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Photo by: Ron Phillips
AGAINST
BOND
Writing Die Another Day
by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade
Starting a Bond screenplay is easy:
FADE IN:
TRADEMARK. GUN BARREL - BOND - BLOOD.
007 Theme MUSIC.
But after that ... it can be murder.
Just as Bond himself inhabits a parallel world, so, too, writing a
Bond means stepping into a parallel film industry ... or so people
seem to think.
Even experienced figures in the business make an assumption
they’d never entertain about any other film: that you must be just one
of numerous cells of writers working up the script from rigid story-
lines handed down by the producers. Fortunately, in the course of
two 007 films, we’ve never come across these secret writers. And the
only truly rigid thing in the films ... belongs to James Bond.
If producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson aren’t hand-
ing down an Ian Fleming storyline (the Fleming novels and short sto-
ries have been picked at until there is hardly anything usable left),
with what does that leave us? Well—a blank page. Oh, and the
release date of the film. Recently, that’s been Thanksgiving. In the
case of The World Is Not Enough, we had 21 months from the start.
For Die Another Day, we had the luxury of two and a half years—still,
not long for a $100 million-plus movie.
But there shouldn’t be a problem. We still have the so-called ‘Bond
formula;’ that should make writing a Bond script easy. They virtually
write themselves. It’s true some kind of formula does exist; Bond
films are a genre unto themselves. So much so that other films bor-
row liberally from them or pay homage, from the Arnold/Sylvester
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(Again)
quips of old right up to the present day (a snapshot at the time of
writing—August 2002—shows three films in the American top five
to be highly Bond-dependent).
So yes, that’s good. We get to play with the real Bond, not the
ersatz ones. We get to use the magic Bond formula that has pulled
them through 40 years and 19 other films.
But the formula is exactly what makes it so difficult. How the hell
do you make it different from the others? How do you make the
most of a character—your main asset—whom you desperately want
to delve into yet cannot for fear of undermining his defining mys-
tique? How do you show his inner feelings when a man like that
would never externalize them? How do you find a new playground
for the man who has been everywhere and ‘push’ the genre without
violating it? (For instance, put in a voice-over to hear Bond’s thoughts
and suddenly you’d be in the detective genre. Fleming made the mis-
take himself in the book The Spy Who Loved Me.) Finally, how do you
make the storyline ... unexpected?
It’s a thrilling job to have—but daunting, too. Not only must you
succeed with this film, but also failure could in one stroke kill off the
most successful film series in history.
Of course just like any movie where there is big money at stake,
writers are there to be fired—the prospect of being rewritten is vir-
tually built into the proposition—but the opportunity to fill in that
blank page is a very seductive challenge. If you get it right, you’re
becoming a small part of movie history.
And so, your everyday thoughts turn to world domination.
Bond is Only as Good as His Rival
Real-life terrorism is too awful to be bent to the purposes of
entertainment. In the screen world of James Bond, the villainy has
to be grandiloquent and bloodless. You therefore spend an
unhealthy amount of time pondering ways of taking over the
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world—in a manner that you hope a real-life megalomaniac can’t
then unscrupulously copy. It’s a constant striving for something out-
landish yet not silly.
This is the tightrope: For the screen Bond resides in a world where
things are better—and much bigger—than life. Finding the right bal-
ance where it doesn’t tip over into being a cartoon and yet is unmis-
takably over-the-top is difficult enough. But within this context, you
also have to nourish a character—and an actor.
In some ways, the least satisfying Bonds seem to be those where the
actor isn’t finding challenges in the role. Whether that’s true or not,
Pierce Brosnan made it very clear to us that he wanted scenes to play.
Brosnan has brought an interesting dimension to the character;
Michael Wilson describes his Bond as having a “vulnerability with-
out appearing weak.” GoldenEye pitted him against treacherous
friend 006 (Sean Bean), Tomorrow Never Dies had Bond reluctant-
ly use an old flame (Teri Hatcher) who then turned up dead, and in
The World Is Not Enough we had him fall for the daughter (Sophie
Marceau) of a man for whose death he felt a share of guilt. Then he
discovered she planned that death and is, in fact, the villain. Bond
killed her in cold blood.
A New Kind of Bond
So having pulled out all the stops on the last one, we had to find
another frontier for Brosnan’s Bond to cross (which turned out to be
literally a frontier—the 38th Parallel).
After much brainstorming with the producers, we all agreed we’d
like to see how Bond would react to being abandoned in a North
Korean prison, tortured (during the title sequence), then rejected by
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M when he expects to return to the fold of MI-6. It seemed quite
radical for a James Bond movie to have him truly incarcerated, and
indeed, this was something some people felt was inappropriate for
Bond—surely 007 would escape. But our view was that he was no
superhero. Naturally, we’d have to stack the odds against him—like
Hesse at Spandau, he’d be the only inmate. But Bond doesn’t get
himself out, instead he suffers the personal humiliation of being freed
only in exchange for a dangerous enemy spy. And then, mistrusted
and perhaps even unwanted, he has to go it alone and rediscover him-
self. Rediscover what it is to be James Bond.
In trying to underline the allure of our hero, it helps to pit him
against a worthy adversary; a Bond film is only as good as its villain.
