18

ROBERT WADE AND NEAL PURVIS

Die Another Day

‘What’s the worst situation that Bond can get into?’

Robert Wade and Neal Purvis have enjoyed great success in Hollywood. Responsible for the two latest films in the globally successful James Bond franchise, The World is Not Enough (1999) and Die Another Day (2002), their other produced screenplays include the drama Let Him Have It (1991), Plunkett & Macleane (1999) and the 007 spoof, Johnny English (2003). In 2004 they co-produced Return to Sender and the Wild & Wycked World of Brian Jones from their own original screenplays, while preparing the next James Bond film. Both Wade and Purvis live in London.

Synopsis

North Korea, the present. Agent 007, James Bond, escapes detention by the North Koreans by driving a high-speed hovercraft through a minefield in the Demilitarized Zone. From Hong Kong to Cuba to London, Bond circles the world in his quest to unmask a traitor, Gustav Graves, and his ruthless right-hand man Zao, to prevent a war of catastrophic proportions. On his way, he crosses paths with the beautiful Jinx and Miranda Frost, who could be accomplices or spies. In a palace built entirely of ice he experiences the power of a high-tech weapon. This leads to an explosive confrontation back in Korea, where the mission began.

* * *

KEVIN CONROY SCOTT: I’d like to start by asking each of you if you could tell me something about your upbringings, and what part books played in your household then …

ROBERT WADE: My mum was an artist, a sculptress, and there were lots of books at home but there wasn’t any ‘bookishness’. I used to like reading, and at school English was the subject I was into. I couldn’t do anything else, really. So I always thought it would be cool to be a writer in Paris – that sort of thing. Then when I was about fifteen, I got more into movies.
NEAL PURVIS: My dad was a photographer so I was brought up with the smell of fixer all over the place. I read a lot in my teenage years, but for me I think it was really about going to see a lot of films. Going to the cinema on your own is the defining thing about liking films – it’s that thing of coming out of the cinema in daylight … I joined a couple of cinema clubs when I was sixteen, ones that only dealt in 1940s movies and got a very strange crowd – older people eating sandwiches with the crusts cut off.
RW: I made videos as a teenager. You know the old video equipment where you had the camera and a massive suitcase thing that was the recorder? Black and white.

Neal, what sort of books were you reading when you weren’t seeing films?

NP: Oh, I was going through a very pretentious phase. All your Sartres and your Camus. A little bit of Kafka on the side.

Was it your shared interest in film that brought you together?

RW: We met at university, Kent, which at the time was the only place you could do film theory as a major. I’d seen a lot on BBC2 late at night, the sorts of films where there was always a good chance you could see a naked woman. I got into French movies that way, Bertrand Blier.
NP: For me, Bertolucci, the earlier stuff. That, again, is a bit pretentious …
RW: Scorsese. But that’s the normal thing.
NP: Humphrey Bogart movies.
RW: And Laurel and Hardy, actually … But at Kent it just happened that we were put into shared bunk-beds in a college where there were only four rooms with bunk beds. We had both stipulated that, a., we wanted to live outside of college if possible, and, b., we didn’t want to share. But instead we were flung together.

So you were both eighteen and in bunk-beds?

NP: Yeah. And that helps you talk long into the night …
RW: And then you left after a term.
NP: Yeah, I didn’t like it. The music had started by then, hadn’t it?
RW: Yeah. We were in a band together.
NP: After I left, we still kept in touch. I went to polytechnic to do a Film and Photo Arts BA, which was half theory and half practical. We still have the band – we’ve been playing pretty much the same songs for twenty years now, so we’re very tight.

This would have been the late seventies, early eighties. Were you into that post-punk scene?

NP: I suppose so. I rather liked the New York stuff. In those days, Television, and the usual Velvet Underground, Stooges sort of thing.
RW: We were quite good musically but the lyrics weren’t any good.
NP: Yeah, we were mainly an instrumental band.

So how did screenwriting come into play for you?

RW: Neal was doing his practical film degree, and by now I had graduated in pure theory. My original plan was to go to the National Film School, but at Kent they were very academic: they were trying to create a generation of teachers, and so they really looked down on anyone who actually made movies – they were actively discouraging about that. I got a First and could have got a scholarship and gone to UCLA if I’d been thinking. But I thought there was all the time in the world, so I was mucking about with the band. Then I moved up to London and we got a place, and while Neal was doing his graduation I was writing a script, about two blokes in London. And we met someone who had some money who was prepared for me to direct it, Neal to edit it and he would help me to rewrite it and put up money to get it going. We got an office on the Strand and he bought this car that featured in the story: a convertible, fifties sort of car.
NP: Pink.
RW: And we sort of edged towards this thing and we rewrote it together during the summer of the LA Olympics, 1984, when Frankie Goes to Hollywood were number one.

Did you know anything about screenplay format or technique?

RW: Not at all. We didn’t even know what a script looked like.
NP: At my college, even though you’d make your graduation film, there were no real scriptwriting lessons or lectures.
RW: That Syd Field book may have been out, but you couldn’t get hold of it. So it was really hard to get on, but eventually we did get hold of a script called Agatha directed by Michael Apted at that time. And from that we could see how you laid it out.

So you came by a script from a director who you were to work with about fifteen years later in The World is Not Enough?

