Is it important for you that the Bond actor does his own stunts?
Some actors do very few stunts and realy a lot on stuntmen, Roger Moore is perhaps the main example in the bond series. Other actors do a lot of the stunts or even do all of them, and Tom Cruise is probably the best known example of this. When the new Bond actor is finally chosen, how important is to you that he does some or all of his stunts? To me both extremes can be negative. When it's obvious in so many scenes that it was the stuntman and not Roger Moore who did even the physically demanding scenes in AVTAK it took some of the experience away. but when I watch Mission Impossible I often think "Tom Cruise did that himself!" and not " the hero made it!", is that much better for the movie experience? I think Timothy Dalton had the right idea when he said (from memory) "When the audience can see it's not the actor doing the things they see on screen it takes away from the movie experience. but likewise if the audience knows the actor did the stunt it also distracts from the experience of the movie. The audiece should simply believe the hero is doing the things they see on screen."
It's likely Tom Cruise will cut down on his stuntwork during the tenure of the next Bond actor. Does that factor in?
Comments
For me, it's not important as long as the substitution isn't too obvious (cough cough AVTAK).
I don't think an action star who does so little stunt work as RM did would be accepted today. I understand the MI stunt team has a series of tests to determine if actors they are considering have the aptitude for stuntwork. I know EON had a fight scene as a part of the selection for potential Bond actors, but I get the impression the IM tests are more comprehensive. I'm guessing fitness, balance, coordination and how much the actor dares to do are in those tests.
I’m with Barbel on this…but with being able to CGI an actors face in/out, it should be less obvious.
True. Playing "spot the stuntman" is much harder now.
On the other hand stunts done by actors has become a part of the promotion of a movies these days. The promotion, especially in interviws, is mostly about the stunts in MI.
I don't care. If the movie is good enough, you'll be so wrapped up in what's going on that you won't care if Actor X actually performed each individual stunt or not.
And comparing to Tom Cruise and the MI films isn't really fair. Tom Cruise has an entire marketing campaign surrounding the fact that he does all of these stunts for real. That's part of the 'charm' of seeing a film by him...'is this the film where he actually dies on screen?'
It doesn't matter to me at all. Ideally he'll do a bit of action (not the same as stunts) and the last three Bonds have all done the right amount I'd say: you see them jumping and fighting and all of that, but they're not doing any more than they need to. And even then Craig and Brosnan still got some nasty injuries: any more than that and you risk the film being shut down: there's a reason you use stuntmen!
The face replacement in NTTD was brilliant I think: those shots of 'Craig' riding the bike through Matera really blew me away in the cinema. I think you can sort of see the join at home, but they really work. And apparently there's a lot of other stuff: I read that the fight with Ash on the boat in Cuba is pretty much all head replacement, and I wouldn't have guessed that at all.
That's pretty much Dalton's view, isn't it? I agree with HarryCannon and emtiem, that's for sure. That said, I'd like to see more big stunts in bond movies. NTTD didn't really have any big, spectacular stunts for people to applaud for.
I'd say it had two, but both of them before the credits and, I know what you mean; they weren't sort of punch-the-air, applauding moments. As opposed to the similar PTS of Skyfall, which I'd say had stuff like the crane/train jump and the bikes on the Grand Bazaar which had that spark of Bond fun and triumph about them.
I’d just like to see a new Bond movie 👀
I’d rather the focus was on plot/story than action sequences…but you need them too…