Hollywood–I think it was 1990, roughly about that time–I rang him up and said, “Can we have dinner?” And he and his wife, we had a five-hour dinner, me just picking his brain. So, you know, my dream come true: have dinner with John Frankenheimer.

You both started in television…
He was Sidney Lumet’s assistant, I think. And TV then, you know, the hour-long live dramas–I didn’t have anything like that kind of pressure. Live television must’ve been terrifying. I started much more protected: My career began as a TV cameraman, video cameraman. I shot a lot of dramas, so I guess in that way it was like Frankenheimer. This is in the late ’60s, and there was some live TV then as well, but not too much. Really the kind of prep that John was brought up under, the kind of preparation they had to do for those shows–you know, you get an hour-long drama with all the actors and the extras and everything else, and you almost don’t have time to think. I wonder if that’s not a blessing. I mean, anything can go wrong, and I’m sure sometimes it did. 

Did it with you?
(laughs) Not to me, not really, but I remember I was a cameraman on a play once. We were shooting with Sean Connery, and he told us that he was on a live hour-long show in America and it was all set on an airplane, right, with all the passengers, everything else, and the other actor at the time freaked out. He lost his nerve because it was live. He walked out the door of the plane in the middle of the scene. This is before the end of Act One, so God knows what they did. I imagine that was quite an improvisational moment. But, but no, I would say that my and Frankenheimer’s experiences were very different. But from a technical aspect, maybe, yes, there are similarities, and certainly with subjects that I’m interested in and how to portray them. I will say I’m grateful to have learned the value of rehearsals. It’s all about the preparation and the rehearsals. Yes, that’s something I certainly picked up on, because I do tend to do a lot of preparation. It’s come in handy especially now, the reason simply being that these days, the budgets and schedules are both tight. 

The Manchurian Candidate is so ethical and moral in its depiction of current events and political ambiguity. I find that in your pictures as well.
Well, let’s not forget that first of all, it’s a terrific thriller. From that weird opening where the platoon gets captured in Korea. They’re captured, brainwashed, and they’re sent back to the States. And unlikeable Laurence Harvey, who was Sergeant Shaw, if you remember, suddenly is beloved by his men. Frank Sinatra and all the remaining members of the platoon, when asked about Shaw, said he was the bravest, best leader–

Warmest, most wonderful human being—
Yes! All of that! I loved it first for that. And that ending, set against the Presidential campaign, right, in the Stadium? It really holds up. Unfortunately.

I admire the clarity of its action—not just the reasoning, but the execution. I see that in your films, too.
In all honesty, I think in those days that’s just what they did. That was the standard. You know, those directors like Frankenheimer, Lumet, Siegel, all the thriller directors of that era, even William Wyler with Ben-Hur, right? It’s all about the preparation. He must have storyboarded that chariot chase down to the millimetre. It’s a brilliant piece of kinetic cinema, absolutely brilliant, right? And you’re right. You know, in those days, you would back up and you would see the action. You could see what was happening, who was doing what to whom. And so often now, with action, you know, you get too close. It’s a lot of kind of blurry frames and you don’t know where the hell you are or what is actually taking place. So, no, you’re absolutely right.

Almost a documentary approach…
In those days, they filmed the action correctly, in my view. Old-fashioned maybe, but I thought it was much better. And that’s exactly what I believe. Yeah, I don’t think we’ve ever improved on it, to be honest with you. Action is storytelling. I mean, it’s not just visceral action for action’s sake. The audiences are so… They’ve seen everything, you know what I mean? In terms of action, they’ve seen it all.

