News on NO TIME TO DIE (no spoilers)

If Boyle/Hodge already have an idea in mind I’m sure they could get a script to EON easily in 2 months - I will point out the leaked CR script was dated as November 05 and that film has been praised for it’s script, just to give an idea of how up to the wire a script can be worked on (outside of “actor breaks leg” stuff) and still come out with a good film.

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It amazes me how some writers can bang out quality work in a short span while others take literally five-times as long. I don’t doubt for a second that Boyle/Hodge can deliver, I’m just like a lot of others who desperately wish for a quality script this go round.

Quite, though it is relative I suppose - Avatar is the most financially successful film of all time with stellar reviews, personally think the film seems like it was written by that paper clip that used to be on Microsoft word with no more thought than than Cameron going “what kule looking crap can I sell!!!” and is thus a :poop: of a film that relies on “what an AMAZING coincidence…moving on” far, far too many times so card board cut out characters can lap his purdy 3D cgi - but history of film says I’m in a minority.

Sorry about the rant. I really hated that film.

Avatar was more a spectacle than a compelling film in a lot of people’s opinions. I believe the sequel will be much of the same, with new technology (i.e. underwater motion-capture) as the main attention grabber. I just want Bond 25 to have heart this go around, with solid characters that we invest in, and a realistic villian and threat.

Yup. Completely understand, and agree.

The Committee idea as advocated in the 80’s is alive and well. Or, this is just a confirmation that ‘Ideas’ develop as parties come and go.

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I agree wholeheartedly with you guys. Maybe I was a tad too harsh on P&W. Its just angst because I know they (as a creative team) could do such much better narrative wise.

Also, good to see some fellow writers here. I’ve been here since probably 99 and have made many good friends. Where are you from, Orion? (I’ve known SAF for a long time). We’ve had writers, actors and actresses, military folk, psychotherapists, and all sorts of interesting lines of work at cbn. Really good to see some writers around. What do you guys write? Novels, plays, screenplays, …? Well, maybe that’s something for another topic.

Cheers, and sorry for the late reply. Been in my other job until now.

PS: Can you imagine if Sorkin and Garland wrote the humour? But only the one liners and punchlines. That could work in so many levels :wink:

My books are written for a middle-school audience, although I might branch out one day.

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As far as a sequences and gadgets go, there’s a whole trove of ideas that are tucked away and either couldn’t be achieved in terms of film making or locations. The acrostar jet (two of them) were in early drafts of Moonraker and the concept of Bond being thrown out of a plane with no parachute had been about since the 60’s, but there was no way to effectively film it for real. I’ve heard again and again over the years that the Harrier sequence in True Lies was a lifted idea from a Bond outline. I’ve always believed that MGW has a special file cabinet labeled “That’s cool. We should find a way to use it.” filled with every prototype vehicle and gadget he’s ever come across.

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https://www.jborbisnonsufficit.com/2018/03/10/more-on-the-boyle-bond-connection/
A recap on what we know

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I don’t believe any of their SS-GB was rewritten and that was phenomenally turgid and hackneyed screenwriting.

Okay, I´m biting.

  1. “Turgid and hackneyed” - you thought so, others loved it. In fact, the majority of reviewers gave the series their enthusiastic thumbs up. It holds a 94% positive rating on rotten tomatoes. Again, all those reviews are personal opinions. But you seem to belong to the few who did not enjoy the series.

  2. You must surely know that writers for Film and TV have no authority to demand that their work is filmed as written. And that the BBC, as every tv station, decides how a script is developed - and the producer and the director also will ask for changes.

No writer - not even the stars - can say no to changes unless he/she wants to get fired and replaced.

Unfortunately, it´s as simple as that.

I have to say I’m becoming excited with the prospect of a Danny Boyle directed Bond movie. If Miss Brocoli and Michael G Wilson are excited with the idea Boyle and Hodge had for the movie, it must be interesting.

Havn’t watched SS-GB so I can’t speak to it specifically, but BBC is very this, only more so as they insist on having every episode of your series before they air a single one, meaning you are very much at the mercy of the executives rather than audience reactions. To use Sherlock as an example, the head of drama changed whilst they were filming - the original commission was for 6 60 minute episodes, the new head of drama wanted a different format having had success with the 3 90 minute eps format with Wallander, so they had to start again despite having finished ep1 (the 60 minute version is on the DVD if you’re curious)

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Yeah, and if Craig likes it too that suggests everything is proceeding in a positive direction.