RW: Yeah, oddly enough.
NP: We also wrote a Bond theme in the band. We haven’t played that to the producers yet. We’re biding our time … So we wrote our script but we didn’t really have a clue as to how to get it made. And neither did the financial wizard who was going to produce it. So we would just get Spotlight, the actors’ listing guide, and go through and get a cast. I think we actually sent it out to people.
RW: By this stage I realized that I couldn’t direct it so we got the name of a film director who was going to be doing a big movie and sent it to him – Robert Bierman, who did Vampire’s Kiss …
NP: He later did Keep the Aspidistra Flying, also known as A Merry War.
RW: And he read it and really liked it, and was extremely nice to us and said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t be told there’s a lot wrong with this because there isn’t.’
NP: But we were there in leather jackets and hair sticking straight up. Rob had these big mutton chops.
RW: We were sort of rockabillies. Robert Bierman introduced us to people including his agent, and she managed to determine very quickly that it wasn’t going to get made.
NP: She handled that script but she wouldn’t take us on because we were so unknown and would have been too much work for her. And yet we’ve ended up with her. We moved there about seven years ago.

What happened with the script?

NP: Well, we got a big six-page article about us in The Face magazine. And so we thought that we’d arrived. But the option on the script went to a couple of different people over a couple of years, and nothing came of it.
RW: What happened then was that we took a year off and played golf. That’s the other good thing about having a partnership.
NP: There was an assumption that you write one script, get it made and then write another one. So when this one wasn’t really happening, we played golf.

Would you say you were any good as screenwriters then?

RW: We got better … But we also realized that that wasn’t quite how you got on. We’re going to be talking here about one of our more big-budget movies, but actually our taste was kind of quirky, quite dark stuff. Bertrand Blier’s movies, you couldn’t get away with them in Britain. They’re edgy material and somehow because it’s Gallic and subtitled, it’s not so controversial. We then tried to write a script about a liftboy at The Savoy called Fin du Siècle, about a guy who realizes that his great grandfather had murdered Byron and he becomes a sort of serial killer, killing in literary ways. It was good stuff. That was when we hit on the thing of doing a structured document, a scene-by-scene breakdown, a beat sheet really. We wrote it out and stuck all these bits of paper together.
NP: It went right across the room. I suppose the things we were trying to do were all commercial ideas.
RW: With humour. We wrote a script called A.K.A. Lucifer and that was three stories about the devil over one story. The last line of that was, ‘You’re all going to die. Women and children first.’

How long did it take from when you were first writing screenplays till you got your first screenplay produced?

RW: Six years.
NP: That was Let Him Have It, which was a departure for us, because it was more serious than what we had done before. We set out to make it light throughout, and then it got serious. We really thought that if that didn’t get made, we might give up on screenwriting.
RW: We started at a terrible time trying to make movies. But we didn’t want to write for television, we wanted to write a proper movie and yet no films were being made in this country. There was Chariots of Fire and then everything went wrong after that. That’s when we were just getting going. It was really difficult to get a movie made and we thought that if you can’t get a depressing period melodrama made, we might as well pack it in. Luckily it did get made. And that was because it was serious. People can latch on to something if it’s serious. It’s much more difficult to sell something quirky.

What sort of work did you do to make ends meet?

RW: We’d get option money for different things and sign on a lot, social security. And we also would ghost-write pop videos.
NP: Once again, you would do a lot of those and get no money. But if it got made, you got a hundred quid.
RW: And that was a lot of money in those days. Then we did a number of treatments for things – not off our own backs, but if someone wanted a series or something. This was 1985. Before that, we did get paid to write scripts, not just for options. We adapted a novel for what was our second script, a novel by Tony Parsons for Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner at Working Title before they broke through with My Beautiful Laundrette.
NP: We did some pop promos for Tim Bevan’s video company which gave us access to their photocopying machine that we were able to come in and knock scripts up on.
RW: That was a big deal in those days.

Do you remember any tough lessons you learned about screenwriting and the film business in general during this time?

RW: I think that when you start out you tend to write lovingly and to overwrite enormously. When we look back on our early scripts, they’ve been worked and worked on to a point that is completely irrelevant in terms of getting a film made. My brother’s been writing recently, and his scripts have some great stuff in them but there’s also tons and tons of description – which is what we were suffering from.

But another thing about that period, I think, is that the fact that there were two of us made it much more bearable.
NP: That thing about just keeping on going while other people gave up. There were a couple of other partnerships and they dropped by the wayside.

Why did you decide to keep going?

RW: I don’t know. We weren’t making a lot of money, and we were sweating while we worked. I remember there was a book we wanted to adapt, and our agent phoned up and said the producers weren’t interested in us. They knew who we were and what we had done. A few years later, they came to us with that book and we just thought, ‘Right, we don’t want anything to do with you, because nothing’s changed except that maybe we’re more bankable.’ I don’t know about dogged determination, but we knew what we were doing was good. It was just the pictures that got small …

You broke through with Let Him Have It. How did you get on that project originally?

