Daniel Kleinman has been the creative mind behind almost every 007 title sequence since the 90s. He discusses his work on Daniel Craig’s final foray in No Time to Die and how he finds the delicate balance between reinvention and homage
The visual language of James Bond’s world is instantly recognisable, be it the fast cars, sharp suits or vodka martinis (shaken not stirred, of course). The film franchise’s distinctive title sequences are no exception, with each one being treated less like a list of credits and more as a mini movie in its own right. This has been the case ever since Maurice Binder’s work on the 1962 Dr No film, which was the first to include the signature gun barrel sequence shot from the point of view of 007’s assumed assassin.
“[Maurice] invented this whole genre, this whole look that effectively is the shorthand for the spy mystery world. It’s been copied so much that it feels now a bit hackneyed but he invented that, it didn’t exist,” says Daniel Kleinman, the director behind every Bond title sequence (bar Quantum of Solace) since Binder passed away in the early 1990s.
Prior to joining the Bond franchise, Kleinman built up an wide-ranging portfolio of creative work. He began his career in the 1980s as an illustrator, before moving into making music videos and working with artists including Fleetwood Mac, Prince and Madonna. He then started directing ads for brands such as Guinness and X-Box and co-founded production company Rattling Stick in 2006.
Despite never having done any title sequences before, Kleinman jumped at the chance to work on Pierce Brosnan’s first outing as Bond in GoldenEye, having been a fan of the films since he was a kid. “When you’re a 12-year-old British boy sitting in a cinema watching Bond, it’s great,” he tells CR. “I’ve always been interested in art, my mother was a painter, and so I liked the artistic nature of the titles, and I really liked the fact they had naked women in them – I thought that was great at that age!”
The six years in between the making of Licence to Kill and GoldenEye happened to coincide with a significant time in the technical evolution of editing machines. “Maurice had done it all with optical effects; he’d take different bits of film and put them together and change the colour by dyeing, so it was a very physical, hands-on craft,” says Kleinman. “By the time I did it, everything had pretty much moved on to editing on video, even though you still shot on film. It meant that the technical side of it was slightly more sophisticated and slightly more controllable.”
Since his first outing, Kleinman has created an array of distinctive yet recognisably Bond-esque title sequences. Featuring vocals by Tina Turner, the GoldenEye titles were rich with symbolism and motifs of a fallen Soviet Union, including a hammer and sickle and large Communist statues being pulled down, while striking images of two-faced women nodded to the Janus Syndicate in the film. By contrast, Casino Royale’s titles played on the gambling theme with card tentacles, bodies exploding into playing cards, guns firing hearts and spinning roulette wins, and Skyfall is set within the mind of Bond himself, as the viewer is immersed in the depths of his tortured thoughts and memories.
Working on one of the world’s longest-running and most lucrative film franchises presents Kleinman with a unique set of challenges. While he’ll have the film script to read and a rough demo of the title song if he’s lucky, he typically has to start filming while the movie itself is still being shot. “I’ve got to read the script, have the ideas, have the meeting with all the producers and the director, and then go away, think about it, do storyboards, brainstorm ideas, and this is before I know what the music is going to be and all that sort of stuff. Then I take it back to them and say ‘is this heading in the right direction for the rest of the film?’ Which at that point doesn’t exist, so it’s very difficult,” he says.
The scale of the entire post-production process also means that Kleinman no longer has the hands-on creative control that he used to in the early days. “It is really terribly difficult to try and have a vision of what I want to do and for the end result to stay true to that, because the process is so complicated and there’s so many people involved,” he says. “I no longer know how the machines work because they’re so complicated, you have to be an expert in every single different machine, which I can’t be. I have to treat it a bit like a shoot where I’m just the director sitting there saying, ‘This is what I want it to be like’, and try and keep everybody heading in the same direction.”
Working on the latest Bond flick No Time to Die – which also happens to be Daniel Craig’s last outing as 007 – added an extra layer of complication to the process. Kleinman describes it as being “a race to the finish line”, after filming was delayed due to a change of director from Danny Boyle to Cary Joji Fukunaga, followed by Craig getting injured, and subsequently bringing in Phoebe Waller-Bridge to help out with the script. As a result, it meant that the entire post-production process was shunted in order to meet the release date.
Ironically, the film’s release was subsequently postponed not once but three times due to the pandemic. The end result is certaintly worth the wait though, according to the critics. As for the titles, they feature a refreshingly intimate Bond track courtesy of Gen-Z favourite Billie Eilish. “The film itself is a tie-up of lots of themes of the films that [Craig’s] been in, and so I tried to make the title sequence the same. It alludes to quite a few of the characters and elements and narrative themes that have gone through the previous films, and then suggests what narratively might be happening in this film,” says Kleinman.
Looking back at how the Bond titles have evolved over the years, Kleinman views each of them as a time capsule of the period in which they were made, the use of Bond girls being one of the most obvious examples. “One of the things the producers asked me very early on when I was talking about doing GoldenEye was: are you going to keep the girls?,” he says. “I think Maurice was a man of his era, and so the women that he put in his sequences were there for titillation effectively, which worked on me when I was about 12. But the way I wanted to use female form in the videos was more as a cipher. They were not there in order to be sexy per se, it was to suggest this world of exoticism and sensuality, but I always felt that they represented something.”
The evolution of the titles also reflects how the films themselves have had to change with the times. “Daniel Craig’s Bond is now sensitive, he has a heart, he feels things, and he’s vulnerable emotionally. But if we’d seen Sean Connery be vulnerable emotionally, it just would have been ridiculous,” says Kleinman. “So it’s a question of keeping with the political times, keeping the heritage of the past and also trying to create something fresh, which looks new, and people go, ‘OK, it’s a Bond title sequence but it’s not just another rehash of the old ideas’.”
While the Bond franchise and what 007 represents seems to be the subject of constant debate, particularly as the speculation around Craig’s successor reaches a crescendo, Kleinman believes that the films ultimately demonstrate that British creativity is very much still alive and kicking. “Bond is what it is, you either like it or you don’t like it,” he says. “I like it as a British heritage film, it’s a great action film. Considering that we make probably the most famous action film in the world and it’s still drawing in these audiences is a great thing. It’s great for the film industry, great for the creative industry, and it’s an incredible thing to be part of.”
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