''Don't get me wrong,'' says 49-year-old Pierce Brosnan. ''I love Bond. He has such panache. He travels the world in such style. It's just hard for me to talk about sometimes. I do it so much it gets mind-numbing. It starts to sap the soul, if you know what I mean.''
Nope, don't have a clue. And that's the astonishing thing about Bond: After 40 years, he's still not boring, at least to most people. Despite all that's happened in the world -- the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of feminism, the casting of Timothy Dalton -- he has survived to become more popular than ever, with his last three movies each grossing more than $300 million worldwide.
This latest, the 20th Bond movie (not counting 1967's spoofy ''Casino Royale'' or 1983's unofficial ''Never Say Never Again''), will be the most expensive ever, costing around $120 million. But like all the films in the series, it will follow a formula that is never shaken and only rarely stirred. ''Gadgets, guns, and girls, that's the mantra of Bond movies,'' explains Die director Lee Tamahori, the 52-year-old New Zealander who made 1995's ''Once Were Warriors'' and last year's ''Along Came a Spider.'' ''Whatever else you do, you've got to have those three things. Otherwise, you're dead.''
It's got plenty of those, all right, plus other stuff no Bond movie should be without. Like a megalomaniacal supervillain with a needlessly convoluted plan for global domination. In this case, Gustav Graves, a dashing young diamond tycoon so rich and eccentric he gets fencing lessons from Madonna (along with her cameo, she provides the movie's title song). ''He's a very British sort of entrepreneur-adventurer,'' says Toby Stephens, the very British actor who plays him. ''Sort of like Richard Branson, only diabolically evil.''
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