Casino Royale (Columbia Pictures, 2006)
In the summer of 2013, Film Matters published, “License to Joke: Parody and Camp in and Around the James Bond Series,” an essay focused on the longevity of the Bond franchise. Editorial board member, Lydia Plantamura, interviews author Craig Manning about his writing career and fondness for agent 007.
Lydia Plantamura: Where did you first hear about Film Matters magazine?
Craig Manning: I found out about Film Matters through a simple Google search. I wasn’t a film studies major, but an English major, so I wasn’t familiar with the various undergraduate journals for film. I was actually taking a really cool English class about parody, and for the major assignment of the semester, our professor gave us a lot of freedom to decide what we wanted to write about. Basically, he wanted us to take the definitions and elements of parody that we’d learned about over the semester, find an example (or several examples) to analyze, and then write an essay. What made the assignment unique was that he wanted us to write as if we were planning on submitting to an undergraduate journal. Actually submitting to the journal wasn’t a requirement, since the peer review process is lengthy and would extend past the end of the semester, but I figured it would be a good experience to have. Knowing that I wanted to focus on Bond, I searched for undergraduate film journals, and Film Matters was the first that came up.
LP: At the time your article was published, you were a freelance journalist for a few different publications. Are you still a freelance writer? If not, what are you doing now?
CM: Yep, still freelancing! I consider myself kind of a writing renaissance man. I do everything from music journalism to web content development. I just authored a children’s book for a company in Illinois, and I’m in talks to work with an editor at one of the magazines I write for on a major book project for the fiftieth anniversary of the Super Bowl. My ultimate goal is to ghostwrite biographies for musicians, actors, or filmmakers, so I try to take every opportunity that comes my way.
LP: Have you published any articles about film since being published in Film Matters? If not, where is your focus of work now?
CM: I’m actually not sure. [It’s] hard to remember everything when you write 8,000+ words a day! I don’t write about film that regularly, just because I don’t really have a platform to do so—at least [not] right now. My focus is mostly on music. I’m a senior staff member at AbsolutePunk.net, where I get to review a bunch of albums, write essays on music, and interview some of my favorite artists, which is all really cool. I’d like to get back to writing about film more, though, so I’ll probably look for opportunities to do that this year.
LP: In your article, you cite a plethora of films, including fifteen Bond films. When did you become a Bond expert and what inspired your article?
CM: I’ve been a Bond fan since I was seven or eight years old, probably, ever since the Golden Eye 007 videogame for the N64. The semester I wrote this article was the fall of 2012, which was also when Skyfall was coming out. The week of the release, I wrote a piece for my school newspaper called “The Lasting Legacy of Mr. James Bond,” which started with the sentence, “Before I loved music, long before I could adequately formulate thoughts in writing and prior to building an appreciation of film on any significant level, I was still a fan of James Bond.” I realized that I’d been a fan of James Bond movies for longer than I’d been anything else in my life. That was a pretty remarkable revelation for me. I also got to thinking about how durable the Bond franchise was—this was also the autumn where the series turned fifty—and I thought that was remarkable. So when it came time to come up with an essay idea for my parody class, I knew I wanted to look at Bond’s longevity, and to do it in a way that I don’t think anyone really had before.
LP: What were the responses to your article?
CM: It was a pretty cool experience. When I finally got a copy of the issue, I took a picture of the title page of my article and posted it to Facebook, saying something like “Finally published in a scholarly journal; glad it’s about James Bond.” I got a lot of likes and comments on that post. Most people just never have an opportunity to be published in this context, so it was cool to be able to brag about it just a bit. I’ve also stayed in touch with the professor who assigned the paper in the first place, and he ended up assigning my Bond essay as a reading in one of his courses last spring. Suffice to say that it’s kind of surreal knowing that your work is being “studied” at the university you graduated from less than two years ago!
LP: What is your favorite Bond film? Why?
CM: Casino Royale, no question. (The 2006 version, not the parody version with Peter Sellers.) A lot of Bond fans think it’s blasphemy to rank anyone but Sean Connery as the best 007, but in Casino Royale, I think Daniel Craig created a much more fully realized version of the character. He’s as charismatic and charming as you’d expect Bond to be, but where Roger Moore (my least favorite Bond) skated by on charisma and charm alone, Craig’s Bond just has so many more layers. He’s the most violent and unpredictable Bond, but he also has these really genuine moments of emotional tenderness. He’s smart and egotistical, but he also makes big mistakes. And he brings the dark, tortured psyche of the character to the forefront—something you would have to expect from an orphan who kills people for a living. That film really commits to rebuilding the Bond legacy from the ground up, and Craig makes it work almost single-handedly. The thrilling action sequences, the suspenseful poker scenes, and the terrific supporting cast are just bonuses.
Author Biography
Lydia Plantamura is part of the editorial staff for Film Matters magazine. As an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, she is majoring in Creative Writing and Film Studies with a minor in English. She is a nontraditional student, returning to school after taking a three-year break to travel. She fell in love with Hawaii, where she spent the majority of her educational hiatus, living on the island of Maui.