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They’ll be excited about it until the first draft comes back and they find out how far from the norm Hodge has taken things, then they’ll backtrack and we’ll get a weird blend of interesting and new ideas packed in with dull, tired formulaic tropes like what ended up happening with SPECTRE.

They’ll end up bringing in some no-name writer to add some basic things in that the producers and studio think are missing and then P&W will be back to give it their typical Bond sheen, all to the point that whatever Hodge and Boyle’s original idea has become nearly unrecognizable in the final draft.

I hope that they’ll give Hodge the leeway to do whatever he wants with it. I’d welcome an interesting disaster of a film at this point rather than a minimally competent film that telegraphs its recycled plot points from a mile away like the films we’ve gotten from Mendes.

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To be fair, all the Bond scripts have always been mixed together by many different writers. Which is, sadly, how it works for every big budget bonanza - simply because there are too many people involved who will want to add that their input saved the script (by bringing in their own writer who has to do what those in charge want).

Also, to stray too far from the formula will always endanger a Bond film because it is what it is and needs to be: a formula entertainment.

Of course, one could and can inject interesting things there. The best Bond films managed to do that.

Then again, there are cycles with every Bond actor, and the freshest films, of course, always are the first ones because the novelty factor here is the biggest.

With a fifth film the actor has already covered all bases before. Will Boyle & Hodge bring out something in Craig that he could not show before? Very doubtful what that could be.

The rumor about this idea being “golden” IMHO is just the typical hype machine. I’m curious, of course, but really, BOND 25 can hardly be about something else than Bond rejoining the service, going against another big baddie in exotic locations. Which is what it should be.

But I don’t want a stylistic experiment here, a flashback story, Bond brainwashed and acting as the bad guy, or another part of the previous 4-film-arc.

To have it go all out and probably become an “interesting disaster”, as you put it, would be kind of fun in a “we’re destroying things because we don’t have anything to lose at this point and would re-construct everything anyway with the new actor in BOND 26”-way.

In any event, I agree: not another mix of old tropes done to death in the Craig era:

  • no going rogue
  • no “is Bond still relevant”-angst
  • no M,Q,Moneypenny-family dragging along
  • no tracking device, smart blood etc.
  • no personal angle
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I’m sure that we’ll see at least one or two of those tropes reappear in BOND 25. They’ve just become too much a part of the DNA of the franchise under Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson.

I guess, in the end, it really comes down to how much faith one has in those two to make this film great, because that’s who it’s really down to. I’d actually welcome them just completely handing over the reigns to one of these A-list directors that they’ve gone out and hired, if for no other reason than we might get something completely different from what we’ve gotten before. If you’re going to go out and get artists who are very much the best of the best, then let them do what they do. If you’re going to want to meddle and inject your own tired ideas into the pot, then hire a journeyman or a hack or a “yes man” who will do what you want and little else beyond that. I’ve, unfortunately, lost the confidence in the producers at this point to steer the franchise. They had it going in an interesting direction following the 1-2 punch of CR and QoS only to crash the franchise into a ditch on the back end of Craig’s once-promising tenure. New blood is needed, and as much as I don’t really care to see a Danny Boyle Bond film, I’d rather see them turn the reigns over to him and Hodge completely rather than heading back into something that is, at least in terms of its process, something very much like SPECTRE.

I remember reading someone’s assessment of the plot leaks for SPECTRE back before the film came out and thinking that that film could have been the kind of off-the-wall, interesting Bond film that the franchise really needed, only for it to turn out to somehow end up being the dullest, least interesting film in the entire franchise.

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I think this is being overly harsh. From the elements in SPECTRE that were leaked early on we can see that there has been plenty of ambition to go beyond the usual. That these elements ended up cut from the script, like Blofeld’s shared history with White, or turned up flat and uninteresting, like Bond’s shared history with Blofeld, was largely due to development-by-committee and emphasis on action where the story just wasn’t solid enough. The monumental budget spent with underwhelming visual results and the overlong running time didn’t much help either. But the initial impetus surely was there.

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I agree, and this is where I think that the need to just allow, if you’re going to hire these people, the A-list director and his/her trusted creative team to do what they were hired to do. The too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen approach is largely what doomed SPECTRE and brought to it some of its biggest issues. A more single-minded approach, or at the very least, a group approach where everyone is more or less on the same page, surely would have resulted in a far superior picture. Some interesting risks were taken out of SPECTRE to its detriment, largely because EON wanted to play things more safe and the end result was a dull mess of a Bond film.

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Am I the only one not excited about Boyle…