RW: We were around at that time when everyone was floating around wanting to make movies, but there weren’t many writers around. A guy called Rob Warr was in the music business but wanted to move into the movie business – he was married to a woman who worked at Working Title, Tim Bevan’s video company. He had originally been the one who brought Tim and Eric in to the Tony Parsons novel about the music business which was supposed to be a version of Sweet Smell of Success. It was a misguided enterprise that everyone has chosen to forget. But Rob Warr had been at the same school as Derek Bentley, the guy who got hanged in Let Him Have It. And he said, ‘This would make a big movie, why don’t you look into this story?’ We were resistant, but then we started looking into it, and got a researcher.
NP: The researcher was Will Self, now a very successful novelist.
RW: So Will did this research, and we started to get interested and said to Rob, ‘We’ll write it if you find some money.’ He then teamed up with a guy called Luc Roeg, a very successful promo producer.
NP: Music videos were doing well even when the film industry wasn’t.
RW: So we wrote the script, on spec. And it was a very depressing thing to do, because the story is so harrowing. But we felt that we had a lively vehicle. It was about these two boys who can’t relate to the outside world, one of them is retarded and the other’s dyslexic and a kind of livewire. It was about two morons having fun, finding their mode of expression and then suddenly being in trouble with the law. So it was supposed to be a fun journey that went horribly wrong. What was bizarre was that the first director attached to it was Tony Richardson, and he said that this was the first thing he had wanted to do in ten years or so.
NP: We were in LA for a while working with him on the script, which was good but weird, because there we were in sunny LA, in a Hollywood house, and this whole thing was written about rainy Croydon in the fifties.
RW: So we worked with Tony and then he excused himself because he needed some money, I think, and he went off to direct The Phantom of the Opera. And then Alex Cox came on board, who had done Sid and Nancy.
NP: We’ve worked with a lot of directors, but Tony and Alex were two of the best by a long chalk.

How did the writing process evolve through working with a director? Did you get notes, were you sent away for another draft?

RW: We had a solid script and it didn’t change very much. When Tony Richardson came in, he gave us very broad strokes.
NP: If the film was really about this Derek Bentley then Tony wanted to see him in every single scene, whereas we had split it up a bit more.
RW: He emphasized it was about the generation gap, the distance between the father and the son and the father ends up not being able to save his son’s life. It’s very moving in that way, and Tony focused on that.
NP: I also remember that he said, ‘You should take the films you really like, and put that into a film you really like.’ In other words, if you like something in a particular film and you understand it, then don’t be afraid to put that sort of thing into your own film. That was a learning thing.

So you had a film made in 1991 and then the next one in 1998. But in-between you were also working in Los Angeles for Disney, right?

RW: What we’re credited for and what we actually did out there, there’s a lot more … Chronologically, Let Him Have It came out and we went to America for the opening, and got ourselves an agent in Hollywood, a guy called Tom Strickler who we’ve stuck with as he’s progressed through different agencies. We were brought in as ‘the director’s writers’ on a Disney picture that wasn’t a great movie, but we were glad to do what we could.
NP: The great thing about that is to just do eight weeks or something and then you’re off.
RW: We then wrote a spec script, Return to Sender, and that was optioned and nearly got made, and it got us work in America. It’s totally an American movie. Actually, it’s just been made by Billie August, with Connie Nielsen, Aiden Quinn and Kelly Preston.

Did you have any problems writing an American film?

NP: Not then, no.
RW: We had meetings with studio people and they were really surprised that we were English. Return to Sender is like a Sidney Lumet picture from the seventies, a genre picture. We’re all brought up with American movies here, so in a sense ‘genre dialogue’ is less of a foreign tongue than it might be.
RW: We started work on it in 1989, and got the script right in 1992, and then we worked with Vincent Ward on it.
NP: He then did a Robin Williams movie called What Dreams May Come.

So how do you guys work together as a writing partnership? What goes on when you’re writing? Do you pace the room trying to work things out?

RW: Well, we walk from the bar to the table. When we’re hatching a plot, we spend quite a lot of time together. And the process is that in the morning we drink coffee, and then you’ve drunk so much coffee that you need alcohol, and during that there’s a little window where we have some good ideas.
NP: During the hatching period, the mornings would be each of us on our own and then we meet up early afternoon to discuss things, and that may go on into the early evening.

Where would you say your ideas come from?

RW: Well, with the Bond films, that’s very extensively discussed with the two producers and it’s very hard to say whose ideas are whose.
NP: That’s sitting in an office for hours and hours, very concentrated.

Is a lot of that already laid out by the history of the franchise?

RW: No, it’s not set in stone, it’s really up for grabs. For instance, in Die Another Day, there’s very little of Moneypenny – in fact, at one point, she wasn’t even in it and we thought we had to get her in somehow so we came up with the idea of her as a virtual character. That came actually two days before shooting. We did know we needed to have a Q scene, and introduce the new Q.

You go through the process of the nuts and bolts of the plot. Once you’ve agreed on that, do you go and write an outline?

NP: Well, depends on the job at hand. The way we prefer to do it is to go straight into a scene-by-scene breakdown, then split up and take a couple of scenes each. On a daily basis, you do five pages each of consecutive scenes, or maybe one scene. Then I’ll e-mail my stuff to him and then he’ll join them together, and we carry on.
RW: I guess what we like to do is to get the pages out rather than kill ourselves on the actual finer points of the scene, because sometimes it’s much better to get pages up than let it be ahead of you. Because you can do as many treatments as you like, and even after it’s changed for the first time, when you find a way to do it – it will change again and again. And also because there are two of us, we’re going to get fed up with it and change it whether someone else wants to change it or not.
NP: And what’s good is that when there are two of you, you owe it to the other person to get your pages done, because if you don’t you’re letting the side down.
RW: Whereas if you’re on your own …
NP: You don’t need to. You can let it go to the next day.

How do you guys handle any conflict between you about what you’ve both written?

NP: We don’t have that problem. Generally, we’re fairly specific about what we’re going to achieve. You know where it’s going. We’re not the sort of people who write and work it out as they are going. We know pretty much what’s going to happen. When we were younger there might have been some conflicts, but life’s too short for that sort of thing. We’re very clear what we’re going to do and we just do it.

