Alan Whicker’s cue cards for interviewing Sean Connery on You Only Live Twice
On location in Japan for the fifth James Bond film, Sean Connery and Bond producer Harry Saltzman were interviewed by globe-trotting broadcaster Alan Whicker for an episode of Whicker’s World. Whicker’s typed and annotated cue cards give a unique insight into the process behind his affable but very direct line of questioning.
In 1966, journalist and TV presenter Alan Whicker covered the production of the latest James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice (1967). As globe-trotting as Bond himself, this episode of Whicker’s World took Whicker back to Japan – a country to which he’d devoted a whole programme in 1961 – as well as to Pinewood Studios and the homes of producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. As usual, Whicker prepared in meticulous fashion, honing direct and probing questions to be asked in his typically disarming manner.
You Only Live Twice was a pivotal film in the Bond franchise. Sean Connery had announced his fifth film as Bond would be his last (he did later return for Diamonds Are Forever in 1971 and for the unofficial 1983 entry Never Say Never Again), and it was the first James Bond film to keep only the barest elements of its Ian Fleming source novel.
The author Roald Dahl, who Whicker also interviewed, described it as Fleming’s worst book and as screenwriter invented an almost entirely new plot, adhering to the formula established by the films. Although, as Whicker’s planned questions suggest, Saltzman went “through writers like a meat chopper”, Dahl lasted the distance, introducing the necessary elements of (in Whicker’s words) “girls, guns, danger, sex and sadism”.
Whicker and his crew covered Connery’s arrival in Tokyo, capturing on camera the huge level of press interest that the star generated. In response to Whicker’s “How has your own life been affected?” question, Connery unburdened himself with the candour of a man chatting to a friend in the pub, discussing the invasion of privacy and intense level of fan attention he experienced. Whicker found Connery “unaffected and candid” and softened a number of his questions from those originally planned, encouraging this openness.
Some of Whicker’s cue card questions can sound very direct, almost to the point of rudeness, but Whicker always managed to ask them in a non-interrogatory way. He deployed humour, framed them as just one perspective, not necessarily his own (“It’s been said that you used to make great pictures, now you just make successful ones”), and knew when best to abandon them entirely.
While these cards never make an appearance on camera, they’re a place to develop ideas and test approaches: they are the essential framework that underpins the final interviews that we see and hear.
Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.