Oh, James – buff your script for me one more time...
Daniel Craig is said to be rewriting the script for Spectre, the 24th official Bond film
Not for the first time, James Bond has stepped in to save the day. But not by biffing a henchman, defusing a nuclear bomb or averting World War Three.
According to the Daily Mail, Daniel Craig, the 47-year-old film star who plays him, has stepped in as additional screenwriter for Spectre, 007’s 24th official outing, directed by Sam Mendes.
The film is due to open in November. And, coming as it does after Mendes’s Skyfall – which in 2012 took more than $1 billion at the box-office, an all-time record for the franchise – it has a particularly hard act to follow.
“The script is still all over the place,” one insider has revealed, “to the extent that Daniel himself has had a bash at rewriting it. It’s total creative turmoil.”
Indeed, this production is already long-familiar with issues over the screenplay. Last year, the story broke that Neal Purvis and Robert Wade - who have co-written five Bond flims - had been drafted in to soup up the original offering by John Logan, with later, additional contributions from Jez Butterworth. Emails leaked in the Sony hack revealed that studio executives were unhappy with the third act, which months of tweaking had apparently failed to fix.
You may, however, remember that Craig has form at this kind of thing. Speaking in 2011, about 2008’s Quantum of Solace, he told Time Out magazine, “We had the bare bones of a script, and then there was a writers’ strike and there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, “Never again”, but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes – and a writer I am not.”
The rules of the strike, said Craig, were that although writers were forbidden, the actor and director were allowed to work on it. “We got away with it,” he said in 2011, “but only just.”
And what’s that they say, Mr Bond, about never saying never again?
