Former James Bond costume designer Jany Temime has questioned whether it will be possible to successfully reboot the 70-year-old spy thriller franchise for the current age.
Temime worked on Sam Mendes’ 2012 and 2015 movies Skyfall and Spectre but was not involved in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s No Time To Die, the last film in the franchise to date, which came out in 2021 with Daniel Craig’s Bond perishing in a barrage of missiles.
“We made two beautiful James Bonds, two amazing gems,” said Temime, describing the coming together of Mendes, Craig and producer Barbara Broccoli as the “Golden Trio”.
She said adapting Bond to the times had already been a challenge for Mendes on Skyfall and Spectre a decade ago.
“He tried his best with a lot of psychology, talent and his incredible quality as a director… but we are 10 years later,” said Temime.
“I’m a James Bond fan but how are you going to have a guy killing somebody, making love to a woman and then drinking a Martini to forget, and then have those girls who know that they are going to die, because the Bond girls always die… I’m really wondering how you can adapt that formula to 2025.”
The French costume designer’s comments come in the wake of last week’s news that Dune director Denis Villeneuve has signed to direct the next movie in instalment.
It will be the first Bond movie produced without the direct involvement of the Broccoli family after Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson ceded control of the franchise to Amazon MGM Studios in February.
Temime heaped praise on David Heymann, who she worked with via the Harry Potter franchise, who has been tapped to produce the film under his Heyday Films banner, alongside Amy Pascal via Pascal Pictures.
“David is an amazing producer. I worked with him for 10 years, and I know that if somebody can carry the project, it’s him. He’s talented, he’s clever, he’s brilliant,” she said. “Denis Villeneuve, I’m sure will do an excellent job so I just wish them the best of luck!”
The costume designer would not throw names into the ring for who will end up being the next Bond, saying: “I know so many incredible, wonderful, sexy young actors, but it depends what direction they want go.”
Temime, whose credits also include In Bruges, Gravity, Judy, Passengers, Black Widow and House of the Dragon, was speaking to Deadline over the weekend at the fourth SCAD Lacoste Film Festival, taking place within the Savannah College of Art & Design’s summer semester at its campus in France’s Provence region.
SCAD feted the designer, who is beloved among directors and actors for the creativity and wearability of her costumes, with its Etoile award. As she discovered SCAD’s work for the first time, Temime in turn praised the college for the attention it paid to preparing students for the world of work.
“I really like that approach because in my very, very long career, I’ve worked with so many young kids coming out of school and very few of them were prepared for how tough it can be,” she said. “You have a job for two three months… and then there might be nothing… you’re chosen all the time, which is psychologically tough, because nobody likes rejection, and rejection is a part of our daily life.”
“The other reality is that you’re working for an industry in which the ultimate aim is to make money, so you have to put your ego in your pocket and work for what they want you to do and not what you think is best,” she said.
As part of the honor, the festival laid on an open-air screening of Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), which was the first film in the franchise that Temime worked on.
“They wanted to change the style of the film. The first two films were for a very young public and they wanted to have a film for teenagers. So they took Alfonso Cuarón and he then asked me. At first, I was very afraid, tense… and then it came quite naturally.”
“I never saw Harry Potter as a cute little boy. I gave him jeans and sweatshirt. I just wanted to make him like the guy next door. I wanted every single teenager to recognize themselves in him and that was exactly Cuarón’s vision.”
Temime worked on all the subsequent films in the franchise up until the last instalment Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 in 2011, watching its stars Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson and the other young cast members move from childhood to adolescence and then adulthood in the process.
“When I started, they were little kids, then became teenagers and started falling in love with each other… there was lots of intrigues… things cooled off as they got older and then they became stars,” she said.
“I always tell the story of bringing a pair of jeans for Emma and I arrive in a beautiful room and I see all these designer clothes waiting for her, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m dressing a star’ but for me she was little Emma.”
Temime was among a quartet of honorees at that SCAD Lacoste Film Festival, running July 26 to 28, alongside UK screenwriter Christopher Hampton, director Stephen Frears and actor Toby Jones.
