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Bond, James Bond, graced the halls of the Center for Communication and Business (CCB) yesterday morning to lend his support to the third Cinemagic Los Angeles Film and Television Festival for Young People, taking place Feb. 20-25 in various locations around Los Angeles. Yesterday, the place was Pepperdine University and the man of the hour was Pierce Brosnan.
“I am delighted to be joining Cinemagic once again to share my experience in film and television with students from Ireland and Los Angeles,” Brosnan said in a Cinemagic press release. “Cinemagic offers a unique educational experience to students who might otherwise not receive the chance to learn about the entertainment industry.”
A Malibu local born in Ireland, Brosnan is a patron of Cinemagic, a youth film festival anchored in Belfast and Dublin. According to its press release, the festival “gives young people the opportunity to work with others from different cultural backgrounds and to create new channels of communication through the medium of film.”
Brosnan’s involvement was much appreciated. “And to hear someone like Pierce, who’s so humble and so kind, speak and inspire these kids is just an amazing opportunity,” said Joan Burney Keatings, chief executive of the international festival.
Students participate in workshops and Q-and-A sessions with professionals to hone their filmmaking as well as their interpersonal and intercultural understanding in the pursuit of their ambitions.
Once such professional is Brosnan, who joined Pepperdine’s Center for Entertainment, Media and Culture to speak candidly with students in the LA area as well as several students from the Republic of Ireland as well as Northern Ireland.
Making their way across the Pond, these seven teenagers were selected to represent Cinemagic in LA after participating in Cinemagic’s International Film Camp in Belfast last August, which brought together hopeful moviemakers from around the globe and challenged them to make a short film in five days.
Filling the room to capacity, the students listened eagerly to Brosnan’s story. Born in the Irish countryside, the future 007 lived there until his parents split and he moved to London was he was 11. He left school at 15 — an action he did not condone for the students present — and survived in the big city because of his love and talent for artwork.
His break into acting came from director Joseph Sargent in the 1981 TV miniseries “Manions of America.”
“You meet many people in life and they open doors in small ways, and he opened the door in a very big way,” Brosnan said of Sargent, who was on the phone during this portion of the event.
“Is this the same unknown Irish actor that walked into my office in London and knocked me out with a great reading?” Sargent joked over the phone, excited at Brosnan’s success and time at Pepperdine.
Sargent’s work brought Brosnan to America, where his mid-1980s role in “Remington Steele” launched his American career.
Despite his passion for acting and his career success, Brosnan didn’t always see himself as an actor. He was a natural painter, after all.
“It was a great surprise to me that I wanted to be an actor because I was very shy as a young man,” Brosnan said to senior Theatre major Jamye Grant, who led a Q-and-A for a portion of the event. “And I had the arts. I was enjoying being an artist at that time; however, I had a great love of movies. I’d been asked to be in school plays, which I shunned. The dream was never really on the landscape.”
After being exposed to acting at the behest of a friend in the late 1960s, “life changed on a dime.”
The room full of students saw the turns his life took through the decades via clips from “Manions of America,” “Ghost Writer,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” among other projects of his. But any discussion with Pierce Brosnan would be incomplete without mentioning his iconic portrayal of Ian Fleming’s suave MI6 agent, James Bond.
“The character of Bond was so deep in my psyche because of Connery [and Roger Moore] that it was difficult to find a place within the space and on the page,” Brosnan said.
He was actually offered the role once and had to decline because of his contract with “Remington Steele.” Grant asked how he prepared for such a difficult, revered role when he could accept it the second time around. “I tried to make him as human as possible. I tried to make a place in my heart for him, to have blood in his veins and to have some kind of humanity. That’s what started me on the quest for his character,” Brosnan said.
That, and preparation. Reading and studying the script, rereading Ian Fleming’s books, immersing yourself the role — this is the advice he offered the budding moviemakers.
“You want to have freedom to find yourself in the world and to have the security and strength to make a fool of yourself,” Brosnan said to the students about the acting process. He pointed to his “Mamma Mia” co-star Meryl Streep as one of the most exemplary actors to learn from today.
“[For ‘Mamma Mia’] this woman came in and led a company of young actors and dancers and singers. And this woman was fearless. She’s incredible … and I think the same for any of her work; she experiments. You have to be open and show yourself.”
Recalling old advice from Sargent, Brosnan said, “No matter how big you get and wherever you go, you’re always going to have to test for someone. As great as you think you are, maybe you’re not in another person’s eyes. They want you to show up, to meet you, talk to you. It’s a constant constructing and destroying of yourself, being an actor.”