You obviously have a very clear understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. Do you have certain roles?

NP: Rob’s quite good at doing all the verbiage at the beginning of the script.
RW: But that’s only because I take an interest in it! I thought at one point we were quite good at dialogue, but I think we need to work harder on it than we used to.
NP: The problem is that things get changed so much and then it can slip.
RW: I picked up some drafts of Die Another Day and it’s depressing because there are some good lines that were in there for ages and ages and then they get cut.
NP: I read in William Goldman’s book that he thinks the first draft is his then after that it’s everybody else’s. I agree. The first draft is the one we like the most.
RW: Things do get better as well but …
NP: It’s when perhaps you have a little more time to do what you want. And when you get into production, there’s such a rush on all the time that everything’s different.
RW: Getting back to that question about strengths and weaknesses – those Bond films, they’re really hard to do, but perhaps one thing we’re quite good at is coming up with unusual ideas, things that you wouldn’t expect. The Bond script, they’re beaten down and down until they’re left just as an element.

The hovercraft idea, for example.

RW: Things like – actually the director Lee Tamahori thinks he came up with that – the diamond shrapnel. It was our idea and then it got cut out and he thought of it as well.
NP: We had different hovercrafts in our original conception, ones we found on the internet that fly eight feet off the ground and that can glide across the minefield.
RW: And that went over water too. But that wasn’t what I meant about original ideas. What I mean is slightly weird elements is what we’re good at. But one of our weaknesses is to try to put in too many ideas. I know this in theory but can’t put into practice, that films are really simple and should be. They’re not meant to hold lots of ideas and they don’t work when they try out too many different ideas. When we write something, we fall in love with an idea and put in more ideas because we like them. And we shouldn’t, you should just lose those ideas, but it’s really difficult not to. You get entertained by putting those ideas in.
NP: Entertained by yourself, more like it.

Have you found your writing has become more simplified as your career has progressed?

NP: Not really. I’ve found it hard all the way along. In fact, the first script is in some ways the easiest because you don’t know as much. It’s like the perfect golf swing.

Obviously music is a big part of your friendship. Do you listen to it while you’re writing?

NP: I think you can listen to stuff you know. But if it’s something new, it’s difficult to work because part of you is listening to it. You use it more as a blocking-out thing to concentrate.
RW: I listen to music partly because if I’m in a café and I don’t like the music they’re playing I’ll put my headphones on. Or if there’s a particularly annoying conversation going on I’ll block it out. So it’s partly to tune out and also to get in the right mood. We rewrote a script a few years ago which has now been made but not based on our script whatsoever. It’s called Highwaymen and we took it and went off in a different direction and the people who have made it have not even seen our draft. It was all about a guy using a car as a murder weapon and it’s a very unpleasant film. And I listened to Nine Inch Nails and Prodigy and that kind of stuff. Nowadays, if I ever listen to that, it gets me back into that horrible world of that film and it really depresses me, so I can’t listen to it any more. But writing a Bond movie is great because you’ve got soundtracks to every Bond movie if you want as a theme in the background.

How do you let each other know when one of you suggests an idea and it does or doesn’t work? Is it diplomacy or instinct?

NP: Desperation, isn’t it?
RW: We generally agree.
NP: In the beginning of Plunkett & Macleane, two people meeting over a body that they intend to get the jewel from and then having to swallow it, that clearly seemed … you latch upon something and we have similar tastes.
RW: But that goes back to that problem of trying to get too many ideas in because you know that in the end, you’re going to have to get rid of them. We’ve been doing a rewrite of a Michael Douglas picture and it’s difficult because what the studio want it to be is a thriller, but no one gets murdered and there’s no threat. So it’s more like a David Mamet thing, in a way. But because the theme is modern art, there are so many things that are interesting to us that they really are a problem. We’ve got a script of 130 pages. We’re going to have to get rid of some of the ideas we really like. Maybe that’s our problem: we don’t have a mechanism of editing it before we do it. But if you aren’t allowed to put that in, it’s not interesting to do that as a writer. You’ve got to try. Who said you have to kill your babies?

Going back to your process of writing, do you do character biographies or treatments?

NP: We don’t like doing treatments because you’re virtually writing the whole thing there and then.
RW: In a dry way whereas if you get in and try to work on the scene it’s different.
NP: We don’t like doing it but it is useful to do character biographies. Half a page each.

Who makes the decisions about the characters?

RW: Another weakness that we have is over-reliance on back-story and the trouble is when you do a character description, the tendency is to get into that back-story and there’s a danger to that. You make the character more interesting to yourself by giving them a back-story but if you then dwell on it, it causes problems. The story should move forward into the future.
NP: We don’t do it in a particular, easy way. We muddle through all the time in lots of different ways. It just helps that there’s two of you to help bring you back on course.

How do you handle the moments of self-doubt and try to get around that as a writer?

RW: When we wrote that boxing script, we had some periods in that where there were some true, unsolvable problems and I just remember I went to Belgium because my wife happened to be there. And I went there to try to get a new way of thinking about that and it’s not a place I’d recommend going even though the croque monsieurs are good. And I just went through agony and I can’t even think what the problem was now. You just have to keep going and having two of you means that you do.

Do you find one of you playing cheerleader to the other, with one picking up the other when they’re down?

