There’s been little word yet on the next James Bond film, with the series for the time being back in a little bit of limbo following 2015’s Spectre.
Speculation remains over Daniel Craig’s involvement too, with no announcement thus far on whether he’ll return for at least one more adventure.
But then as screenwriter Neal Purvis has noted in a new interview with The Telegraph, it’s hard to find a story for a new James Bond outing in the current world climate.
Purvis has effectively retired from penning Bond films, having co-written every movie in the series from The World Is Not Enough through to Skyfall with Robert Wade. They then did some late rewrite work on Spectre. As for James Bond 25, though, “I’m just not sure how you would go about writing a James Bond film now. Each time, you’ve got to say something about Bond’s place in the world, which is Britain’s place in the world. But things are moving so quickly now, that becomes tricky. With people like Trump, the Bond villain has become a reality. So when they do another one, it will be interesting to see how they deal with the fact that the world has become a fantasy”.
Purvis also lifted the lid on the behind the scenes difficulties in putting Spectre together. He and Wade came in late in the day on that one.
“People were already in pre-production on the film”, he recalled, “and they wanted to see things all the time. And sometimes they couldn’t decide what they wanted until they’d seen it written. So you write scene upon scene upon scene. You write so much. But how it finally got shaped was probably down to [Sam Mendes,] the director”.
As we hear more on James Bond 25, we’ll keep you posted. But it seems very unlikely that the film will arrive before the end of 2018 right now.
