Memory’s Martin Campbell on making two Bond films, and why he was the wrong director for Green Lantern

Liam Neeson seems to have been making different versions of Taken since 2008, when the revenge thriller became a runaway commercial hit. Memory, his latest, fits comfortably within Neeson’s one-man subgenre, following a peerless hit man who finds himself at odds with a client after refusing an assignment. But under director Martin Campbell, who helmed The Mask Of Zorro and introduced two James Bonds to the world, Memory adds a unique dimension to Neeson’s work and offers a complex, and decidedly more mature, take on sociopolitical action.

The A.V. Club spoke to Campbell about the film, which he shepherded to the screen after seeing the Belgian film The Alzheimer Case in 2013 and deciding it should be remade in English. Campbell, a director for almost 50 years, also discussed his earliest work on comedies like The Sex Thief, his tenure with the Bond franchise, and his brief sojourn into superhero films with Green Lantern.

Martin Campbell: Well, I think it’s different to the other ones in the sense that he’s playing a bad guy to start with, right from the word go, clearly. He is morally well and truly on the wrong side of the law. He’s a hit man. He gets paid to kill people. He does it without questioning it. I saw the original film and I loved the movie. I thought it was great. I thought the idea of transferring to the Mexico-U.S. Border was a really good idea. I thought it would be a perfect fit. And I really [appreciated] the twists and turns that it takes as the [character’s] Alzheimer’s gets progressively worse; how that dictates the plot to a large extent; and also his relationship with Guy Pearce’s character, which is where essentially they team up, if you will, in order to see justice done. That intrigued me, but really the twists and turns in the plot, I found there were a lot of surprises in it, and Liam playing someone who was progressively getting Alzheimer’s, I thought was a really interesting twist.

AVC: How difficult was it to chart his character’s mental faculties throughout the movie?

MC: Obviously, we researched Alzheimer’s. We did a lot of research on that. We start off in the opening scene and he forgets the keys in his car, where he put them. It’s a very simple thing. You and I do this probably once a week, [but] then, of course, it progressively gets worse throughout the film. And, of course, we’ve got a 110-minute film, so that happens over a reasonably quick period of time, so we have to obviously speed up the whole process. So by the end of it, after he’s gone through physical trauma and so forth, he’s clearly in a bad state in terms of the Alzheimer’s, where it’s got to a point where it’s progressively worse. So really, it was a question of researching it, marking out every scene as to what actually should happen without overdoing it, if you see what I mean. And that’s what we did. And I sat down with [Liam], we went through the script, we just talked it through. He had done some work on Alzheimer’s as well. And we just progressively went through the script, marked it up, what had to be done.

AVC: Your films always feel like they’re made for adults. In an industry trying to appeal to younger viewers, how do you still serve more mature audiences?

MC: You have to be true to the script. This is not something that 15-year-olds are going to see; clearly this is not their cup of tea. And to be honest, when I choose something to direct or I’m offered something to direct, it’s just instinct. I think this is a great story. In this case, I was given the DVD of the original film way back in 2013. I loved it. When finally the rights became available, we got them. The whole process took eight years, amazingly enough. And it was always a story I loved and it was something different. “A hit man getting Alzheimer’s,” that’s a hook that I’d never seen before. And the original film was very good. We changed some things. I enhanced the action more than perhaps was in the original film. The ending is very different from the original film and there are other bits and pieces throughout it, which we changed. But on the whole, it pretty much follows the original film.

AVC: Going back through your body of work, the first three films that you made were all sex comedies.

MC: I did! In England. My first one was called The Sex Thief.

AVC: What did you learn making those films that helped you develop your pedigree for action films and thrillers?

MC: Well, I used to be a video cameraman, TV, doing drama, all of that sort of stuff, in the late ’60s. And I wanted to direct, but I couldn’t get a job in TV [Laughs.] So a friend of mine offered me The Sex Thief. Now, I would direct anything. And what happened was we got the script, it was a 15-day schedule. It was a 90- or 100-minute movie and I got through that. And in those days in England, sex comedies, there’s a few bare boobs, they’re all very mild, these films. And what I learned was what not to do with movies. I did do it in the 15 days, and they released these on the sort of minor circuit. I mean, they get a proper release; you don’t get the Odeon Leicester Square, but you get the cinema around the corner.