NP: Well, we’re usually complaining about the same things. You’re either happy about something or not happy about something.
RW: I might be more bothered about something …
NP: And I have to calm him down about something. Things have changed a bit over the last few years by doing Bond because you’re caught in a different world both creatively and time-wise. You just sort out problems, whereas if we went back into trying to do stuff like Radio Riviera recently we’d have problems.
RW: We’ll get over those.
NP: I know, I know but we’re in a sort of unreal writing place.
RW: It’s probably more like writing a hit TV show in that there’s a kind of sense of moving forward.
NP: We don’t really suffer from blocks for too long.
RW: One way of solving the problem is putting it off and doing something else in the script. It’s a different situation at the moment. It’s kind of like childbirth. Women forget once they’ve had the baby the excruciating pain.
NP: On Return to Sender we even bought a couple of books to scriptwriting because we thought structurally it wasn’t right and we couldn’t work out where we had gone wrong. But they were no help.

And how did famous Bond producer, Barbara Broccoli, come to read your work?

RW: The drafts of Plunkett and Macleane that we were particularly pleased with, our agent passed around Hollywood and she read it and liked it and then invited us in and we made them laugh.
NP: I think Tomorrow Never Dies was just coming out and they wanted to inject a bit more drama back into Bond because that had gone a bit action-y. What with Let Him Have It and Plunkett & Macleane, which was probably the best thing we have done as a script –
RW: Not the movie, but the script we did before we got fired from it.
NP: It was character-based and had imaginative action but it was serious as well. And that fulfilled what they really required on Bond. We went in with a lot of ideas the second time, including the Thames chase and the female villain.
RW: The good thing was that we didn’t go in with any hopes. Normally you go into a production company and you don’t get to meet the boss, you get to meet the development person. And we just got shown straight in to Barbara and Michael Wilson in a massive office which was totally intimidating. But because we weren’t really prepared for it or expecting anything, we didn’t put any ideas on the table. The worst thing is when you put an idea down and they throw it out. Then you might be out of it.

How does writing for Hollywood and for the British film industry compare?

NP: In Hollywood, they want to know absolutely everything you’re going to do before you do it. And if you change it from what you said you were going to do, they’ll go along with that but they want you to edge it back to what you originally talked about. They work really hard and expect you to work sort of harder than you feel is fair. They just want to keep on going and going when you know it’s not necessary and you know that you’ll do a good job by it and you don’t need to tell them everything.
RW: You get to a point with a script when you know that it’s pretty good and then it’s all diminishing returns after that. You know that you could make it twenty per cent better, but in the Hollywood process of going at it, going at it, going at it before you’ve even got a director maybe, you’ve lost what it had.
NP: So when things go from a draft, the rule is that you don’t get them back again so when you lose something good, that’s the last time you see it.

So how does it feel to be rewritten?

RW: Well, there’s two types of being rewritten. There’s one which is against your wishes, and there’s the other which you’re perfectly happy about.
NP: Will Davies did a good job on keeping a fair amount of things in Johnny English when it all had to be changed.
RW: In that instance, it was just that we couldn’t go back and work on it, so that makes you more philosophical about whoever is going to take over.
NP: What was bad about Highwaymen, was that they went back to a draft before our draft.
RW: Because it was a change of producer.
NP: We didn’t get rewritten, but that script is dead now and no one is going to see the film. And I’d rather it had been rewritten and had been made rather than never be rewritten at all.
RW: In the case of Plunkett & Macleane, you don’t blame the writer that comes on, you just have to look at the whole situation but there was a big mistake that got made.
NP: We were rewriting it in the first place, but from scratch, so it felt like our own.
RW: It was moribund and we gave it life which was good.
NP: But that was the worst experience of all.
RW: That was terrible because we were very proud of that script.

What about rewriting other people?

RW: Well, for instance, we’re rewriting a script by David Henry Hwang who did M. Butterfly and he’s done a good job on the script. We haven’t spoken to him. I think what he got to was a point where he didn’t want to carry on. You could see the gulf between what the producers wanted to do and what he wanted to do. And, equally, we took over and they want something different from what we thought that they wanted originally. I admire what he’s done, whereas there are other times when you take over a script and you don’t like what they have done. You can’t complain about being rewritten but it’s just circumstances whether you’ve been made to jump or are pushed. That makes the difference.

So how did you come up with the fire and ice premise of Die Another Day?

RW: We were thinking at that time about dictators and that when they get pushed, they want to get going. Our original idea of the character was Colonel Moon, because that is literally what they do; they take diamonds because they’re the most concentrated form of wealth and the easiest to get rid of. So we started off with that idea, which then became an arms deal and we’d been thinking about North Korea as a very scary place and a parallel with the Iron Curtain because we’d had the idea of Bond being exchanged. Those things fell into place.
NP: We had a lot of ideas and it slowly balanced out into the film. Thematically it was about mucking about with nature and what’s real and what’s not.
RW: Also there were all sorts of things, he’s literally the son of this guy. We had had this idea of the mirror in space, which the Russians really had and put one in space but it broke. It’s natural and harmless in nature. So the sun and the light and the heat came from that. And the cold, actually in a fairly arbitrary way, Barbara Broccoli had suggested using an ice hotel as a setting. So Iceland came out of that. And the idea was using a very cool blonde, the Miranda character in contrast to the hot Jinx.

Can you tell me more about the conversations between you and the Bond producers?

NP: The conversations are long, from ten in the morning till four in the afternoon. All you’re doing is talking about interesting things you’ve read or seen.

How long did that process last?

RW: A long time.
NP: Because unlike The World is Not Enough where we had a release date even before we started talking about the story, we went in once every week or two and took three or four months to get a story-line.
RW: But they’re very intense discussions. I happened to see a thing about the Eden project and that gradually put two ideas together.

