While travelling on London’s newly-christened Skyfall train, we caught up with Bond screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade to discuss their past, present and future with the franchise.
IGN: So what do you make of the Skyfall train?
Robert Wade: We didn’t expect this to be the final chapter of Skyfall – actually being on a train named after the movie. It was 2 o’clock in the morning and we were trying to come up with a name for a grim house – an evocative name where you couldn’t tell what it meant. And that was the one that sort of fell out of the sky. And ends up being the name of the movie and a train. I wonder what it will be next!
IGN: Did the film’s finale always take place at the Skyfall estate?
Wade: The idea for the house came very late in the day. The original third act – which was in place for a year or more – was in a European city. And it didn’t have any resonance. And when we had the idea of Bond taking M to the home where he spent his unhappy childhood, it suddenly made sense. Everything clicked into place.
Purvis: That was in the last two weeks after writing it for a year-and-a-half.
Wade: It only made sense at the end of the day – it wasn’t a plan going forward.
IGN: What are the challenges involved in writing a Bond movie?
Wade: What we found when we suddenly ended up writing James Bond movies was that you work much harder than if you’re doing something similar. The reason why some of those Bond-a-like things didn’t last is because people think ‘Oh, that works for Bond, so we’ll do that.’ And that’s a lazy approach. If you’re actually doing Bond yourself, you can’t repeat yourself or be lazy. You’ve got to strive to do something different.
IGN: Did the 50th anniversary of Bond influence your writing process?
Purvis: When we started it we didn’t know it would be the 50th anniversary because you didn’t know when it was coming out.
Wade: If we’d actually gotten on with it, it could have been the 48th anniversary.
Purvis: We had the Aston Martin in place before there were elements of the 50th anniversary that came in.
Wade: But we had gone back to the books You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun, because those movies didn’t really reflect those books. There’s a lot of interesting stuff – it’s about Britain in crisis. Particularly You Only Live Twice.
IGN: So why was now the time to bring Q and Moneypenny back?
Wade: We wanted to bring Moneypenny back. And we felt it was time because the last movie was a bit grim and unrelenting. And the nice thing about Q and Moneypenny… we deliberately didn’t have them in Casino Royale because we wanted to get rid of all the familiar elements and concentrate on Bond. But now that that story has been played out, it was time to give the audience some fun. And Daniel [Craig] wanted more fun and more playfulness. Less grimness.
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IGN: What did Sam Mendes bring to the table as director?
Wade: He was extremely demanding.
Purvis: Usually we write a script and then the director comes onboard, and this time he was there right from the very beginning when we were working the story out. So we were all heading in the same direction, which helps.
Wade: And because he saw all the stages that it went through, he understood why it was built and oversaw it coming together.
Purvis: We talked about Javier Bardem in the very first meeting with Daniel Craig and Sam. As a worthy adversary to Bond – as a dark side to him. Having someone like Sam, it means you can get the person that everybody wants.
IGN: Do you have a favourite scene in the movie?
Purvis: I think when Silva comes into the room and Bond’s tied up. That long shot, what he’s saying, that attitude and everything. The film, which had been good until that point, goes up a notch.
Wade: And that story about the rats – Sam was apparently told by the cinematographer Conrad Hall.
IGN: Would you like to see Mendes direct another Bond?
Purvis: Yeah, I think everyone would. But he’s a busy man.
Wade: It took a lot of work. A hell of a lot of work. I don’t know whether he’d want to. But I think you know, [producers]Barbara [Broccoli] and Michael [Wilson] are nice people to spend time with so it’s a really happy ship. So he had a good time. [co-screenwriter] John Logan had a good time. It’s not that, it’s whether or not he’s got the energy.
IGN: Having written five Bond movies, is Skyfall your last?
Wade: We don’t know. It’s our most recent one.
Neal Purvis: We’re not currently writing the next one, and it’s good for us to take a break, because we’ve been doing it for longer than Ian Fleming was writing Bond.
Wade: We’ve done five of them, and they really do take up a lot of your energy. And in a way, that film is Bond finished, played out. Can he pull it out of the fire again? That was for us, a movie about us. In the end the film was good, so we felt we did well. And now we’re doing stuff that we couldn’t do because we were always doing Bond.
IGN: So do you think you have more Bond movies in you?
Purvis: Well it’s nice not thinking about it, because we’ve thought about it nearly every day for 15 years. But it would be nice to look at it all again after a break. But it’s not our decision – you can’t just say ‘Oh, I think I’ll write another Bond movie.’ It is a question of if you have something fresh to say about it. And I think we did say quite a lot with the ones that we’ve done.
Wade: There’s still some Fleming – all that works is quite interesting, and a lot of it hasn’t been tapped. But it’s very difficult to do it because it’s period and you can’t do a period Bond.
Skyfall is out now on Blu-ray and DVD.
Chris Tilly is the Entertainment Editor for IGN in the UK and his poor excuse for banter can be found on both Twitter and MyIGN.
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