My second one was a film called Eskimo Nell, and I actually had some names in that. Roy Kinnear for example, who was a marvelous actor. His son, Rory, is a terrific actor. He turned up in Bond films. Excellent actor, and his dad was hilarious. I mean, very, very funny. And Eskimo Nell is the longest, dirtiest poem ever written in England. It goes on for like 45 minutes or something and I just loved the plot of it. In fact, you could almost remake the plot of that movie now. It’s sort of hilarious.

After that I then did a film called Three For All, which was financed by Dick James, who owned Northern Songs, the Beatles catalog. And there was not so much as a bare ankle on that, and the film was bloody awful. I think I had to shoot it in 21 days, and I decided the money wasn’t going up on the screen.

AVC: And then you stepped away from directing for a while before coming back to that role.

I gave up and decided to go and to learn about producing and line producing. And I then produced a movie for Elliot Kastner called Black Joy with the terrific director Tony Simmons. And it became, along with Ridley Scott’s The Duelists, the British entry to Cannes. And then I was the line producer, because I wanted to learn all about money and so forth, on a movie called Scum, which which was Ray Winstone’s first movie—terrific movie—and a lot of [other] young actors on it subsequently became famous. Then I got second unit on directing The Professionals, which was a very successful TV series. And from that they offered me some episodes and then I went on to direct all those kind of one-hour series. And I went from there.

AVC: You directed two significant Bond films. GoldenEye was perceived as a righting of the ship, while Casino Royale was more of a confident reboot. What brought you to the Bond franchise?

MC: I did a film called No Escape, which is kind of a B feature I shot in Australia. It had Ray Liotta, and it didn’t make any money, although the financiers got their money back. And I then got a phone call from the head of United Artists, and he said, “Do you want direct Bond?” I said, “Why did you choose me? And he said, “Well, I saw No Escape and I think you’d be good for it”—probably because I was cheap [laughs].

With GoldenEye, because Tim Dalton was six years before, there was legal tie-ups. They couldn’t make another Bond, you know all of that. And so when we made it, there was a lot of doubt about, did anybody want to go and see Bond anymore? The gap was too big. The last Timothy Dalton [film] made money, but it didn’t do very well. We’re in the ’90s, and really it’s past its sell-by date. So that was the challenge. And there were even budget discussions and so forth, which is very unusual on Bond, and we had to tighten our belt a bit. There was no guarantee and I think UA [United Artists] were not totally sure that it would be a success and so forth.

With Casino, Bond had got to a point where the producers just felt it had gone way over the top, I think, with invisible cars and snowboarding off and they felt we’d just got to a point where it had to come back to earth. They had the year before finally got the rights to Casino Royale, and we talked about it and we said, “Look, we have to come back to really the tone of the books.” If you read the books, there’s no humor in the books. That’s all been grafted on, right from the word go—and very successfully. But really a new Bond in Daniel Craig, a grittier, tougher kind of character, more with his feet on the ground, if you see what I mean. And that was the decision we all took. And we just said, we have to bring it back to earth, was the directive.

AVC: Are there qualities or skills you bring to Bond films that nobody else can?

MC: I don’t know if I’d bring anything. The point is, I used to love Bond films. It was an event, that was the great thing. They were event films. You know, you wait for the next Bond. And I just loved the series, it’s as simple as that. Whereas you look at one of my failures, which is Green Lantern. I don’t love Marvel movies, and I did it because I had never done one before—and that’s not the way to go into a movie. I think you have to really, really connect and love the material. And I was the wrong director for Green Lantern, but I’m the right director for those two Bond movies, because I love the series and I love the character. And I was lucky enough to have two very good scripts.

AVC: John Glen came back multiple times to direct Bond films. Is that something you would consider?

MC: Put it this way, I’d just say, never say never, you know what I mean? We all do that. Bond is a very high profile, but having said that, Sam Mendes did a terrific job. And the guy that directed the last one did a terrific job. So what can I say? I mean, I was lucky enough to be able to do GoldenEye and Casino, introducing two new Bonds. But there are plenty good directors out there that can do it just as well as me.

AVC: For what it’s worth, I actually visited the set of Green Lantern in New Orleans, and I really like your work on the film.

MC: There were big budget constraints on that. There were other problems, but would I do another one? Absolutely not. There are better guys more qualified than me to do a good job on those movies.