The Producers

Matthew Bauer – Writer/Director/Producer

Matthew Bauer is an Award-winning Australian film director, producer and writer and graduate of NYU film school. He has been longlisted for Best Debut Director (Documentary) at the British Independent Film Awards, nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the National Film Awards, Austin Film Festival and DocEdge Film Festival, winner of Best In Category Award at DocEdge Film Festival and the Human Spirit Award at the Chagrin Documentary Film Festival.

Michelle Brøndum – Producer

Michelle Brøndum is a RTS-winning producer based in London, with over 10 years of experience in physical production. Over the years, Michelle has produced several award-winning films – including Requiem (RTS Award winner, 2021), Other Half (Cannes nominee 2021), Stories of You and I (BAFTA Student Award nominee, 2021), documentary feature Scala!!! (line producer, 2021), documentary feature The Other Fellow (producer, 2022) and is currently line-producing a documentary for HTYT who is behind the Netflix documentary Rising Phoenix.

Lesley Posso – Editor

Lesley Posso is a film editor spanning across documentary, fiction and animation. An NFTS graduate, she has been awarded the Avid Award for ‘Excellence in Editing’ and the Royal Television Society: Craft Skill Editing Award. Her films have won and received nominations for the BAFTA, BIFA, IRIS Prize, RTS, Grierson and Annie Awards. Recently, her documentary short Tease was acquired by Channel 4, her feature documentary The Other Fellow made available on ITVX and has also collaborated with Disney+ Star imagine on her short Nights. She is currently working on her next feature Turn Up The Sun! starring James McAvoy.

Making The Film

In 2012, somewhere from the aether appeared the question of what it would be like to have the name James Bond. I jumped on Facebook to contact real men named James Bond, and immediately started to see the subtle effect of 007 – all of them had weird usernames like ‘Bond James’, ‘Bond, James Bond’, ‘James Alexander Bond’, ‘JB Bond’ - anything but actually ‘James Bond’. I would later discover this is because Facebook’s algorithm flags James Bond as a false name when you sign up for an account.

I saw that whilst the Bonds I spoke to had a lot of the expected and occasionally funny experiences one might assume at first, like using the name as a pickup line or getting free theatre tickets to the Bond premieres, there was also a more serious dimension to having the name.

This led me to a gay man dealing with the world’s perceptions of masculinity typified by James Bond, who became one of our central characters. And then – two years into shooting, a Black man named James Bond Jr. was arrested for murder in the US, and agreed to let me interview him in prison.

Still, one question remained – why wouldn’t they just change their name? Some of our characters did. For example, the Swedish James Bond, who changed his name to disassociate from a father figure and gain a new one in 007. As well as in the case of London’s James Hart, who changed his surname to disassociate himself and any future offspring from what he described as the ‘mire’ of the name Bond.

It was important to me to visually represent the noise of information that I came to find surrounds and interacts with my James Bonds. This is the noise that carries the Bond phenomena around the world in 2022 – TV signals, news stories, radio chatter, mass media, social media, the internet – noise that these characters are more sensitive to than a normal person.

On a personal level, I hope the film can resonate with all audiences and not just people with a funny name – through watching how the characters have overcome (or failed to overcome) this rare sociological situation. Like any problem or hang-up an audience member may have – disability, addiction, mental illness, identity confusion etc – the film shows how connecting and sharing with others can help overcome the obstacles in your head.

–Matthew Bauer, Director