In the opening of 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, George Lazenby, the replacement for Sean Connery’s immediately iconic James Bond, looks at the camera, smiles, and says, “This never happened to the other fella.” Debate amongst Bond die-hards has always raged over whether Bond is the same guy from film to film, sometimes played by another actor, or if it’s a codename. What the truth is hardly matters, but imagine, if you will, bearing witness to the final synapse firing from Sean Connery as James Bond’s brain when he’s replaced onscreen and off by a different face. Try to picture the death dream that figure might conjure as he’s put out to pasture. Really focus on the fractured memories of a twisted fusion of man and character, the surreal swirl of women’s faces as he struggles to remember which lover tried to kill him last. Merge all of that in your mind, and you’re halfway to catching the vibe of Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet’s latest, Reflection in a Dead Diamond.
The married duo’s newest freakout of senses centers on a former spy, John D. (Fabio Testi, a dead ringer for Sean Connery), living out his final days in a luxury hotel. He’s soon taken by the sight of his neighbor, a woman who reminds him of a past love. As he watches her, he finds himself drawn into a conspiracy that seems to be unfolding around her and a diamond. Or is it? Is this all the delusion of a senile, old man? The hows and whys of Reflection in a Dead Diamond hardly matter—Forzani and Cattet are more interested in using the aesthetics of James Bond (as well as the OSS films and Danger: Diabolique) to break down just what it means to remember. The diamond is simply a trinket serving as a parallel to the way broken minds tend to remember their past. They make brilliant use of the James Bond mythology both on screen and off: from John D.’s great love being a woman named Serpentik played by different actresses, to the spy stumbling upon posters and novels depicting him but as a man with a different face, it all serves to depict memory loss in a way only Forzani and Cattet can.
Reflection in a Dead Diamond is a hypnotic frenzy for the senses. Breathtaking in form, calling back to many masters before them while still retaining their own sensibilities, the film is also their most playful. Never a spoof, the film still allows for quite a bit of fun to be had at the expense of spycraft stereotypes. They also take their first stab at action filmmaking with a thrilling car chase through winding, European mountains and a barnburner of a bar fight. Reflection in a Dead Diamond doesn’t necessarily signal a tonal shift, but a sign that the filmmakers are at their most comfortable.
Ahead of its release, I sat down with them to discuss the film, “cinematic orgasms,” and how they’ve kept their voices while intentionally paying homage to their favorite filmmakers. As you’ll see, their strong sense of collaboration doesn’t just exist on film—the two delightfully finish each other’s sentences as well.
[Hélène Cattet joined the interview midway through]
The Film Stage: Your work is fascinating because I think, in lesser hands, it could be dismissed as simple pastiche. You both are clearly paying homage to worlds of cinema that have come before you, but when I watch a Forzani / Cattet film, it’s undeniably yours. How have you found that balance that allows you to keep your voice intact?
Bruno Forzani: I think it’s several things. The first thing is that we are working on fake memories of the movies we’ve watched. So it’s kind of distorted. We come at it first with a subject, and then we pick genres that talk about this subject. For instance: for Amer and Strange Color, it was something linked to fantasy, desire, body, and the perfect language for that was the Giallo. There wasn’t the detective aspect, but all the iconographic language was perfect. For Reflection in a Dead Diamond, it’s about people who love beauty but destroy it—a man who loved the world but destroyed it. To talk about that, we thought James Bond was a good entry into that because he’s tried to save the world for 50 years, but in fact, maybe he’s made it far worse than better. So yeah: there is the subject, and after the genre comes, so for us it’s not really pastiche because we just use the genre to tell our own stories.
In Amer, there is a sequence where the girl is walking through a path of bikers, and this sequence was inspired by a Pinku Eiga movie by Masuru Konuma. We saw a Hideo Nakata documentary about Konuma, and there was a sequence where a woman was walking in front of Yakuza. In our memory, the sequence was very long and full of tension. But then, when we made Amer and we watched this sequence again, it was very short; it was three seconds. But in our minds it became a totally different thing… longer, bigger, and voila, the scene in our film.
The title, Reflection in a Dead Diamond, isn’t just evocative of a forgotten Bond novel; it’s a perfect way to convey the film’s sense of shattered memories. How did you land on that?
BF: It’s exactly that: the way we have written the film was like a diamond, because it has several layers. Depending on which angle you look at the diamond, you see a different image, a different reflection. We were inspired by Satoshi Kon, who made Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, and his way of writing. He called it “stereoscopic writing.” So you have several layers of thematics; each time you watch the movie, you can see it as a different movie, and it gives more depth, and then more depth, and then even more depth, like a 3D image. Here, the Dead Diamond could have several meanings. The diamond could be the earth, it could be the character, it could be many things.
Tell me how Fabio Testi’s casting came about. He’s, of course, a longtime working actor in Italy, but it’s shocking how much of a dead ringer he is for Connery.
BF: In 2011, we saw Road to Nowhere by Monte Hellman. While watching it, we realized it had been a long time since we had seen him in a movie. We knew him from the ’60s and ’70s, but then we saw him in this, and we had the same reaction as you: “He looks like Sean Connery but not Sean Connery.” He was dressed in a white suit with a Panama hat, like Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice. When we came out of the screening, we said, “Ah, it would be fun to mix these two types of cinema and do a Death in Venice with a James Bond.”
