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To be fair I think every screenwriter/director has worked on duds in the past (whatever this is classified as - in terms of Bond there's been no film that's been a box office failure and even 'misses' that Hamilton or Maibaum worked on weren't detrimental to the franchise in the long run). I don't think those beyond the fandom (which for Bond by the way, makes up a very small part of its audience) care or know who the director or screenwriters are. That and these particular people often work on radically different films (ie. I personally dislike TWINE but really enjoy SF and the same two screenwriters worked on that in part).
It goes to show that if ten writers were given the exact same subject to write about, we'd deliver ten, very different scripts (not to talk about how these stories start to change once a director and crew come on board).
In fact, one writer could be given one subject and deliver ten very different scripts.
I don't have a dog in this fight. I don't know these two writers, and I've never had the luxury/immense pressure of working on a $200 million tentpole picture, but I do sense that many of the slings and arrows fired at P&W, are more often than not, out of their control.
By the time their scripts, and most of Hollywood screenplays, are delivered as the "shooting draft", there are dozens of other fingerprints all over these stories, that don't belong to the original writers...
Just make the next era less interconnected, not every character needs to know each other, strangers in Bond are sexy, dangerous, exciting and sorely needed
It confuses me too. I don't look at the recent films and see terrible scripts, and that's without taking into account all of the other writers/producers/directors' ideas that are in there too as you say. I feel like 'Purvis & Wade are terrible' is a bit of a repeated meme as I don't really see much solid basis offered for it. Yes, Bond left the service a couple of times; I don't see that as a reason to think they're awful writers. Fans complain when they don't get repetition (the 'formula') and complain when they do.
But even this isn’t without controversy: according to Haggis, P&W’s script for CR skewed closer to the book when depicting Vesper’s death.
He found it lacked dramatic punch and wrote in the crumbling house….
On this site we have fans divided on this, but, to emphasize the point: P and W stuck closer to Vesper’s death as drawn in the book and had nothing to do with the conclusion we did get (and just as a side: I get why Haggis did it, and, although some of us here don’t like it, this was a more cinematic conclusion in an action-thriller film. I think this was the correct choice).
And then it was Haggis who wanted Bond to save Vesper’s child in QoS, and we have Logan making some missteps on the Spectre script, which BROUGHT BACK P and W!
+1. No big major arcs unless EON has the foresight to plan it out ahead of time.
Absolutely, no making it up as they go along.
I don't like TWINE either, but I honestly think it's more direction than script. If that story had been a continuation novel published in the last decade or two, it's so packed full of interesting and fresh ideas for Bond that folks would be crying out to see it adapted as a movie.
But then something like seeing Felix and Beam on the plane chatting to M on the phone, and then having Greene -the villain of our movie- walk in and join them in a friendly way is nicely thrilling, I'd say. Why is our friend Felix in bed with this guy?
If we didn't know Felix and he was some other nice CIA agent, that would make it less interesting and exciting.
I like story elements travelling through the films and Bond learning and changing. I wouldn't want to go back to Bond appearing to suffer amnesia every two years and not notice that this guy is doing exactly the same thing as the last one, only in space this time! :)
Good point, and of course direction has a lot to do with it in terms of which films are 'duds' and which aren't. That and SF and TWINE have much in common (I always say SF is a sort of remake of TWINE in some weird way).
I would disagree with that- I can totally understand why he put it in; as you say, it's an action movie, but you can feel the story fighting against it. When I watched in the cinema the first time I was eager to see the dramatic fallout from Vesper's betrayal- I wanted to see Bond confront her. That was way more exciting than a sinking building. All of the shooting just got in the way and actually kind of frustrated me- it felt like they'd lost confidence in the film they'd been making up until this point.
Maybe it needed a bit of excitement, but it could have been much smaller than that and stayed more character-based because that's what we needed.
I think it's quite interesting to look at Mission Impossible Rogue Nation, which I think is terrific. They'd planned a big action climax, but apparently McQuarrie looked at the film they had up until that point and realised that the story just didn't want that and it would feel stuck on. So he made a surprisingly small-scale climax involving an underground tunnel and a box, and it's perfectly satisfying as the climax to an action movie. It doesn't always have to be big and grand, it just has to be satisfying. I guess Die Hard is a good example too.
Oh okay, that's interesting. Because it deals with someone M trusted? And MI6 gets blown up of course!
I hear what you’re saying @mtm , and to a point I agree (I not necessarily think the sinking house and all that it was, was exactly the choice I’d have gone with, but the correct choice to punch-up the climax with Vesper WAS the right thing to do. Now I haven’t read the P and W script with Vesper’s death, so I may be speaking out of turn, but if it’s true that they stuck close to the book, well, it’d basically be:
Bond and Vesper search for a romantic getaway. She thinks they’re being followed. She acts strangely. She overdoses on pills “off camera” and is found dead, leaving Bond a note.
He calls into the office and reports that “the bitch is dead”.
Now if they stuck close to this, I think the correct choice is the sinking house (it may’ve gone too far and taken away the drama between Vesper and Bond). The Fleming conclusion was not cinematic in the least (perhaps a balance of the two? Maybe that’s the tug of war you felt, mtm? P and W went one way all in, Haggis came in and pulled it all the way over the line into a spectacle.
