When author Ian Fleming needs a name for his suave, sophisticated secret agent, he steals one from an unaware birdwatcher and creates a pop-culture phenomenon about the ultimate fictional alpha male. 2022. It is the year of 007's sixtieth anniversary onscreen and Australian filmmaker Matthew Bauer is on a global mission to discover the lasting, contrasting and very personal impacts of sharing such an identity with James Bond.

From a Swedish 007 super-fan with a WW2 past, a gay New York theatre director, an African American Bond accused of murder, and two resilient women caught up in it all, The Other Fellow is an audacious, poignant, and insightful examination of masculinity, gender, and race in the very real shadows of a movie icon.

For an episode of the Only Bond Live Stream, Director Matthew Bauer spoke about the making of the documentary.

Are you are you as big a Bond fan as the rest of us are?

So I grew up in Adelaide, Australia, where I was the biggest Bond fan in the local area for sure. I had my collection on the walls and actually in Adelaide, Australia in the 90s is actually quite hard to amass a James Bond collection, and so there were two shots So in the city that I would go in one was called antique market. The other was called Movie maniacs. And I would pop in there every weekend to see if a bomb thing and kind of popped up. Yeah, so I was always that kind of kid. Yeah. And then I will say, though, from meeting a lot of you guys, and also the Swedish James Bond, who you see in the film with his whole collection. Yes, I now not the biggest Bond fan, I know for sure.

But you're touring at the moment with the film?

Yes, yeah. I actually just saw someone asked in the chat while this film was crawling around the world? And the answer would be, we don't have the budget of something like a men in black or a Bond film to do an international day in day release, kind of as they call it. Yeah, but yet, it's been slowly kind of sold off to different territories. Our next big one is actually the UK. Finally, so it's our distributors said it's being released there in quarter two, which means April, May, June. So sometimes it's going to be in some and again, with these things, it's not like a wide release of video played here in New York, on the weekend. But yes, I imagine you'll be able to see this in a few British cinemas, sometime around them. But yeah, we've been on quite a long tour with this. And I'm finally going to be able to go back and do this from my home. In London, which is going to be really nice, actually. Yes, it gets it gets a bit exhausting. But it was great having the whole kind of bond community sort of down there on Saturday as well.

I like the same some of these people are named James Bond that have absolutely no interest in the in double oh seven.

Yeah, it kind of varies. We've got a Swedish guy in the film, who's some Bond fans know and he's often known as like this Swedish James Bond. And he's a man in Sweden, who is a complicated story. You'll see in the film that because of his missing Nazi father, he slowly spent his life turning himself literally into James Bond and he actually changed his name to James Bond was kind of just the icing on the cake to a lifelong journey that we try and follow he changes. He changes his name, but kind of is actually more he's changed himself into James Bond drives around this small snowy town in Sweden.

Confusing all of the locals in his Aston Martin. Yeah, and so he's, he's the one in the film who actually is the big Bond fan who really kind of goes for it whereas conversely, our one here in New York, who is our I guess you would say, homosexual James Bond. I don't think he would kind of know who he was if he didn't spend his life complaining about being named on and so that's the thing is a lot of these guys they're sort of stuck in this like catch 22 situation and I asked and everyone always asked them they're like well that's so bad why not just change the name and I asked them all that and like that's not a route that there was one of them actually does.

I won't spoil which one but generally not a route they kind of want to go down but I mean, I'd asked the other bond guys on here especially how you felt as Bond fans because that especially the Swedish guy he's almost a guy who's watched a few too many David Zaritsky videos and really going down the bond experience being James Bond routes.

Did you have any contact with Elon at all during this process?

No. I mean, we haven't really had touch with them. I mean, you'll see when you kind of see the film, it's really isn't about the James Bond films. And so there's no there's no clips about, there's no clips from the Bond films or kind of anything like that. And that's because, the actual material in the James Bond film itself doesn't actually affect these guys at all. Most of them say they've never seen a Bond film or they avoid them, like the plague, so a lot of Skyfall doesn't affect them, what affects them, and you'll see it very much in the film is just the noise of James bond that exists in the media sphere. If you watch CNN today, I guarantee you they'll mention James Bond three times, and often kind of as like a verb. All that's very James Bond, yada, yada. But then, of course, when a film is coming out, and that's when we tried to film the most, you do just have the noise out there, or the James Bond films.

And so you'll see in the film, we kind of superimpose a lot of like the CNN footage and that kind of thing over the cities. These men are in almost like it's the spaceship from Independence Day, sort of hovering above. So if your name is James Bond, for instance, here in New York and a new James Bond film is coming out, a lot of like, lower grade companies decide and pre interest you as well a lot of lower grade companies like used car shops and that kind of thing. One or two of them will have the idea of doing a James Bond ad and getting a guy called James Bond to endorse them. So if your name is James Bond, your phone starts ringing with, like offers for TV commercials and that kind of thing.

And we follow one who ends up doing an ad for like an online casino, say my name is James Bond, and I support this yada, yada. So our film is kind of about that thing that happens with these guys. And so in that sense, no, we didn't have contact with them. Because we weren't, we weren't ever really after like a clip from a James Bond film. And I think we also, this had to be its own thing, we didn't want this to feel like a DVD extra, or really a documentary about the kind of James Bond films. And I think, for the guys who have seen it, you'll know that this goes really hard on these characters and their stories. And the film is very, very busy with the dramas that these characters find themselves in.

And they've seen the film, there isn't really a point in the film where it would feel natural to cut to one of those clips. Sort of anyway, we did use a few like archival interviews with like Daniel Craig, and that sort of thing. But again, kind of in that media sphere, rather than the sphere of the Bond films, if that makes sense.