On a basic level, we felt that making the villain a man in his 20s
would give Bond a chance to show what he’s made of. Because
Brosnan is very good (and most watchable) when conveying thought
processes (suspicion, calculation, ideas hatching, instincts aroused),
we’d make the villain elusive and shadowy until the moment halfway
through the film where Bond reclaims his own identity and provokes
the villain into letting his mask slip.
The concept of the enemy hiding in plain sight was used by Ian
Fleming used to great effect in the novel Moonraker. It’s a dated book,
and the film that took its name took little else apart from the villain’s
name (Hugo Drax). But the essence of the villain and his weapon
being right in the public eye is brilliantly played out, and we quick-
ly realized our story was a parallel to it.
Leading Ladies
For a while, we increased the debt to the novel by plucking one of
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All Photos: ©DANJAQ, LLC and United Artists Corporation All Rights Reserved
Halle Berry as Jinx in Die Another Day
our girls straight from it. Gala Brand, apart from having a wonderful
name, is unique among Bond girls in that she rejects Bond at the end
of the novel. Our Gala, being something of a cold fish, would do the
same thing.
However, as we wrote and re-wrote, this became increasingly trou-
blesome. One of the headaches with Bond is juggling the girls. In the
modern era, they can’t just be “bits of fluff.” For one thing, if they were,
it wouldn’t reflect well on Bond. The more interesting the girls he tan-
gles with, the better he looks. To make them interesting, they need
screen time. That might be why Brosnan is a two-girl Bond (cut it
down to one per movie and it somehow just doesn’t feel like
Bond)—but juggling two worthy females isn’t easy.
As the character developed, Gala moved so far from the person in
the novel that it was decided her name should change. In an amaz-
ingly subtle reference to the themes of heat and cold throughout the
movie, she became ... Miranda Frost.
So if she’s the cold one, what about the hot one?
Her name is Jinx. The concept was: If you were watching some
other movie, and James Bond walked into it and you didn’t know
who he was, he’d be a sinister presence, a mysterious shadow, some-
one you probably wouldn’t—or shouldn’t—trust. But if, as in the
Bond series, you know his motivations, then he’s a hero.
When Jinx walks into James Bond’s film, you don’t know where
you stand. She’s someone who does what’s necessary; it’s only her
motivation that makes her good or bad. Whatever she is, she’s alive
just like Bond. Both of them live life to the fullest because they
inhabit a world of death.
As we wrote, Halle Berry came increasingly to mind. We were
delighted when she took the role. When she won the Oscar® in mid-
shoot, we thought we’d better give her some more lines quickly!
Quips and Comebacks
On the subject of dialogue ...
Bond’s quips have become not just a basic element in the 007 films
but an essential ingredient in the action genre as a whole. They
evolved as a facet of a smart man with a certain detached irony.
Somewhere along the line, they started lapsing into being puns for
their own sake. The weaker the pun, the weaker Bond looks. We
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hope this film doesn’t contain too many “groaners” (one big one
is probably judicious). As with everything else about Bond, the key
is striking the right balance.
Action, Action, Action
Take rhythm, for instance. There’s an increasing pressure from the
effects- and action-laden competition for the action quota in Bond to
grow. One wants to strike the right balance rhythmically, but the nat-
ural tendency is for each piece of action set out in the script to
expand during production. Because of this, the story, the characters
and the swoop of Bond’s world get squeezed. That is all part of the
creative challenge: the script has to anticipate this inevitable process.
We Enjoyed the Ride
If it sounds as if we’re just complaining about how hard it is, then
we’re not painting the full picture. Alongside the creative challenges,
there are the surreal pleasures of walking around the real world think-
ing “what shall we blow up next,” sitting with the producers
throwing out terrible lines, pondering what kind of girls to throw
at our hero and simply deciding where we’re all going to take peo-
ple on this ride, both physically and emotionally.
Although in the heat of the action it can be murder, in Bond’s
world hatching plots is fun (even though now we leave the
ludicrously suggestive female names and pussy-stroking villains
to the spoofs).
Our other co-conspirator has been director Lee Tamahori, who
came in and made the film very much his own. Fortunately for
us—and unusually for such a big film—the director was secure
enough to let us carry on refining the script throughout (as
opposed to bringing on his “own” guy). It’s hard to believe, but he
didn’t fire us once.
Whether he was right remains to be seen, but we hope we’ve
mixed the formula sufficiently to have created a different cocktail
that is, nonetheless, distinctively a Bond film. Above all, we hope
we’ve given the writers of Bond 21 an even harder job when they sit
down to stare at that blank page.
NEAL PURVIS AND ROBERT WADE also wrote the screenplay for The World
Is Not Enough. They had their first success in 1991 with the British screen
thriller Let Him Have It, the controversial true story of Bentley and Craig who
were accused of killing a policeman during an armed robbery. The critically
acclaimed film, directed by Peter Medak, was screened for Parliament and
played a part in Derek Bentley’s eventual posthumous pardon. Over the years
they have worked in a variety of genres with screenplays including An
American Werewolf in Paris for Polygram, The Wasp Factory, an adaptation of
Iain Banks' novel for Renaissance, Plunkett & Macleane and Grid Iron for
Working Title. Most recently they worked on The Italian Job starring Mark
Wahlberg and Edward Norton for Paramount, and Johnny English starring
Rowan Atkinson and John Malkovich for Working Title/Universal. They are cur-
rently developing The Wild and Wycked World of Brian Jones for Scala Films,
and a thriller set in the contemporary art scene to star Michael Douglas, for his
own Furthur Films.
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