So what’s it like coming up with these ideas and then going on set and seeing seventy people setting it up?

RW: Five hundred probably. It doesn’t feel real.
NP: Every page of the script costs a million dollars. Actually slightly more. So when you finish a page in a café, you can go, ‘That’s a million.’
RW: What was bizarre was that we went to Cádiz where they filmed the Cuba stuff. And we had no intimation as to how much work had been going on down there for three months.
NP: You walk out into this beach bar, have a drink and then you hear they built the whole thing.
RW: There’s a scene on the rooftop there, and there’s rigging, stairs and an elevator just built to get up there to do that shot.

So you kind of feel like God for the day, having created this universe while drinking tea in your local café?

RW: It’s really a fantastic feeling. All the work that goes into it, really clever people working flat out – and you dreamed it up in the first place.

There must have been a lot of people weighing in with their opinions. How do you deal with feedback from the producers and the studio?

NP: Well, you’re sort of protected by the producers. You’re kept away from the massiveness of it all so it’s a surprise when you see how much is going on.
RW: The director comes to you but he talks to the producers as well. Once shooting starts you just have to accept it’s not your baby any more.
NP: They’re shooting for six months on the whole thing and on pre-production for five months so there is time to see, everyone’s nice about it all.
RW: We had a very nice director so that makes a huge difference. We could equally have had a horrible experience, I’m sure. It’s like Pierce Brosnan was concerned about carrying the expository dialogue in a couple of places and he let us know that and we took that on and tried to address it. Now some directors would have a problem with the actor talking to the writer, but Lee saw it as one less worry for him to deal with.

How much writing did you actually do during the filming?

RW: We wrote every day.
NP: For a lot of time we were playing catch-up on what we should have done before. The whole third act, the location changed from being on a beach to being on a plane.
RW: Originally we did have a plane but that was how they got to this giant indoor beach. And then a month before production, there was a decision to change that to this huge plane.
NP: And we were involved in that right over Christmas, so when they started shooting we were trying to polish things a few days before they occurred. So we had a list on the wall of things we had to do and have done before they reached that page.

Where did that come from?

NP: It was stuff we knew needed work. Notes the director might have had.
RW: For instance, the end of the movie is always a concern. And because it’s not an immediate worry, it’s going to be shot at the end, you get on with this, get on with that.
NP: We get a lot of freedom because we can polish what we want.
RW: Apart from the general shopping list, we weren’t in any hurry to go off and do anything else, whereas maybe we should have been off and maybe we would have worked harder.
NP: We felt in a privileged position because we were working on it all the way through and could guide it where we could.

Were there any moments when you had to write things that you weren’t too fond of?

RW: Really just details. Sometimes you think, wait a minute, that’s doubling up on something that has happened before, it’s redundant.
NP: There are a lot of practicalities that go on. But dramatically, there’s only really one thing that we were annoyed with in the way we thought it would be done and it had to be re-shot down to about three lines because the film would be too long. That was annoying to do that because it was unnecessary.
RW: If you don’t agree with something visually, that’s not really your business. You might argue something gets in the way of the drama, if there’s something crap distracting from the story but the director’s in charge so you’ve got to bite the bullet. I’m talking about the electric armour which we weren’t keen on. You just have to weigh all these things up, on the whole.

And this is the 40th anniversary and the 20th Bond film with a lot of in-jokes and references. How did you go about that?

NP: I think that the Q workshop was the big one. That’s fun because it was meant to be that if you didn’t notice it, it didn’t matter. It’s not meant to stand out.
RW: It was a bit of a mind-boggier because here was Pierce Brosnan sniffing the shoe of Rosa Kreb who tried to kill Sean Connery. What does this all mean?

Was it difficult to write dialogue in an action film for a woman who had just won an Academy Award?

RW: We were well into shooting when Halle Berry won the Oscar. Before she went off, she was in a red leather cat-suit, strapped into a robotic arm being tortured by lasers. And then she went off and came back and got re-tied. We did pay slightly more attention to the dialogue after that. It’s funny, Judi Dench was up for the same Oscar.

We had a scene which Judi and Halle were both in and they hardly speak at all because she speaks mainly to Michael Madsen so we did try to get more dialogue in. Our approach with Jinx was that we always felt she should act like she’s a character who’s got her own movie. She’s wandered out of her own film into James Bond’s movie. If Bond walked into your movie, he would have been a strange presence and that was the original idea. Ironically, we’ve just been working on the Jinx movie and hoping that that’s going to come off.

How did you deal with the product placement on such big movies as Bond?

NP: They generally work off the script, and if they find Bond shaving they’ll find a partner for that.
RW: We would have liked him to have a wet shave but it’s a Bond movie so …
NP: And if he’s flying they look to an airline. Apart from the Aston Martin, which we knew was going to be in the film – which was great, we weren’t going to complain about that – everything else came from the script. We’re not restricted in any way.
RW: You know it’s associated with so much of that corporate sponsorship. My own feeling is that it’s not really intrusive. It’s the marketing of the movie that makes you think it’s there but when you watch the movie you don’t really notice it.

Is it hard to find a replacement for Russia in plot terms or do you look to the modern world today?

