Maurice Binder

Maurice Binder

  • Birthday: 1925-08-25
  • Deathday: 1991-04-09
  • Place of birth: New York City, New York, USA

Biography

Maurice Binder (December 4, 1918 – April 9, 1991) was an American film title designer best known for his work on 16 James Bond films including the first, Dr. No (1962) and for Stanley Donen's films from 1958. He was born in New York City, but mostly worked in Britain from the 1950s onwards. In 1951, Binder directed two short films in the obscure Meet Mister Baby series; these films were preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2015. He did his first film title design for Stanley Donen's Indiscreet (1958). The Bond producers first approached him after being impressed by his title designs for the Donen comedy film The Grass Is Greener (1960). Binder also provided sequences for Donen for Charade (1963) and Arabesque (1966), both accompanying music by Henry Mancini. Binder created the signature gun barrel sequence for the opening titles of the first Bond film, Dr. No (1962). Binder originally planned to employ a camera sighted down the barrel of a .38 calibre gun, but this caused some problems. Unable to stop down the lens of a standard camera enough to bring the entire gun barrel into focus, his assistant Trevor Bond created a pinhole camera to solve the problem and the barrel became crystal clear. Binder described the genesis of the gun barrel sequence in the last interview he recorded before he died in 1991: That was something I did in a hurry, because I had to get to a meeting with the producers in twenty minutes. I just happened to have little white, price tag stickers and I thought I'd use them as gun shots across the screen. We'd have James Bond walk through and fire, at which point blood comes down onscreen. That was about a twenty-minute storyboard I did, and they said, "This looks great!". At least one critic has also observed that the sequence recalls the gun fired at the audience at the end of The Great Train Robbery (1903). Binder is also known for featuring women performing a variety of activities such as dancing, jumping on a trampoline, or shooting weapons in his work. Both sequences are trademarks and staples of the James Bond films. Maurice Binder was succeeded by Daniel Kleinman as the title designer for GoldenEye (1995). Prior to GoldenEye, the only James Bond movies for which he did not create the opening title credits were From Russia with Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964), both of which were designed by Robert Brownjohn. Binder shot opening and closing sequences involving a mouse (an animal that didn't appear in either the novel or the film) for The Mouse That Roared (1959), a sequence of monks filmed as a mosaic explaining the history of the Golden Bell in The Long Ships (1963), and a sequence of Spanish dancers explaining why the then topical reference of nuclear weapons vanishing in a B-52 mishap shifted from Spain to Greece in The Day the Fish Came Out (1967). He designed the title sequence for Sodom and Gomorrah (1963) that featured an orgy (the only one in the film). He took three days to direct the sequence that was originally supposed to take one day. Binder also was a producer of The Passage (1979), and a visual consultant on Dracula (1979) and Oxford Blues (1984). Binder died from lung cancer in London, aged 72. Source: Article "Maurice Binder" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Filmography

Die Titelmacher

1976

As Self

Production

Shout at the Devil

1976

As Title Designer

Arabesque

1966

As Title Designer

Charade

1963

As Title Designer

The Tamarind Seed

1974

As Main Title Designer

The Young Philadelphians

1959

As Title Designer

Goodbye Again

1961

As Title Designer

Fathom

1967

As Title Designer

Brass Target

1978

As Graphic Designer

The Mouse That Roared

1959

As Title Designer

Battle of Britain

1969

As Main Title Designer

Live and Let Die

1973

As Title Designer

King David

1985

As Graphic Designer

The Spy Who Loved Me

1977

As Main Title Designer

Staircase

1969

As Title Designer

Kaleidoscope

1966

As Main Title Designer

Thunderball

1965

As Main Title Designer

Dr. No

1962

As Main Title Designer

Promise Her Anything

1966

As Title Designer

Once More, with Feeling!

1960

As Title Designer

Two for the Road

1967

As Title Designer

The Mouse on the Moon

1963

As Title Designer

You Only Live Twice

1967

As Main Title Designer

Diamonds Are Forever

1971

As Main Title Designer

Young Winston

1972

As Main Title Designer

A Talent for Loving

1969

As Main Title Designer

Gold

1974

As Main Title Designer

The Little Prince

1974

As Main Title Designer

The Man with the Golden Gun

1974

As Main Title Designer

The Wild Geese

1978

As Main Title Designer

Moonraker

1979

As Main Title Designer

The Sea Wolves

1980

As Main Title Designer

The Awakening

1980

As Main Title Designer

Green Ice

1981

As Main Title Designer

For Your Eyes Only

1981

As Main Title Designer

Octopussy

1983

As Main Title Designer

Rustlers' Rhapsody

1985

As Main Title Designer

A View to a Kill

1985

As Main Title Designer

Shanghai Surprise

1986

As Main Title Designer

The Living Daylights

1987

As Main Title Designer

The Last Emperor

1987

As Main Title Designer

Licence to Kill

1989

As Main Title Designer

The Road to Hong Kong

1962

As Main Title Designer

Oxford Blues

1984

As Graphic Designer

Call Me Bwana

1963

As Main Title Designer

The Running Man

1963

As Main Title Designer

Purple Noon

1960

As Title Designer

The James Dean Story

1957

As Title Designer

The Wild Affair

1965

As Title Designer

Who Dares Wins

1982

As Graphic Designer

Surprise Package

1960

As Main Title Designer

The Passage

1979

As Associate Producer

The Passage

1979

As Executive Producer

The Final Countdown

1980

As Visual Effects

keyboard_arrow_up