I’m a little nervous about 007 First Light, which—from what I’ve seen—seems to play everything a bit too safe and linear to really leverage IO’s strengths as a studio. When I played First Light, I found myself asking if, perhaps, the Bond license-holders at Amazon were a bit precious about their character. Maybe IO simply couldn’t get as whacky with someone else’s intellectual property as it can with Agent 47.
But I guess I was wide of the mark, because when I asked 007 First Light franchise art director Rasmus Poulsen about what it was like to work with someone else’s license, he said it was actually surprisingly easy to nail down the big stuff, like making 007 a young’un.
“The youthful take has been a go from day one,” said Poulsen. “I think we put a lot of effort and honour into doing our homework, because we take this extremely seriously… the conversation gets easier when you have a foundation like that.”
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The things that actually demanded time to hammer out were issues you and I wouldn’t dedicate a second’s thought to. “Really weird things get discussed, right? … What colour car would Bond never drive? People think one thing, people think another thing. We go like, ‘Well that’s a weird discussion,'” recalls Poulsen.
Discussions like these could eat up days. “Really fun, really strange offshoots that demanded three meetings… whereas really big, tent-pole decisions,” like Bond’s youth, could be wrapped up in a jiffy.
And if you’re wondering, the colour car Bond would never drive is white. Though it “depends on what you see as the flavour of the character, whether it’s leased or not, whether it’s rented locally or not.” Would 007 drive a white car from Hertz? What about Enterprise? This will demand another five meetings to establish. And wait a minute, didn’t he drive a white Lotus Esprit in The Spy Who Loved Me? Call everyone back in, we’re gonna need to sort all this out.
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