So when we wrote the script, we had Fabio in mind because, for us, he was the key to this mix of two different cinemas. He worked with Zulawski, De Sica, and things like that, and then he worked in Italian westerns and hard-boiled Italian police films. We were lucky enough that he wanted to do it, because if it wasn’t Fabio, it would have been very difficult to find someone to play this character.
You mentioned writing the script, which sort of leads right where I was heading next. How do you approach such evocative imagery within the script? Can you break down that process vs. your storyboarding process?
BF: When we write the script, we write it through the images, the sound, the editing, and things like that. We try to have a universal language and not tell it through dialogue, but really through all the cinematographic tools we have at our disposal. One sentence is one shot, and then there is already a rhythm. We try to have that rhythm that will be in the film inside the reading. The script is really just a description of what the movie will be. So there is not really a script, and then, after, the storyboard. The storyboard is inside the script, so to speak.
Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet at Berlinale 2025.
[Hélène Cattet joins the conversation]
I think there’s a world in which that could be dismissed as style over substance. I’ve always hated that expression because, in the hands of the right artist—like you two—the style is the substance. Your images aren’t weightless.
BF: It’s because we do all the storyboards regarding the editing, and we know the placement of each shot in the movie, and then that leads into… what’s the word, Hélène?
Helene Cattet: Transition.
BF: Transition, yes. We don’t do a storyboard with 1,000 shots and then see how to edit them together afterwards. No, we know exactly where they will be. So I think it’s for that reason you don’t have that feeling of style over substance because it’s, like you say, the shot is the substance. For us, each shot is a word, and little by little it makes a sentence, and the whole movie is the sentence. For us, the shot is the language.
Hélène, I read an interview you did a while ago where you described this film as a “cinematic orgasm.” Can you elaborate on that for me?
HC: We really want to have a physical movie, we want to talk to the intuition of the spectator, we want to speak to their senses. So we developed the movie that would go —
BF: Higher, higher, higher, higher, like an orgasm. This is a feeling that I think we only have in a theater, and for that, it’s great that there is a theatrical release in the U.S. before the streaming release. I think that kind of experience—an orgasmic experience—is what we try to give to the audience. You can experience it in the theater with the big sound, the big image, but after, as I told you, we have written the script with several layers —
HC: Layers of narration, so several layers of interpretation. So you can watch the movie again, then with your brain this time, at home. It’s all complementary.
I’m not always the best collaborator; I typically prefer to work alone. How do you approach working together? Is there something one does better than the other or vice versa? It’s fascinating watching you finish each other’s sentences.
HC: It’s complicated because we are not efficient at all, because we’re doing everything together like a monster with two heads. So we are always discussing each detail, each shot so we can save time. But on the set, it’s very intuitive. If Bruno wants to speak to the actor, he can go and it’s okay. It’s very intuitive.
BF: We’ve worked together for 25 years and it’s always changing. For instance, for Let the Corpses Tan—as the distances between the camera and the actors sometimes were very far—one of us was with the actor who was just in front of the camera and the other was with the actors who were very far away. It all depends on the project. Sometimes I’m with the actors more, and Hélène is at the camera to watch all the details and things like that. It depends on the moment, but —
HC: There’s no rule.
BF: Yeah, there’s really no rule. The only rule is that we have to agree 100% and do a lot of preparation because we have to speak with one voice on the set, and we can’t begin to —
HC: Argue!
BF: That’s the only rule! No arguing!
This is by far your most stunt-heavy film. There’s that great chase sequence, the fantastic bar fight. How did you approach the action in this?
HC: It was a real challenge for us because it was our first time. We didn’t have a James Bond movie budget, so it was really a challenge. We didn’t know how to approach those scenes because usually there is a choreographer who would tell us how to shoot to have a better angle to see the action. We didn’t want that because we thought that there couldn’t be continuity in the way to direct. So it was very —
BF: DIY. We did a storyboard, and with four friends one morning, we tried it.
HC: Just like this. [Mimics fighting]
BF: Yes, just like this at home.
HC: With spoons!
BF: Spoons, not knives!
HC: It was really great.
BF: It just worked. There were some details to adjust, of course, but we did it just like that. In fact, it was Hélène who wanted to do a fight scene. She loved Cheng Pei-pei because when you talk about Hong Kong, she was just the best martial arts actress. She wanted to do a fight scene with a female strong character in tribute to her. If someone else, like a choreographer, did it, it would have been a shame. So we wanted to do it ourselves.
HC: Because it’s funny to do ourselves! It’s just a lot of fun.
Beyond homage and tribute, there’s a real meta-commentary to James Bond as an idea here. From the fear of being replaced textually to the fear an actor may have of passing the mantle on to another. Talk to me about breaking down the myth of Bond.
BF: As we approached that genre, we wanted to look at what makes Bond Bond. Inside the James Bond movies, you have the gadgets, the casino sequence, a lot of —
HC: Car chases.
BF: Things like that. We wanted to approach those sequences each time in a different way. We wanted them to be there, but to tell the story, not just, “Ah, we need a fight scene, now we have to do the casino sequence,” and things like that. We wanted this code to tell the story. The fact that James Bond is always played by another actor was interesting, because Serpentik is the kind of character who has a mask and is always changing. She’s a mirror to him. We played with that aspect of the James Bond industry, but played in a way to tell our story.
HC: And we wanted to play with this character who is losing his identity because he’s old, but it’s deeper than that. It was just a good way to deconstruct the —
BF: Identity of the character.
HC: Yes. The loss of his identity and what that does to him.
Reflection in a Dead Diamond is now streaming on Shudder.