How do you deal with that in an action franchise?
In the Bond films, we always sat down to begin with and said, “Well, what hasn’t the audience ever seen before?” And the special effects guy puts up his hand and he says, “Well, how about a tank chase?” Great! You know what I mean? Literally, we had those meetings, and nothing was too extravagant or unlikely–everything is fair game[.] If none of us had seen it, then probably most of the audience hasn’t seen a tank chase, either, much less one going through St. Petersburg, right? Thundering after a car with a mad General in it. So, you know, apart from a tank chase in St. Petersburg (laughs), they’ve seen all the–I mean, how many car chases have you seen? God help us. You get the Bourne type car chase, which there are a lot of now after Liman did it so well, and it’s by the way very visceral, but a lot of the time the shooting is so close, and the cutting is so fast, it’s all a kind of a blur.

Which brings us back to Frankenheimer again: Ronin and Grand Prix.
Yes! Go and see Ronin–a great chase in that one. Very good chase. And you can see everything. Absolutely. There’s a chase in that film, there’s the chase in To Live and Die in L.A., or even The French Connection. There are so few great ones that we all think of the same ones when we think of the best ones. The rest just kind of get lumped together. Wasn’t Friedkin the first to have a car going the wrong way up the freeway on To Live and Die in L.A.?

The first I remember–I’m sure some of those Italian fellas in the ’70s did it, too…
Yes. Everybody copied him, you know, suddenly everybody does the same thing, and not as well.

“Well, look, to be honest, I don’t think Bond means anything. I don’t think he represents anything. I don’t think there’s any message in James Bond.”

You have a tease of a chase in Casino Royale.
(laughs) Yes, when I did Casino Royale, the girl gets kidnapped and the cars take off. That was originally written as a big car chase, right? They go into a forest and I thought, “How boring.” I mean, do we really have to see another car chase with two cars? Chasing each other through a forest? So I remember saying to everybody, we’re going to have a car chase that doesn’t happen. We’re literally not going to have a car chase. We’ll let the audience think they’re going to get one. We’ll do all the usual set up, we’ll get the music to go, and the audience is already tuning out, playing out the same old in their heads, and if they can already see it, well, why should we show it again? You’re not going to get one. We’ll stop the whole scene in its tracks. That’s what we did, because every other option was so, so boring.

Unless you go back to San Francisco.
(laughs) You can go back to Bullitt, you know, which is a terrific car chase because they clearly did it themselves with stunt people on the bloody streets.

Peter Yates. There was another one.
There’s no camera tricks in Bullitt. There’s no green screen or blue screen, right? They actually sort of did it.

Walter Hill said he just stood around keeping people from driving onto the set.
Another master. In those days, the very fast editing that they do now wasn’t even popular. You didn’t fake the speed, you just clearly had those cars doing the speed they were doing, and the guys driving them, McQueen in one and actually Bill Hickman was the stunt guy in the other, they were mad. They just genuinely went at it. I don’t think you can fake it. Well, you can, of course, and I have done, but I think an audience knows it’s faked. It’s the old thing about CGI, isn’t it? You can smell it with the CGI. You can do all sorts of the Michael Bay thing, you know, where you have rolls of newsprint kind of crashing off the back of a truck heading straight for you, following with the camera, but do you know what? Do I believe it? Absolutely not.

Frankenheimer revolutionized a lot of this with Grand Prix.
And actually the action was for the time pretty terrific. The problem with that movie was the stuff in between the races just slowed it to a crawl in terms of pace. The racing stuff was excellent. Still is. I think he was the first person to mount a camera in the backseat of one of the cars. I think he was the first to do that. And they were big cameras. Nowadays, you can [use] GoPros, you name it, but in those days, you had to put the whole bloody Panavision camera there sort of mounted in the car. He was very good.

And he married it all to real issues. Like The Train…
Another of my favourite movies of all time. A fantastic movie. The incredible black and white. The entire look to the thing. The action is great, as you say, but so is the moral question of it: is a life worth a masterpiece?

