Back to the Edge

By GRANT SMITHIES - Sunday Star Times

NEW ZEALAND-BORN director Martin Campbell is on the line from Los Angeles, flashing back to a fateful day in 1962 when he sat wide-eyed and enthralled in a darkened room in Hawke's Bay.

"I must have been in my late teens, and I don't know why I wasn't at school," he says in a gentle voice, his slightly posh English accent testifying to several decades spent living in the UK. "Maybe my mum took me out of class for the day. But anyway, there we were, watching Dr No at the Regent in Hastings. My mother was an avid Bond fan, she'd read all the books, and so she took me along. I remember it to this day. Terrific movie."

He was shaken. He was stirred. Reaching for a poetic angle, some journalists have suggested that watching that first Bond movie in the sleepy New Zealand town of his childhood inspired Campbell to become a director himself. No, he says; that was The Manchurian Candidate, which came out the same year. Nevertheless, Campbell, now 66, has gone from watching Bond movies to making them.

After emigrating to the UK in the mid-sixties, he worked his way up from cameraman to director, cutting his teeth on popular British TV shows (The Professionals, Minder, Edge of Darkness) before making the leap into movies. He has since shot over a dozen features, but is best known as the man who was called in, twice, to revitalise the Bond franchise. First he directed Golden Eye in 1995, in which the perplexingly popular Pierce Brosnan replaced the outgoing Timothy Dalton, then, in 2006, Campbell directed Casino Royale, the first in the series to star Daniel Craig and the first to embody the intense, brooding Bond of Ian Fleming's original novels: cold, damaged, a hard man, a ruthless killer.

"There was a feeling that the Bond films had lost their edge and become too fantastical, so we wanted to go back to the tone of the original books and make him a more dark and complex character, someone who drinks too much and has all sorts of flaws. Pierce was great as a very traditional Bond, but wouldn't have worked as the more screwed-up version, whereas Daniel Craig was perfect for that role. As a director it was great to have a character who was so f----- up, because it meant he had a real journey to take to become the Bond we know."

Slick, stylish and punchy, Casino Royale remains the biggest earner since the Bond movie franchise began in 1962. It took a whopping $US599 million worldwide at the box office and bumped Campbell into the premier league of action directors. He's now able to pick and choose his projects, but has decided to revisit one of his own earlier works with Edge of Darkness, a movie remake of the six-part TV series Campbell made for the BBC in 1985. Somewhat controversially, he has chosen disgraced Hollywood star Mel Gibson to play the lead role of Boston homicide detective Thomas Craven, more of which later.

"The story is basically the same as the TV series, but with some significant changes. A policeman's daughter is murdered in front of him, and he sets out to find out who the perpetrator was. Along the way he discovers his daughter was involved in all sorts of things he knew nothing about. And yes, the government is involved, and there's a private nuclear facility in there, too, but the nuclear angle was much more pronounced in the original TV series. Back in 1985, plutonium was a big issue, but these days everybody makes plutonium in their back yard so nobody gives a shit. It's lost its sense of drama."

True. But really, the political conspiracy angle has always been mere window dressing. Every action movie needs a symbolic source of evil so the hero can set about righteously kicking ass, and these evil forces generally reflect the prevailing insecurities of the age. A couple of decades ago, most action movies featured rampaging New York street crims, damaged Vietnam veterans, malevolent Russians or eastern Europeans, power-addled Mafia dons or colonising aliens from space. Now there's a rise in shadowy Arab terrorists and elaborate political conspiracies involving double agents embedded in the the CIA, the FBI and the American government.

In many of these movies, the villains du jour give the good guy an iron-clad reason to unleash all manner of fearsome violence by harming his immediate family. So it is here. As the Edge of Darkness tag line suggests ("Few escape Justice. None escape Vengeance"), Campbell's new film joins a long line of vigilante action flicks in which a wronged family man seeks bloody revenge. Whether it's any good or not, I couldn't say, having seen only a trailer, but the production has not been without its issues.

Firstly, Robert De Niro was signed to co-star as a shifty CIA agent sent to cover up the murder, but he fell out with Campbell over the direction of the film and left the set after two days. De Niro was later replaced by British actor Ray Winstone, but the departure of such a respected star must have been a huge loss to the project. "Well, these things happen. He and I just had differing ideas on his character, it was as simple as that. It really was the old cliche of artistic differences. That's usually a euphemism for a whole lot of other things, but it was actually true in this case. I said, look, this is not the way I see it, and he saw things differently, and very quickly we decided not to continue. There was no animosity. If these things have to change, they should change right away. It was by mutual consent, and there was no fall out from it. Ray came in and did the part instead."