RW: We saw the 38th Parallel as a fantastic image and the fact that it’s full of mines. Bill Clinton, who was President at the time we started writing, said it was the scariest place on earth and we did think it was a flashpoint. And we were also trying to think, ‘What’s the worst situation that Bond can get into?’ And it’s to be held prisoner in North Korea. You couldn’t get much worse than that.
NP: It also seemed in keeping with Fleming. Oddjob was Korean. North Korea seemed to represent the last hard-line Communist country.
RW: And Kim Jong-il does wear Dr No suits. He likes Swedish models as well. He also liked Bond films. Or he did. Part of the process of working with the producers is reading what is happening in the world and what might happen. It’s a really difficult one. The film has to be escapism in a way and entertainment, but we did lose a lot of our audience in North Korea.
NP: They were going through an anti-American phase and thought it was an American movie.

How concerned are you with keeping reality in an action movie?

RW: There is a big debate about the surfing on the wave thing. It was a great idea, but whether it was an implausible level of action, that is another question. There are times when you just want to go for it. When you think about justifying it in terms of entertainment then it can be difficult.
NP: All the things come from what we’ve read about.
RW: The invisible car is based on something real.
NP: The gene therapy, even though it’s an old movie conceit, now that’s also credible.

So your method is taking a truthful premise and extrapolating it a bit?

RW: Yeah, but you don’t want to step out the movie with something totally implausible.

When you’re writing do you have an internal barometer to gauge where the audience will go with you?

RW: I think you just have to think in terms of being an audience member yourself.
NP: Michael Wilson is very strict as to how close things are to reality.
RW: He’s pretty good on logic. But it’s like the virtual reality thing in the movie. Would it really be like that? We’re not there yet but it’s such a fun idea, let’s do it. And if the audience laughs then it forgives us and you still believe in the story-line. There are times when this particular film doesn’t quite get the balance.
NP: I think you should not have too much action because you lose people who forget the characters.
RW: They get bored. They lose their connection with the character and that’s the danger with Bond movies.

What’s the hardest part of writing Bond movies?

NP: I think it’s finding a story that contains all the things you want it to.

Do you find you have to write around thrilling set pieces of action?

RW: It’s odd, because we can see the action, then it becomes the province of the director and the team. Then it becomes a self-contained thing.
NP: It would be great if there were some action things that already existed, that you can pick and choose what you want but it’s not like that. There’s one stunt that exists that wasn’t in the Bond movie that they tried to get into the last reel and was difficult to put in. There’s an example of something that existed but it’s not going into the film.

There’s a lot of technological weaponry featured in the film. How extensive did your research have to be?

NP: We probably have a couple of sessions on the internet and science magazines.
RW: In that film there’s gene therapy, the space theme, the hovercraft which was changed, there’s the virtual reality thing, the invisible car, the eagle project, the ice hotel, the aeroplane …

Was it difficult to keep a balanced tone throughout the film because you’re doing so many different things and covering so much ground?

RW: The thing with Bond films is that they do have sweep, and that’s fun. I think the tone of this movie is a little bit unequal. It starts off quite gritty, and I think that’s the best stuff. Then it gets more fun and it’s ‘James Bond’ again and a full-on ride. So it’s really difficult and I think it manages quite well. I do think it’s an unusual mixture and the consistency of tone – Bond is the only constant in it.
NP: I think you’re left in the hands of the director in terms of tone. We could say that the second part of the ice-palace stuff could have been done in a grittier way itself.

Where did the idea for the opening set piece and the curtain raiser come from with the night surfing? Bond lands on the ocean, off a parachute, and stylishly surfs his way to shore.

RW: We had this idea of night surfing and originally it was that the psychotic Colonel Moon is making his guys surf at night.

Straight out of Apocalypse Now.

RW: Exactly.
NP: For surfers, some of the best waves are at night so there is a thing of night surfing. And we thought, ‘If they’re wearing infra-red goggles, what’s the problem?’
RW: So the idea is that he’s doing this to his guys, one of them breaks his leg and shoots him and stuff, and then Bond infiltrates them. But then it was decided that was too much story to tell on the surf, as it were, so it became just a clever way to get into a heavily fortified country.
NP: They thought the opening sequence was timing out too long and there were limitations even on this, so we cut it down completely. The introduction happens with the punch bag scene instead. He was fiddling with the hat we see at the end of the film on the plane originally.
RW: So, it is a quite complicated bit of story with Bond distracting and hijacking a diving dinghy. On that level of plausibility you could say, why didn’t he get the guy at the other end, why did he have to go into Korea to do this? But at that point, you don’t understand what’s going on anyway, so you don’t question it.

Was the film shot in sequence?

RW: To quite a large extent.

How do you pace your action sequences? And how much is your idea followed when it comes to the budget and logistics of the film?

RW: We had less shooting in the compound. They made much more of that. They built this bloody great compound so then you’ve got to blow it up. It’s irresponsible.
NP: We do suggest what we think it should be but then the second unit director and the director and the producers just go off and do it and try and push it as much as they can.

How many drafts did you get through?

RW: So many. If you include the thinking process, we started in July 2000.
NP: It’s nearly two years seeing as we were working all the way through the shoot.

What software do you use?

RW: We use a thing called Screenwriter 2000.
NP: We don’t like Final Draft. It doesn’t seem to be as sophisticated.

And what about that scene where jinx comes out of the ocean, like Honey Ryder in Dr. No. It was written at one point totally naked, wasn’t it?

NP: Tastefully done, of course. She’s naked in this draft which is in keeping with the original Dr. No, the novel.

The scene where she meets James Bond reminds me of a speech in The Big Sleep where they’re talking about a race track and it becomes so charged with sexual innuendo. Are those sorts of films a model for you?