But out of the two endings we know we had in writing, I’d make the choice to go Haggis’s route every time.
Yeah, I think it needed a dramatic confrontation, certainly; doing it offscreen wouldn't have been the way to go. But I think Bond and Vesper's relationship needed to be central to whatever was happening onscreen, even if there were baddies involved.
I don't know what the solution is but I don't think they got it right: you can feel the film fighting itself. By Skyfall we have the ending as a short confrontation in a tiny chapel, which also ends with a big death, and it feels right and appropriate to the film. At the point of CR they still weren't entirely out of the Brosnan mindset.
You can almost transpose the Skyfall ending onto CR: Bond is running after Vesper who has been injured in the piazza gunfight, he gets cornered and pulls a baddie into the canal (instead of the the lake) where he fights underwater with the baddie and kills him- he escapes, then we cut to Vesper in a small Venetian chapel being attacked by the eyepatched baddie: perhaps being held underwater, Bond comes in and kills him but Vesper somehow locks herself under the water and kills herself. You almost don't need any more than that.
It's not a fully written piece of course, more of a thought experiment to stick the end of SF onto CR, as I think SF has enough. Maybe an exploding helicopter couldn't hurt too! :)
I absolutely agree with you, @Creasy47!
But then I don't think Fleming was planning it all out in advance when he wrote Tracy being killed by Blofeld in OHMSS and then wrote sequels to that story. Making it up as you go along is how writers generally work, especially when you're talking about a film you're hoping to make in three or four years' time after this one (and I bet any freelancers you have working on your film would want quite a bit more for that!).
And of course when it turned out that they did in fact always have a plan to kill Bond off at the end... well that was bad too and the wrong kind of planning according to some folk! :D
And yes, I’m not a fan of planning out connecting stories. We’ve always been taught: write the hell out of THIS script, then worry about the sequel.
I have a script that won a bunch of writing awards during COVID. It’s called The WitchHunter (basically a riff on Blade meets Kill Bill); I have a general plan for sequels and prequels and tv and even video games and graphic novels). But I wrote the hell out of the script first and I’ll worry about developing my ideas for contuining stories later (I still have t picked up pen to put to paper on any of these general ideas, and I won’t. I don’t want to get married to any ideas that may sound great today, but will be terrible tomorrow).
Bond going rogue has certainly been happening quite a bit since they started! That's a bit of a joke, but that is the number one thing that has been their trademark since they started! I don't fully blame them though, they are good ideas people, and they got screwed on QOS.
Be careful about saying Richard Maibaum screwing up, or his ghost will haunt us! Saying that his script wasn't done right, lol.
Even George Lucas didn't COMPLETELY plan out Star Wars right away. However, compared to the SW sequel trilogy, EON did A LOT better! Hopefully, if a story arc is done again, then EON should be better prepared, considering some of the toughness they went through on the last five movies.
Ha! Thanks, yeah it doesn't quite work but I was literally writing it down as I was thinking about it! But I think there was a halfway point between the two solutions for the CR climax. If they'd made it a couple of years later I don't think it would have ended like that.
I actually really love that they've always kind of done that for Bond films: they have great ideas and don't save them later- they do that massive stunt right now! (Yeah I know they have ideas which don't quite fit and end up returning to them later down the line, but that's not quite the same). There's no point in deferred gratification: do it now! So for SF they had an idea for Bond being the 'old dog'- so they did it! Pierce had another film in him, but they wanted to do CR starring a newly christened 007, so they did. No sense in waiting five years if you've got a great idea right now.
That sounds excellent- I guess it hasn't been produced yet? Congrats on the awards!
I guess another thing with sequels is you don't know how the audience will respond to it: maybe they really love a character you weren't all that attached to, so you explore them more and that takes the whole thing down a new, exciting avenue. Maybe the director adds a whole new dimension to the thing, and that makes it even better and helps to steer a new direction.
I don't have the answer, but how do we know that wasn't what the producers wanted and told them to put it in the scripts, like they told Hodge: write your script, and put in Bond's retirement and death.
This is my point. They're not writing on spec. They are on an assignment, and when you're on an assignment, the producers will have notes of what they want to see in each outline and each draft.
Do you see what I'm saying?
There is a profile of the screenwriter Scott Frank in a recent New Yorker and I was surprised to learn he doesn't even use an outline!
Back to CR...I think the sinking house was a good choice *and* I also think it could have been a bit more intimate with Vesper. Maybe just a scene before they enter the house: "Allow me" is frustratingly vague and the automatic guns right after it reminiscent of the Brosnan era.
Ironically, as terrible as TWINE is, I think it got the intimacy of Elektra's death just right.
Yeah I think I remember reading that John Gardner did the same, and it baffled me! Why wouldn't you write a structure out beforehand?! Surely that would make it easier??
I think it kind of shows in his books to be honest: "What shall I do now? Oh yes, how about this person turns out to be a double-agent?"... :D
Yeah that's a good point: that is a surprisingly good moment in that film and done at the right level. I love Judi witnessing it.
Yeah, and Bond gets injured/has to deal with it throughout both films. