Starting with a bang: how Bond's greatest title sequences were made

Binder’s price tag stickers would, over the course of 50 years and 23 more movies, spawn ever more elaborate imagery with which to accompany the opening list of cast and crew: from voodoo ceremonies to exploding volcanoes. And, of course, naked, silhouetted girls. Lots and lots of naked, silhouetted girls. 

Not much is entirely sacred in the Bond universe. Over the years, the gadgets have changed, as have the suits and the bad guys. M became a woman for a while. In the late-Sixties, 007 even got married, for about five minutes. These days, the world’s most famous spy has blondish hair and drives an electric car.

But the one enduring element that renders every movie unmistakably a James Bond movie are those sumptuous, spectacular, exhilarating and unashamedly overblown openers. Every one is different, but all share the ability to place an audience immediately on Planet Bond, instantly readying our minds for a couple of hours of action, glamour and preposterous chat-up lines. 

In that sense, Saltzman, Broccoli and Binder wrote the playbook for modern commercial branding, long before Nike came up with "Just Do It" or Coca-Cola declared "Coke Is It". They established a combination of music and imagery so powerful and evocative that it could communicate a thousand messages in an instant.

It is unlikely that they realised they were doing so. Binder had graduated from art school, but taken a job as a tea boy at Macy’s department store before eventually becoming their art director. While serving on an army salvage ship during the Second World War, he had made some movie industry contacts during a stop-off near Hollywood.

This led to work as a stills photographer and, after the war, he moved into movie advertising and making title sequences. His titles for the 1961 film The Grass Is Greener received an extremely positive response from the audience at its premiere and, the very next day, he received a call about creating the opener for Dr No. 

The sniper barrel sequence aside, there is nothing particularly familiar about the very-Sixties graphics that open Dr No, wherein coloured dots rearrange themselves around the credits in various formations. The distinctive, dreamlike sequences of shimmering female bodies would be introduced in the second film, From Russia With Love, created by an altogether more maverick figure.

Robert Brownjohn had established himself as one of New York’s most revered graphic designers in the late 1950s, before descent into heroin addiction stalled his career. He decided to move to London when he had heard that the health service offered free treatment and prescriptions to addicts.

By means of cold-turkey, he sailed from New York to the UK, arriving in London a bedraggled mess in 1960. But as the NHS slowly helped him conquer his drug problem, Brownjohn revived his career, first as a creative director at ad agency J Walter Thompson, before he started his own successful design agency.

Far from the stereotypically unassuming designer, hunched day and night over his desk, Brownjohn was a charismatic and notorious figure amidst swinging London’s milieu. Michael Caine, Terence Stamp and David Bailey would attend his parties. “He installed an excitement in everyone around him,” says film director Adrian Lyne, who worked under him at Thompson’s. “I was infatuated with this man. He was hugely talented.”

Saltzman and Broccoli invited Brownjohn to pitch ideas for From Russia With Love’s opening credits. Brownjohn shambled into a screening theatre for his meeting with the execs carrying a bundle of slides that he mounted into a carousel. He proceeded to dim the lights, remove his shirt and perform a grotesque sort of belly dance while the movie credits projected onto his booze-bloated torso. “It will be just like this,” he told the stunned producers. “Except we’ll use a pretty girl!”

Saltzman and Broccoli handed Brownjohn a budget of just £800 to make the real thing, some of which he used to hire a professional belly dancer. He experienced problems getting his projections to display clearly on her body. Eventually, she walked out after being asked to lift her skirt. Brownjohn replaced her with a snake dancer called Julie Mendes and managed to sharpen the projections onto her gyrating form.

He used another model who gazed into the camera as he projected '007’ across her face. The sexually charged atmosphere of the Bond title sequence was born. In his article “Sex and Typography” for British magazine Typographica, he noted: “On this type of film the only themes to work with are, it seems to me, sex or violence. I chose sex.”

For the next film, Goldfinger, he took things even further by spraying model Margaret Nolan from head to toe in gold paint. This time it wasn’t only words being projected onto her body, but explosions and gun fight sequences from the film too. Set to Shirley Bassey’s memorable theme tune, it was a spellbinding sequence – and so overtly sexual that it became the first to require clearance from a film censor. It won Brownjohn the prestigious gold pencil at the Design and Art Director Awards the following year. 

Saltzman and Broccoli offered to set Brownjohn up in his own independent production company to make all future titles. But when he turned them down, their relationship soured and Binder was brought back in to work on 1965’s Thunderball. He would go on to make 14 sequences in total, right up to 1989’s License To Kill, just two years before he died.