RW: Yeah, absolutely. Humphrey Bogart’s so controlled and self-contained. And the women as well.
NP: Talking about the stress of trying to change something on the day of something so gigantic – we were on our way to the airport to Cádiz because they weren’t going to shoot because the weather was so bad. And then the weather cleared up and we got a call that they were going to shoot – that water was freezing – and they’re going to shoot it right now. And the whole scene was written as dusk – the predators come out as the sun goes down – the language of the scene was built around sunset imagery, and suddenly they were having to shoot it in the blazing midday sun. So could we change the dialogue to reflect this? It stayed like that for a year and suddenly it’s being changed. You can’t think of anything, you’re getting out of the car, you’re walking down and you go through all the crowds to get through the set to a crew of a hundred down there. And they’re rehearsing it with the director. And moments before as we’re walking across the sand, we thought of just putting in the word ‘usually’ instead of ‘always’.

What about the sword fighting scene that features Madonna. It seems so anachronistic …

NP: There was a certain amount of resistance to the sword fight because it seems so old-fashioned and in the days of The Matrix will this go down with people and how can we do it differently?

The old-school clubby environment seems to make it OK.

NP: It’s known as Blades which is the name of the gambling club that was in Fleming’s books.

And you get to write lines for Madonna.

RW: We did have a really good line – ‘Cock fights aren’t my style’, but she wouldn’t say it. She said it the other way round, ‘I don’t really like cock fights.’

This is a Bond film with quite a dark tone. Was it your way of trying to humanize James Bond?

RW: I think it’s interesting that he is an assassin. That is the internal baggage he carries around, and it’s quite nice to see him in that mode. What makes him an interesting character to us is how he is that but he also lives life to enjoy it. We didn’t encounter any resistance to the idea of his being incarcerated. Getting caught makes him human, not a superhero. The aim is to give him a chance to shine, because we’re all here to watch James Bond. So the harder you make it for him, the better the picture, the greater the enjoyment.

You’re dealing with forty years of history and nineteen previous films. In some ways limitations are very liberating and in other ways very frustrating.

RW: That’s what made it a hard job. Of course, there are a million things that haven’t been done … but what’s great here is that we’ve got a young villain. Which is sort of to do with Pierce’s age as well. So that’s sort of new.
NP: Pierce is a man whereas Graves is almost a wild kid, a boy. I thought this whole scene was really well filmed as well.
RW: And yet the funny thing was that the director was a bit wary about it and it was put off and off and off and then turned out to be one of the best things in there.
NP: The way they do the betting was influenced by an old Terry Thomas movie called School for Scoundrels. What’s great as well is that these two men hate each other. And it’s that simple.

Exploiting Bond’s ability to be a loose canon as a flaw as well as a plus.

RW: For us it’s come from the producers being so knowledgeable – and also that’s what Pierce is really like. And that’s why we have Miranda Frost to talk about Bond in that way. It’s trailer stuff because they can cut it together. It’s entertainment.
NP: Pierce is bleeding as well which you don’t see very often.

So where did the idea of the abandoned Tube station come from? Vauxhall Cross?

NP: We didn’t have any choice over the location. And we wouldn’t have called it that.
RW: There are a lot of these unused Tube stations and there’s one really near the Bond office in Downing Street, Down Street – it’s where Churchill held secret meetings during the War.
NP: This is quite subtle because he’s going past an old shooting range here. All of it is a nod to the beginning of Moonraker, the novel.

How did you feel about reintroducing the Q character?

NP: We were quite conscious about trying to take it back to the former Q. Even Desmond Llewelyn changed over the years. We tried to get it back to the original bad relationship they had in the early sixties movies.
RW: We were also very aware of Desmond’s passing. So, John Cleese refers to ‘my predecessor’ and Bond initially refers to Cleese as ‘Quatermaster’ – a nod to the origins of the name – and only uses the endearment of ‘Q’ at the end of the scene once he’s realized that this man is really quite clever and good at his job.

Have you had any feedback from the true Bond devotees?

RW: Yeah, I think it was appreciated.
NP: What was interesting with this film is that it polarized people quite a lot. People either loved it or hated it. Normally it’s just a Bond film.

Were you nervous about the invisible car?

RW: We were very pleased that the director liked it because we suggested it originally but we weren’t sure anyone would go for it. The idea is that in Iceland or in the desert when there’s not much contrast in the background it’s invisible, but in an urban environment you’d be able to see it.
NP: So it came down to that first shot, which worked because it’s a gag. But really it shouldn’t have been quite so …
RW: It should have been darker. And if it had been really dark, you would’ve forgiven it.
NP: Q says it’s ‘as good as invisible’. It’s a camouflage, not a cloaking device.

Do you find that you try to structure your scenes on a high note?

NP: Well that was the Q scene and you have to end it like that.

How aware are you guys of the whole Austin Powers thing when you write dialogue?

NP: Those films are only really spoofing the sixties Bonds, anyway – which weren’t really that crude, but more exotic. And we tried to stay on that side of things. But you would have liked to have the choice …
RW: We actually – believe it or not – tried not to do many puns, but we ended up with a movie full of them.
NP: The director was encouraging.
RW: Because it creates a sense of fun. And that’s a good instinct to have. It meant that the first hour of the film is great fun, even though it’s quite gritty … But somewhere along the way, with all this fighting going on – the balance gets a little lost. And this happens because these things are very difficult. As Stephen frears told us ‘Art is easy. It’s entertainment that’s hard.’

 

 London, England

Guillermo Arriaga

‘Each one is a son of a bitch.’ El Chivo (Emilio Echevarría) waits for the right moment to re-enter his daughter’s life.