Barbara Broccoli sits sipping from a mug of tea in her office at the family firm. Had her father run a pizza parlour, she suggests, she’d now be making pizzas. Instead we’re in a six-storey building at the Hyde Park end of Piccadilly. The ceilings are splendidly high. The purple-carpeted staircase is so broad you could probably drive a small sports car down it. And the firm’s most recent recipe, Skyfall, is the biggest earner in British cinema history. Some pizza parlour.
Broccoli has been running the James Bond films for 20 years. She and her half-brother, Michael G. Wilson, took over the series after her father, the late Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, produced the first 16 of them. Since then they’ve been in charge