For some, Thunderball remains the quintessential Bond opener. “Up until then, it had all been experimentation,” says Ben Radatz of design agency MK12, who created the titles for 2008’s Quantum Of Solace. “Thunderball was the most confident title sequence and introduced most of the tropes that would endure.

It had that dreamlike quality, used abundant silhouettes, played on the narrative of the movie with its underwater theme. And it was the first to use optical layering of images.” While it’s true that certain elements persist, it would be unfair to call the title sequences formulaic. The style has constantly evolved thanks to technological advances and changing cultural fashions.

George Lazenby’s one and only portrayal of Bond in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service saw the sequence reach what could now be described as 'peak Austin Powers.’ Union Jack filled Martini glasses accompanied images of the spy dangling precariously from giant clocks.

Binder’s work on the 1970s movies chimed with the spoof-like camp of the Roger Moore era. “Things started to verge on cheesy,” says Radatz. “It was all Union Jacks and naked girls bouncing on trampolines.” Live and Let Die opened with endless coloured fire and hints of voodoo, largely filmed through the eyes of a burning skull and accompanied by the thrilling aggression of Paul McCartney’s theme tune. It was nothing short of barmy.

But 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me went even further. Coming at the tail of perhaps the most famous opening scene, Bond is ambushed by Russian assassins on skis and jumps from a mountain peak, freefalling for 20 seconds before releasing his Union Jack parachute. This morphs seamlessly into Binder’s sequence, with two beautifully manicured hands animating onto screen and catching Bond, as Carly Simon’s 'Nobody Does It Better’ drifts over the scene.

Binder’s willingness to move with the times continued into the Eighties, where lasers and neon were used liberally alongside soundtracks by Duran Duran and A-Ha. The next major reboot came with the advent of the Pierce Brosnan era in 1994. 

Daniel Kleinman was already renowned as one of the world’s most talented commercial and pop promo directors. He came to the attention of Team Bond when he shot the promo for Gladys Knight’s License To Kill theme tune in 1989.

A master of digital art and special effects, Kleinman radically modernised the look of the title sequences. “I wanted to keep the essence of the Binder and Brownjohn eras, but was able to use new techniques to deliver them,” he says. “I am always guided by the narrative of the movie.

"So for my first film, Goldeneye, I used images reflecting the fall of Communism to give a sense of the passing of time. But I look back at the processes now, where I was layering four or five images at a time and it seems quite primitive. Now the layers I can use are limitless which I think helps make the title sequence even more exciting and modern.”

Lending the sequences a fresh feel without compromising the heritage is difficult balancing act. “I have had to update the gun barrel sequence a few times now and it’s not easy,” Kleinman admits. “It feels like being the bloke who suggests that the Queen gets plastic surgery. Or the person who came up with the idea of a new recipe for Coca-Cola.”

It is traditionally the executives at production company Eon who select the director and commission the title sequence, entirely separate from the actual movie itself. But in 2008, Quantum Of Solace director Marc Forster had employed long term collaborators MK12 to provide special effects on the movie and put them forward for the opening sequence too.

“We were big fans of the series and wanted a chance to make the titles come hell or high water,” says Radantz. “We cold-pitched it to Eon – they didn’t like the original idea but liked enough to hire us to have another go.” He describes the Eon executives’ approach to the title sequence as "hands off".

“They knew we had respect for the legacy of Binder and Brownjohn,” he says. “And that we just wanted to make something that lived up to the quality of the movie itself.” The entire sequence, says Radantz, took six months to make and involved a budget similar in scale to an entire feature film.

Kleinman returned to the franchise for Skyfall, and then Spectre. “Basically, the point is to make a list of names seem inherently exciting,” he says of his work on the latter. “Traditionally, the audience have just sat through the white knuckle ride of the opening scene and a boring list of crew members could really slow down the action at that point. So I need to make something that continues the atmosphere, hints at what’s coming without giving too much away and get people in the Bond mind-set by establishing all of those familiar tropes.” 

For an art-school graduate who’s working life started as a founder member of Adam and the Ants (he still pops up on TOTP2 once in a while) you might think that all those guns, girls and flags might seems a bit dated, or cheesy. “Maybe in another film they would,” says Kleinman. “But this is Bond. The audience is familiar with the context and the history. You can get away with almost anything.”

Which James Bond film had the best title sequence? Tell us your favourite in the comments section below.