Then there's the thorny issue of the movie's headlining star, Mel Gibson. Whatever one may think of his earlier career, with the Lethal Weapons and the Mad Maxes and so on, the Gibson brand is seriously tainted these days, to the extent that the mere mention of his name attracts the same sort of involuntary shudder as the mention of Tom Cruise. Not only has Gibson tarnished his acting reputation with a string of mediocre movies, but he also produced and directed The Passion of the Christ in 2004, a movie slammed for its relentless violence and alleged anti-semitic messages. Slate magazine film critic David Edelstein described it as "a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie – The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre – that thinks it's an act of faith", while Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News called it "the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II".

Gibson's personal life has also been a disaster zone. A recovering alcoholic and devoutly religious Catholic, he has alienated many liberals with a series of sexist, anti-gay and right-wing comments in interviews, and also lost the affections of his more conservative religious fan base due to his perceived moral hypocrisy, divorcing Robyn Gibson, his wife of 29 years and the mother of his seven children, and having a child out of wedlock with his former mistress, Russian musician and lingerie model Oksana Grigorieva.

But the biggest bombshell came when Gibson was pulled over driving drunk in Malibu in July 2006 and made offensive comments to the arresting officer, including "F------ Jews. Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. Are you a Jew?" Later, at the police station, he called a female police sergeant "sugartits", a term that has since been immortalised on T-shirts and in pop songs and become one of Gibson's many pejorative nicknames online.

Gibson apologised soon after, calling his own behaviour "despicable" and blaming the outburst on a "horrific relapse" of his alcoholism, but the incident saw him publically shunned by many high-profile Hollywood figures (Joan Rivers: "He is an anti-semitic son of a bitch. He should f------ die.") and several Jewish lobby groups urged audiences to boycott his future projects. Gibson has kept his head down ever since, choosing to direct rather than appear on screen, and Edge of Darkness will be his first lead role since 2002.

Some online critics have already signalled their intention to boycott the movie. Others are wavering: Dustin Rowles at the influential Pajiba website asks: "Is this movie compelling enough to overlook Gibson's anti-semitism? Are we willing to take a stand against Gibson's work only so long as he's making bad films, or will we avoid a credible thriller out of protest?"

Other commentators wonder who ultimately loses out from such protests, and they have a point. After all, if you were to boycott the output of every individual with objectionable attitudes and a drinking problem, you'd rapidly become severely culturally deprived, a stranger to the taste of movie theatre popcorn, sitting at home in a darkened room with no telly, few books and a scattering of very dull CDs.

Campbell sighs when I mention the whole fraught Gibson issue. "Yes, Mel had that incident where he was pulled over drunk in Malibu, and some people won't go and see this film because he's in it, but if that's how they feel then so be it. The truth is, that was a long time ago. He's done all his apologies and to be honest, I don't know what else he can do. You and I have both been drunk at various times and said things we wish we'd never said. So f------ what? It's not that Mel hasn't done penance for these things, God help us!

"To be absolutely honest, I made this movie with Mel because I couldn't think of anybody else as good as he is. He's in his early fifties now, so he's the right age for the role, and he's obviously a very fine actor.

"It's a different kind of part for him, too. It's not the wisecracking Lethal Weapon Mel we know and love, it's a much more serious and focused role for him. Literally, had Mel not done it, I don't know who the hell else I could have cast. He was my first and last choice."

Edge Of Darkness opens in New Zealand on Thursday, February 4.

Martin Campbell on screen:

The Sex Thief, 1973: Campbell's directorial debut was this softcore sex comedy starring David Warbeck as a lecherous jewel thief who lures female victims to bed. Campbell also directed sex satire Eskimo Nell in 1975, most notable for a recurring gag in which a gay cowboy repeatedly rips his skin-tight jeans whenever he mounts his horse.

The Mask Of Zorro, 1998: Mostly filmed in Mexico and starring Antonio Banderas, Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones, this was called "probably the best Zorro movie ever made" by esteemed Chicago film critic Roger Ebert. Most famous for a scene in which Banderas slices away Zeta-Jones's dress with his sword.

GoldenEye, 1995: The 17th Bond film, and the first to star the insufferably wet Pierce Brosnan. The first story in the series not to be written by Ian Fleming, the plot involves a post-Cold War arms syndicate with a satellite weapon pointed at London. Audiences loved it to the tune of US$350 million at the box office, and Campbell was invited back to helm the big kahuna of the Bond franchise, Casino Royale, in 2006, with Daniel Craig.

Vertical Limit, 2000: Chris O'Donnell, Bill Paxton and Temuera Morrison star in this mountains 'n' murder thriller, filmed in Colorado, New Zealand and Pakistan. Sadly, it's an icy lemon, with thrilling action sequences not making up for terrible dialogue and a thin, cliche-heavy plot.

Green Lantern, due June 2011: After disentangling himself from a troubled remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, Campbell is currently in pre-production on this $US150m DC Comics intergalactic superhero flick.