Consequences. Tell me about consequences to violence.
I mean, obviously, there’s, you know, always consequences of violence. Indeed, it’s the consequences, really, which are–which should be–the dominant thing in the work. You can’t do violence for violence’s sake, you know, just as you can’t do action for its own sake. Violence without consequence is repugnant. Look at something like The Wild Bunch with Peckinpah, right? Notorious for its violence–but it wouldn’t have the impact it does without the consequence of all the heroes dying. Bonnie & Clyde is another–ultraviolent and condemned for it, but you can’t say it’s just violence for its own sake. There’s a real moral foundation to it. The violence of both Bonnie and Clyde being shot in the car, sure, but the betrayal to get there, our connection to the bad guys and the state of the world… Anyway, you can’t have violence without there being a consequence to it. There’s inevitably a price you pay for it, morally and otherwise. It’s important.

Is that your contribution to your works?
Well, to be honest, it’s not so much me, I don’t think, but it’s certainly always discussed. When you talk about Cleaner, there’s the brother who Daisy’s character needs to protect, who wasn’t there originally, but the writer we brought in actually has a son who is autistic. So that’s where that came from[,] and as soon as he mentioned it, we were very excited about not just how this humanized Daisy, but clarified the stakes of the entire film. We’re all fighting for someone else, aren’t we? But it’s important to do that work with the writer and the creative team. It’s important to talk about all that stuff. There’s always a process in the writing where you go through it very closely with the writer, you’re always tweaking and adjusting. And these questions of stakes and consequences come up, you know, the questions come up, and they need to. If you do it right, no matter how outlandish the action is… All the action and what happens in the movie is around how she has to attempt to protect her brother, whom she’s neglected. The emotional arc is all traced. It’s certainly something we do talk about throughout the whole writing process.

What does James Bond represent? Is he an Arthurian figure? Is he due now that the world is tilting towards fascism?
What is going on? My God, why are we heading towards fascism? Every day, I read the news happening in America and so forth, and London, too. It’s frightening. Absolutely frightening. I mean, you know, God knows. You go back to the Second World War, it was Hitler, right? It was Mussolini. And it feels the same: the signs, the portents–the same. Now Trump. Now Putin, right? I’m not sure what’s going to happen in Germany and probably in France, too, when, you know, the trend is also heading in that direction. God knows why. But I have to say, in the case of America, I’m horrified with what’s going on there. But as for Bond? Well, look, to be honest, I don’t think Bond means anything. I don’t think he represents anything. I don’t think there’s any message in James Bond. I think he, as the producers always say, he’s the guy that every man wants to be and every woman wants to go to bed with, you know? [He’s] purely the fantasy that someone will save us. I will say, though, that Daniel brought a lot more depth to that as a character. There was a change of tone, obviously, when Daniel came on board. Bond is just pure entertainment, but I was lucky enough to be able to direct the one where he’s much more, uh, what’s the word?

Troubled?
Troubled, yes, if you see what I mean. There’s someone there in Daniel’s Bond who is clearly having an internal struggle psychologically. He doesn’t really become Bond until the end of the movie, or should I say the Bond we know.

I think it’s second only to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in the Bond canon.
Thanks. It’s interesting that in both, he gets married, he’s in love, and then she dies. Assassinated in one, and suicide in ours. It’s all very emotional–those consequences again–and it kind of sets the table for every other Bond film and his relationship with women.

Speaking of which: Defenseless.
Oh, you’re the one who remembers that film, Walter. Oh my God.

Tell me about that vicious fight between Barbara Hershey and J.T. Walsh.
Oh, you mean with the paper knife? Yeah, she breaks his nose and then goes back to look at what’s happened and follows a trail of blood all through the office. Just really horrible. It’s awful. I remember J.T. Walsh, bless his soul. A terrific actor, number one. I remember he was very upset with the violence and his nose having to get smashed like that, because she was thrashing about so much. We had to do it two or three times. It was a very difficult scene to do because he was very worried about his nose really being broken. We tried a bunch of different angles and just sort of let them go [at it]. Oh, my God. That was the second movie I ever made.

Yet there you are, already: violence, consequences, politically-fraught backdrops.
(laughs) And so there it is.