OSS 117

While slowly cleaning up my house, I found the only page of the film script my friend O and I wrote when we were teenagers. It was, of course, a James Bond film. We casted my friend O, a slender, little bit clumsy boy, seventeen years old, as James Bond, and myself, fifteen years old, as the evil (no name, unfortunately).

Very touching is the budget we calculated for shooting this film. Most accessories were present in the households of our parents (two cars - Fiat, Simca - two guns (?), a cat, a dog, two houses, a motorcycle (?), a canoe, 16 tubes of ketchup, 50 guilders of my penny bank and 75 guilders of O's. And one camera of course.

O invited me several months ago to watch the French film OSS 117 Rio ne répond plus, by the Oscar winning director of the Artist. And again the Oscar winning Jean Dujardin as Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, alias OSS 117, a French operative working for the Office of Strategic Services. A few day ago we saw the picture, at last. My ambition to make a spy movie, about a powerful and effective man of course, has never really diminished. Jean Dujardin was only effective in his 1962 clumsiness, but what would the really proud James Bond of 2012 look like?