Icons Unearthed is back again with Icons Unearthed: James Bond. Each season, Icons Unearthed searches for a new angle on a pop culture mainstay and brings it to life through brand-new interviews, deep research, and snappy editing. With the James Bond franchise at something of an inflection point after the game-changing ending of No Time to Die, Icons Unearthed: James Bond offers a look back at the world-famous franchise as a whole.
The man behind Icons Unearthed is Nacelle Company CEO Brian Volk-Weiss, who has shaped the series since it began with Icons Unearthed: Star Wars. Volk-Weiss has long turned his love of pop culture into media gold, having previously created both The Toys That Made Us and The Movies That Made Us for Netflix. A former comedy manager, Volk-Weiss is everything from a company builder to an interviewer, and is in charge of choosing the subjects Icons Unearthed will tackle next.
Brian Volk-Weiss spoke with Screen Rant about outrageous interviews, finding a new angle on an old franchise, and more about the creations of Icons Unearthed: James Bond. Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Brian Volk-Weiss On Icons Unearthed: James Bond
Screen Rant: I think Icons Unearthed: Marvel was eight, but your seasons are usually six episodes. There are 25 Bond movies; how do you even begin to choose what you’re going to cover?
Brian Volk-Weiss: One of the things that I really try to pay attention to whenever we cover a topic is, “Are we the first people doing this documentary? Are we the 230th?” When you’re making a documentary about Star Trek toys, I knew we were the first, so in a weird way, I can say there wasn’t a lot of pressure because no one had done it before. James Bond is the exact opposite. There have been a million billion trillion documentaries about James Bond.
Whenever that’s the case, I always try to find an interesting and unique way in, and what I zeroed in on was basically this really interesting zone of how these people get cast and the ramifications of the casting. It wasn’t about, “Connery is Connery, and Moore is Moore, and Brosnan is Brosnan.” The question we asked ourselves is, “Why Connery over everybody else?” And then, it gets more and more and more complicated every time they have to recast. So that’s how we basically broke up the six episodes.
I know you have George Lazenby, who is the successor of Sean Connery. Did you get a sense of how these guys feel either during of after their tenure? I imagine it’s a wild ride.
Brian Volk-Weiss: I don’t know how much you know about him or not, but I have interviewed a bare minimum 500 people—it could be over 1,000 for all I know–and the most memorable interview of my career is George Lazenby by a million miles ahead of the number two craziest interview I’ve ever had. He is really unique. He made one of the best Bonds there is; on almost any list you ever look at, he’s number five. But he’s a little nutty, and even though they were throwing, in 2023 dollars, tens of millions of dollars at him to come back, he didn’t go back. He has one of the most bizarre stories, I would argue, in Hollywood history with what he did.
We interviewed Martin Campbell, who was involved with casting Brosnan and Daniel Craig. Even though he was a big part of the decision on Brosnan and Craig, it was really similar, and it was this kind of family vibe where they all go out to dinner and they vote, and they were completely unanimous both times. Tied with Superman and Batman and Mickey Mouse, James Bond is arguably one of our civilization’s most iconic names, and for it to be figured out over cannoli after dinner… it’s pretty wild that’s how they do this.
I’m sure you try to be impartial, but I imagine you some sense of how you think the story is going to go when you hear it. How did all of this match up with what your expectations might have been?
Brian Volk-Weiss: You’re absolutely right, and very often–I would say 60% of the time–what we expect is not what actually occurred, so we have to pivot while we’re in the field. The best example of that is when we were doing the Star Wars episode of The Toys That Made Us, where everybody assumed, because we had been told this our whole lives, that George Lucas made most of his money from the toys. That turned out to be completely untrue, so the entire episode changed like that. [With] Icons Unearthed: Fast & Furious, so much of what we had been led to believe turned out not to be true.
But Bond was very different, because I already knew a lot about Bond. And I already knew that a lot of documentaries had been made about Bond, so I very deliberately chose a zone of the James Bond story to dive into. So, I didn’t know any of that stuff. I knew a little bit, but 90% of what we dug into, I was not aware of when we started the research phase.
Was there anyone’s casting that had a particularly wild story, where maybe it wasn’t as unanimous as you said the other ones were?
Brian Volk-Weiss: The craziest story from the point of view of the actor is definitely George Lazenby, because he was lying about everything the whole time. He conned his way in. He literally just lied and lied and lied and lied. I even think, to a certain degree, they knew he was lying, and they liked that he was lying because it was kind of like a James Bond thing. Lazenby definitely kind of alludes to that; they understood him, and that’s why he got the job. From that point of view, that’s definitely, by far, the craziest story.
Other than that, it was Connery because they made lists and lists and lists and lists and lists [of actors, and] Connery was not on any of those lists. Just from one random thing after another, he ended up getting the part. He was already starting to lose his hair. That was a major discussion. He’s wearing… I don’t know if it’s a toupee, but even in Dr. No, they’re concerned about this supposed heartthrob losing his hair. Which is interesting, because the same thing happened with Shatner with Captain Kirk. But it was just that he was literally, like, less than a year and a half away from being dealing with baby stuff and building bridges and digging ditches, and then he’s cast in what becomes what I like to believe is the first franchise.
