007 scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade talk James Bond and scriptwriting

The writing partnership of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who together have penned the last three James Bond films ("The World Is Not Enough", "Die Another Day" and "Casino Royale") and have already handed in the draft script to Daniel Craig's second 007 outing "Bond 22", lifted the lid on their work this week.

They talked to "Star of Tomorrow" Peter Harness for ScreenDaily about scripting Bond, working with Robert Rodriguez and knowing when a script is finished...

Harness: How did you get offered the first Bond film, The World Is Not Enough?

Purvis: We were fortunate that the producers [Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson] were looking for new writers after Tomorrow Never Dies because that was very action oriented and they felt it had lost a little bit of its way and they wanted to put a bit more drama into it.

Wade: We were asked to come into meet them because their development person was a fan of our draft of Plunkett & Macleane. The first time we met them we didn’t know the meeting was about Bond. It meant that we genuinely didn’t have any ideas at the first meeting so we didn’t lose the job straightaway.

Purvis: And we made them laugh.

Wade: We got on quite well with them. We came back with some ideas, including that Thames chase in The World Is Not Enough and the female villain. And after another meeting with the studio people it seemed as if we hadn’t got the job. We felt that it hadn’t gone well. We went and had a despondent curry. But our agent spoke to them a couple of days later and they wanted us to come out to America in a few weeks and start writing it.

Purvis: Normally when you meet people you get fobbed off if no one in that company has met you before. We thought we would meet someone who would vet us and maybe then meet the bosses. But we were shown to their giant office…

Wade: Their lair.

Purvis: It was huge. Eighteen-foot-high ceilings. Not like the British film industry at all. That's what's great about Barbara and Michael. They do everything on a personal basis. They meet you. They talk to you. And if we hadn’t met them and they hadn’t laughed, we may not have got the job.

Harness: Was it harder or easier to negotiate a percentage? The Bond films are a guaranteed money-spinner.

Wade: You don’t get a percentage precisely because of that. It is dangled on other projects because on all other projects, they probably won’t succeed. But with Bond, because it is probably going to make money, they don’t do that for anybody – not the actors, and particularly not the writers.

Harness: It’s part of a writer’s lot that they’ll be rewritten at some stage. How do you find it from both sides?

Wade: You can never tell who has written the film by what’s on the final credit. When it comes to the Writers’ Guild, arbitrate sometimes equals arbitrary. We have had a couple of instances when our names were bumped off. That is frustrating because if you are responsible for something but were bumped off it and it turns out to be a hit then the person who’s on the credit is the person who the people in Hollywood think did it. As far as rewriting other people, sometimes you’ve gone as far as you can or want to go with the project. You can get stuck on a story.

Purvis: We had a good experience on Johnny English. We had a lot of fun writing it but then we had to go off to do something else and Will Davies took over and did a good job. It all really depends on whether it’s a bloodbath or not.

Click here to read the complete interview on ScreenDaily.com

Thanks to `Nick` for the alert.

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