Duncan Jones, the director of the science-fiction movies “Moon” and “Source Code,” said at Cannes that he will be making an action-driven biopic of Ian Fleming, the creator of 007. Variety reports that the movie is being adapted by Matt Brown from Andrew Lycett’s 1995 biography “Ian Fleming, the Man Behind James Bond.”
The timing of the announcement coincides with the release of the trailer for the twenty-third Bond picture, Sam Mendes’s “Skyfall,” which is being released in the US on November 9. The brooding, staccato clip, which is mostly nocturnal (and which you can watch below), features Daniel Craig’s icy Bond playing a word-association game, being shaved by “Eve” (Naomie Harris), declaring that he’ll kill some killers before they kill “us,” and some explosions.
“Fleming,” as it’s tentatively titled, will depict the future novelist’s experiences as a British naval intelligence officer during World War II. The project was once considered as a vehicle for the Scottish actor James McAvoy. Thirty years ago, Charles Dance would have been perfect casting because of his physical resemblance to Fleming in young middle-age.
“Fleming lived through one of the most perilous periods in world history, in a position that allowed him a unique vantage point on all the players, all the stakes," Jones told the Hollywood Reporter. “He witnessed true heroism first-hand. And he saw the evil men could do. Then, when the war ended, he went off to write fiction. The essential question for me is where did Ian Fleming end and Bond begin? Fleming (1908-64) was educated at Durnford School (near the estate owned by the descendants of the Elizabethan spy John Bond, whose motto was “The world is not enough”) and at Eton, by when he already had a car and mistress. As a journalist in his early twenties, he covered the Stalinist show trial of six British engineers in Moscow, and later worked unsuccessfully as a banker and stockbroker.
In August 1939, with war imminent, Fleming joined naval intelligence and started concocting schemes for deceiving the Nazis. Among them was the plan for Operation Mincemeat, which he borrowed from a 1930s crime novel and which involved the use of a corpse of an RAF pilot whose pockets contained disinformation; it became the source for the 1956 film “The Man Who Never Was.” Incredibly, Fleming also wrote a blueprint for an early version of the CIA.
In 1942, he formed No. 30 Commando, a unit of British intelligence commandos to seize documents from enemy headquarters on the front lines. Although Fleming did visit his men in the field on at least one occasion, he didn’t lead their missions personally but directed them remotely – a hindrance to a heroic portrait that Jones and Brown may or may not feel inclined to ignore when they make their movie.
As Germeny faced defeat, Fleming formed T (for target) Force to gather intelligence from liberated countries. He completed his war service in the Far East.
T-Force’s operations formed the basis of “Moonraker,” the third of his 12 Bond novels. He was writing for the London Sunday Times when he began writing his Bond stories in 1952. The first novel, “Casino Royale,” was published in 1953 and was an instant success. By then, he was spending three months of every year at Goldeneye, his estate in Jamaica, where he befriended Noel Coward, among others.
In 1953, he married the socialite Ann Charteris, who had twice been married to barons; she and Fleming has been conducting an affair since the mid-'30s. The cruelty that underpins Bond’s relationship with women is traceable to Fleming’s relationship with Charteris, of which flagellation, bullying, and sadomasochism were welcome components, as the Daily Mail reported in 2008.
In case the Fleming movie incorporates this aspect, Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley, whose Carl Gustav Jung and Sabine Spielrein had a spanking relationship in “A Dangerous Method,” may want to rule themselves out of the running, lest they should be typecast.
And if Jones is looking for a better title than "Fleming" for the movie, he could do worse than the Bond-ian "The Man Who Sold the World," the title of his father David Bowie's song and third album.
Below: Ian Fleming discusses the origins of James Bond's name
Bottom: The Trailer for "Skyfall"