Do you feel like you discovered some kind of throughline that all of these Bond actors have? The character is obviously the same, but Daniel Craig and Sean Connery are very different people.
Brian Volk-Weiss: Yeah, they’re very different people, and they’re very different Bonds. One of the cool things about making shows like this is you basically get paid to do, like, a master’s degree thesis on something that you already love. I watched all the movies over the course of two weekends, like four a day, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and I’d never done that before. It would kind of be crazy if I had.
One of the things that I noticed about Bond, and this is in the series, for sure, is [that] Bond is a core sample of Western civilization over a half-century. The obvious things to point to: M goes from being a man to a woman, Moneypenny goes from being kind of a dumb, sarcastic, worshiping, “Oh my god, I love James Bond” [kind of person] to [becoming someone who] can keep up with him. A couple of times she’s gone out into the field, which always cracks me up. Those are the obvious examples, but, I mean, when was the last time you watched Dr. No?
Oh, man. I can’t remember.
Brian Volk-Weiss: I hadn’t seen it in at least 20 years. It’s crazy. He blackmails a woman into having sex. He throws another woman up against a wall. It is amazing that that character and that name, “shaken or stirred,” “license to kill”, [and] all that stuff is still working in 2023. That’s what’s amazing. They had missteps every now and then for sure, especially the second Timothy Dalton movie, but they’ve held together a very complicated—arguably, from our point of view now–dinosaur, and have made it work each time, slightly changing them so he fits the current decade. It’s wild. I’m not aware of anyone else needing to do that. Superman is exactly the same. Batman changes a little here and a little there, but Batman wasn’t throwing women against the wall in the ‘40s.
I always love hearing about the people that you get on these series. Do you ever end up swerving, or diving more into a particular movie or moment, based on how the casting ends up being?
Brian Volk-Weiss: It was Lazenby. You never know if you can get somebody like that, but then even when you do get them, you never know how open they’re going to be. I’ve never interviewed anybody who was so open. He said stuff almost every three minutes that made my jaw drop.
One of the things I do is if somebody’s done interviews before is [that] I try and watch a couple of them. That way I learn what’s already out there so I can ask different questions and focus on different things. I’m always trying to give the audience more and more and more. One of the stories I saw him tell in a lot of interviews was this story about how when they were making the movie, he kept saying, “I didn’t want to be on the mountain. I had to get off the mountain, and so I made the production give me a helicopter to fly me to town every day after shooting. When I was done, they would fly me back.”
I saw him tell the story two or three times, and it hit me immediately: why do you want to leave the mountain? You’re in a, like, five-star resort in the Alps, living for free. You’ve got the best food, the best cooks, and you’re with all these great people. You can go skiing or bobsledding; you can do all these things. Why does he want to leave the mountain?
I’m interviewing him and the story comes up, and he tells the whole thing. He finishes, and I’m like, “Well, George, I’ve got to ask you. I’m just curious. Why did you need to leave the mountain?” Then, without even pausing, he goes, “Oh, I had run out of women to f***.”
Oh my God.
I’m like, “Okay.” Again, having interviewed a lot of people, it doesn’t happen that often, but this definitely was the winner of this award: whenever I hear somebody say this, I always think to myself, “Does he know this black thing next to my head is recording every single thing he’s saying and doing?” It was like that. So, when you have somebody willing to talk like that and say all these things that you know that no other documentary has put out there–even if he said it to them–it changes the entire structure of the show.
That is a fantastic place to leave it, I think.
Brian Volk-Weiss: I’ll give you something even better to end it on. That is far from the craziest thing he said. That’s a four or five out of 10.
How much of the other stuff made it into the series?
Brian Volk-Weiss: 90%. If anybody else was making this documentary, for a lot of different reasons, they probably wouldn’t use it. But we have no restrictions.
My favorite thing he said… most of the crazy stuff had to do with women, but the best thing he said that made me laugh so hard was [when] he told a story about [being] at a James Bond premiere or something. I think every living Bond was there, and he was like, “Yeah. None of them wanted to talk to me.” He had a rough couple of hours.
About Icons Unearthed: James Bond
The fifth installment to the Icons Unearthed documentary series is directed by Brian Volk-Weiss (The Toys That Made Us, The Movies That Made Us, Behind the Attraction), Alyssa Michek (Icons Unearthed), and Ben Frost (Icons Unearthed), and features exclusive, candid interviews with George Lazenby, Gloria Hendry, Caroline Munro, Catherine Schell, Mike Medavoy, Terence Mountain, John Glen, Vic Armstrong, Andreas Wisniewski, Jeffrey Caine, Jeff Kellman, Trina Parks, Norm Wanstall, Lee Pfeiffer, Steven Jay Rubin, and more.
Icons Unearthed: James Bond premiered Wednesday, October 4th on Vice TV. New episodes will be released weekly.
