The “forbidden” James Bond scene banned by American censors: “I did an alternate take, thank God”
Since its inception, the James Bond franchise has always been geared toward audiences of all ages, but there was one particular scene that left the American censors so up in arms that it had to be cut.
None of the 25 official instalments, or the unofficial ones, for that matter, have ever been released in cinemas with an R-rating, and since the category was first introduced in the mid-1980s, almost all of them have been awarded a PG-13, which allows some leeway when it comes to sex, violence, and foul language.
Nobody wants to see a watered-down 007 trying to save the world, and not many would be keen on hearing him drop multiple f-bombs and leave a trail of mangled bodies in his wake, either. It’s a sweet spot that most blockbusters aim for to open themselves up to the biggest crowd and make the most money, but reinventing Bond for the 1990s posed a unique set of problems.
The closest that the iconic secret agent ever came to disappearing from the big screen forever was in the period between Licence to Kill and GoldenEye, when legal and contractual red tape mired the series in a quagmire that saw studio bosses suggest the character could be easily replaced by another spy.
Fortunately, Martin Campbell’s GoldenEye brought Bond roaring back to the forefront of the cultural consciousness, with Pierce Brosnan’s debut dragging the long-running saga into modernity with a fresh coat of paint that merged the classic tropes with some modern sensibilities and grandstanding action sequences.
However, some of those scenes went too far, at least in the eyes of the MPAA. To avoid the R-rating that would have significantly hampered its chances at the box office, concessions needed to be made, including Xenia Onatopp’s death by choking being shortened by several seconds to make it less graphic. The biggest bone of contention by far is something that happens in what feels like every second action flick, though, with a single punch to the face and the blood-spraying results being deemed a step too far.
In the final brawl between Brosnan’s Bond and Sean Bean’s Alec Trevelyan, Campbell wanted to pay homage to one of the franchise’s most famous bouts of fisticuffs. To channel the brutality of Sean Connery and Robert Shaw’s train scrap in From Russia with Love, the director sought to make his climactic showdown as realistic as possible. “One punch can cover your face in blood,” he accurately stated. “And that was forbidden in a Bond film.” Undeterred, he used Trevelyan’s death scene to up the claret levels instead, which didn’t go down too well with the MPAA.
Originally, after the villain plunged to his death, he envisioned some splatter, only to be denied. “When Trevelyan hits the deck, there’s a lot of blood,” he admitted. “I did an alternative take, thank God, because the American censors went nuts.” In the theatrical edition, it’s a mere trickle that emerges when Bean gets his customary death scene, but Campbell dreamed of going bigger, bolder, and bloodier.
Many minor cuts were made to GoldenEye to ensure it passed the PG-13 test, and while there’s a version that exists without the BBFC-mandated excisions to avoid a 15 in the UK, the unedited and borderline R-rated edition that had to be snipped for the MPAA has never been made publicly available.
