***

Having interviewed hundreds of talented and award winning actors, writers, directors and producers over the last five years, I’ve come to approach interviews with a certain degree of stoicism and passionate uniformity. Some would argue that this is professionalism. Which it is, to a degree. But the simple fact of the matter is that though the subjects are different, the information and the way in which I get this information remain fairly constant. This changed during the 2002 Chicago International Film Festival.

Checking out the list of persons who would be arriving in town during the October film festival, I noticed a trio of ladies, Maud Adams, Lois Chiles and Maryam D’Abo, who were going to be flying in to promote a new documentary in which they were featured. The three names sounded vaguely familiar, but didn’t ring a bell the way the names Parker Posey and Phillip Noyce did. Looking more closely at the schedule, I saw what the title of the documentary was Bond Girls are Forever and instantly realized why I had recognized their names: Adams, Chiles and D’Abo were Bond Girls.

The day after I scheduled our photo shoot and interview with the trio, I began to get phone calls from old college friends to whom I hadn’t spoken in several years.

"How are you doing? Yeah? That’s great. Say... I heard you were interviewing some Bond Girls? Uh huh. Uh huh. Yeah... uh, do you need an assistant? Because I could come to town next week."

I was genuinely surprised by the three phone calls that I received. Having conducted interviews with other beautiful women and having had interviews scheduled with Estella Warren and Ali Landry (the Doritos model), I figured that I would have gotten these calls then too. However, that wasn’t the case.

I finally asked the third person that called what the appeal was of being an assistant on this particular interview. "They’re Bond Girls," he said. "Do you really need more?"

After doing some research on the three and re-screening several Bond films, including Octopussy and Moonraker, co-starring Adams and Chiles respectively, I began to realize that I was not simply going to be interviewing three actresses. I was going to be questioning three members of American and Hollywood history whose legacies would remain for decades to come. Bond Girls were a marketing prize and I was going to be interviewing not one, but three of them at the same time. It’s one thing to talk to Spike Lee or Brett Ratner, but it’s a completely different thing to talk to veritable institutions like Adams, Chiles and D’Abo. They were Bond Girls, one of the highest compliments Hollywood can offer and nobody was ever going to be able to take that away from them. As I spent additional time thinking about this, more and more butterflies began to enter my stomach. "Everyone remembers my part," Adams says of her character, Octopussy. "Certainly there are other things that I might have done that might have meant something to me, but whether anyone would remember them as much as Octopussy is something else."

Produced and hosted by D’Abo (who played Kara Milovy in 1987’s The Living Daylights), Bond Girls are Forever gets inside this very notion: Bond Girls are pretty special. "Looking back on it," Adams says, "How can you not really enjoy the fact that you were a Bond Girl? It’s pop culture and to be part of that is very nice." This is the consensus among the three women at the table with me.

"During the ‘70’s it was a very awkward time to be a Bond Girl," Chiles says. "It wasn’t necessarily looked on by the sisterhood as something that we should be doing. We were a little ambivalent about our roles. We’re very excited about having Halle and Judi [Dench] joining us," Chiles continues. "For years you were told that you wouldn’t be able to do other movies if you took a Bond film. Everything was compartmentalized. Now that’s all changed."

"That was really because of the times," Adams agrees. "We don’t feel that way now."

D’Abo smiles and says, "You know these are not serious movies. They’re entertainment, we’re not talking a political film in any way. It’s pure entertainment."

Is there a down point to being a Bond Girl? "We have a problem with one thing," Chiles starts. "We are always being asked to say, ‘Oh, James.’ That is annoying. You try to do it and somehow it never comes out the way you want it to. You can’t live up to people’s fantasies."

And there it was, out in the open. Adams, Chiles and D’Abo were not simply Hollywood institutions and icons that I was interviewing; they were fantasies and dreams in the flesh.

Interestingly, there were several Bond Girls who didn’t want to be involved with D’Abo’s project, including Diana Rigg and Famke Janssen. "We’ve all been there," Chiles begins, "But now that Halle Berry and Judi Dench are Bond Girls, the next generation of Bond Girls won’t have the same attitude." In other words, hopefully actresses will not see participation in the Bond series as a detriment to a ‘serious’ acting career.

On my way home after the interview, I reflected on what I’d learned and came to realize that not only are most Americans a little jittery when faced with the prospect of talking to a Bond Girl, but some of the Bond Girls themselves are uneasy about their own membership in this elite club. With that in mind, I felt somewhat better about myself, and my opening bout of nerves.

Now to call Halle Berry’s publicist...