But the method worked for him the rest of the time, and as a consequence, Don didn’t outline.
Bond films work differently. For those, a treatment — basically an outline — that represents a blueprint for the story is required before we send the writer off to draft a screenplay.
When a writer who doesn’t naturally outline is asked to do so, the result is often either dry, like a mathematical proof — B follows from A; C from B — or cartoonish because the real voice of the characters and the tone hasn’t yet been found through the writing. As far as I know, Bond 18 was the first time Don had ever been required to perform the interim step of fully plotting out an original story in a relatively schematic fashion. Not his natural process, but he gave it his all.
In September 1995, Don delivered a thirty-five page treatment for Bond 18.
It was a delight to read. Every page brimmed with ideas and fun. But not all of it worked, or at least worked for us. For example, Don had come up with an intriguing new pre-credits sequence, but Bond was absent from it. We needed one with Bond in it. Don had also placed most of the action in Australia, and while amusing — Q equips Bond with a boomerang “that goes boom” — the Crocodile Dundee movies were still pretty fresh in people’s minds, creating a risk that the overlay would tilt us toward unintentional comedy.
Fortunately, because GoldenEye’s release date was still two months away and we didn’t yet know if it would be successful enough to trigger pre-production on the next film, we had some time to work on Bond 18. So we sent Don off to write a new treatment that satisfied our Bond parameters.
There were elements from Don’s work to date we wanted to retain: the Carpathians (Transylvania), the handover of Hong Kong to China as central to the villain’s plot, and Bond partnering with a female Chinese agent. Don went to work and in October, a few weeks before GoldenEye hit the theaters, he delivered a new outline.
This treatment was substantially shorter — nine pages. Once again it had wonderful moments, but it now hewed so closely to traditional Bonds that it didn’t clothe the expected beats with enough fresh surprises.
As we pondered what to do, GoldenEye opened to immediate success. Barbara, Michael, Pierce, Martin, Bruce Feirstein and the rest of our cast and crew delivered a Bond film that reminded the world why Bond, since the 1960s, has been the most beloved action hero of the western world. The ripple effect expanded far beyond the box office. The entire library of Bond films gained new value. Nintendo launched a tie-in videogame that took the gaming world by storm. Almost overnight, GoldenEye created an entire Bond industry.
Within a month of GoldenEye’s release, MGM/UA realized that producing the next Bond film as quickly as possible was the top priority.
As Don, Barbara, Michael and I had predicted, MGM/UA demanded that Bond 18 be released in 1997. The fate of the studio was riding on it.
So: what to do.
Don’s treatments had all the wonderful ideas he’d pitched in London, but neither was fully convincing as a Bond movie. I know Don would have found the right balance if he could have written the script and discovered the story’s details as he wrote, but GoldenEye’s enormous success now imposed on us a full-speed-ahead production time-frame.
If you’re making a movie as complex as a Bond film and you’re rushing toward a release date, then an outline is a necessity. The schedule for Bond 18 necessitated that locations be scouted, stunts planned, actors cast long before a shooting script would ever be completed (as it turned out, the actual shooting script wasn’t completed until three weeks before production ended). If Don continued, he’d have to change out most of what he’d created, going back to the drawing board yet again, while continuing to do the thing that wasn’t his natural writing method — creating an outline before he wrote the script.
This issue was compounded by a growing concern from the studio over centering the story around the transfer of Hong Kong to China. Nobody knew what would happen when Hong Kong changed hands and some people were predicting violent, bloody outcomes. What if we made the most expensive movie in the history of MGM/UA, the movie that the studio was relying on to keep it in business, and it took a lighthearted approach to something that emerged as the biggest global horror-show of 1997?
It was analogous to what would happen in 1999 with Y2K: there were just enough smart people who predicted disaster that even though disaster appeared unlikely, it was still wise to make sure you had a good emergency kit stashed away for the new year. While MGM/UA knew the odds were in favor of a peaceful handover, was it worth taking a risk on when some experts were predicting carnage?
China also turned out not to be a fan of GoldenEye. The Chinese blocked the film’s release due to the opening credit sequence, which the Chinese deemed anti-communist. China was an emerging film market and if things didn’t go well with the transfer of Hong Kong, MGM/UA didn’t want to be unable to release yet another Bond film there.
Heartbreakingly, all of this meant parting ways with Don. Don was disappointed, but not angry. He’d become attached to his idea of robbing Hong Kong’s banks and then destroying the city. Now that MGM/UA didn’t want Bond anywhere near Hong Kong during 1997, Don saw it as a practical matter — the conceit he’d fallen in love with collided with the studio’s anxieties.
Don, his wife Abby, and I remained friends. Whenever I went to New York the three of us would meet for dinner at the most interesting restaurant of the moment — along with a love of travel, the three of us shared a love of good food. And watching the two of them together was such a pleasure. They delighted in each other and that made them always delightful to be with. Abby’s sense of humor, and her curiosity about the world and about people, fully equaled Don’s. It would not surprise me if when he wrote, it wasn’t to please all of us, it was to please her.
Over the years I learned a vast amount from Don about writing and storytelling. I turned to him for advice while working on The Thomas Crown Affair. A few years later, when I received an urgent a call for help from John McTiernan who was in preproduction on a movie called Basic — John was having difficulty planting subtle but memorable clues in a way that would leave the audience feeling the film had played evenhandedly with them when a surprise twist occurred near the end — I asked Don if he’d help John out. Don agreed, so John and I spent a wonderful afternoon at Don’s house, where Don applied his theories of storytelling to John’s problem (my favorite: if you want the audience to feel a clue was laid in fairly, you need to show it to them in three different ways). All the while, Don and I continued to try and figure out a movie we could make together.
When Don died there was every reason to think I’d read my last Westlake novel. Don’s lifelong narrative push had come to a halt. This was a painful loss for all of Don’s readers and fans, but doubly so for me, because as massive a body of work as Don left behind, it was still missing one entry: the movie we were going to make.
I never imagined Don still had one more trick up his sleeve — that he’d taken the underlying McGuffin in his Bond 18 treatments and fashioned an original thriller around it. In retrospect it makes complete sense — when you’ve come up with something as interesting as using Hong Kong’s unique geography to destroy it, how can you let such a good scheme go to waste? But in all our conversations and meals since 1995, he’d kept it secret.