adminLONDON. – They have written seven James Bond screenplays, including all the Daniel Craig films, and their previous collaborations date back over 20 illustrious years.
Yet Neal Purvis and Robert Wade seldom discuss in public the complex way the Bond scripts come together.
The 60th anniversary of the release of Dr. No got them to open up about keeping the franchise alive – and killing Bond off.
When, in the late 1990s, the team of Purvis and Wade signed on to write The World is Not Enough, they already had a couple of successful screenplays to their credit.
However, it was their first Bond – Pierce Brosnan’s third – that lifted them into the top rank of screenwriters.
But they weren’t alone in the writing process. The film carried another writing credit too – the American writer Bruce Feirstein. In fact, almost all their Bond screenplays have then been passed on to at least one other writer for what Purvis terms “a polish”.
“When we’ve finished our job on the screenplay, it’s basically goodbye Rob and Neal,” Purvis says. “With Casino Royale, for instance, Paul Haggis took over. And with Skyfall it was John Logan, but obviously always working with the director.”
Last year, with No Time to Die, Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge was on the writing credits too.
Wade adds that it can get complex. “In the case of Skyfall, John Logan came on after us and then we did a bit more again. Skyfall in particular just kept developing and it developed really well I thought.”
Any discussion with movie writers tends at some point to include the term “story arc”. Purvis and Wade faced the ultimate challenge: developing Daniel Craig’s arc as Bond over fifteen years and five films.
Purvis recalls they started work on Casino Royale when the situation paralleled how it is now: a Bond had left and a new actor was yet to be cast.
“So in that case we were writing our story with no actor in mind but from Ian Fleming’s original Casino Royale novel (published in 1953). We wrote to his conception of the story as faithfully as we could. Daniel then inhabited the role and of course over time we saw what Daniel could do.”
According to Wade, it was a different experience to write from a beginning.
“In the two films we’d written for Pierce it was always essentially a continuum of what came before. The basics of character couldn’t change – he was always infallible.”
“We tried to make Pierce’s Bond more vulnerable and Pierce played it very well. But you couldn’t do a big shift in the character because you knew he’d always have to end up being James Bond. Whereas with Daniel we knew we could start developing an arc. In a way we were starting anew.”
Purvis says dialogue scenes inevitably changed their character with Craig on board because the storyline was changing. “Daniel’s Bond could have the strength and determination and bravado that Pierce had before him. But the actual dramatic scenes were different so inevitably the dialogue moved on. As early as Casino Royale the tone changed.”
The following film, Quantum of Solace, provided a different challenge. Its title came from a Fleming short story of 1959 but otherwise the men had to create a totally new story. The critical delight which greeted Casino Royale was not repeated. – BBC.
Mathew Masinge
Online Reporter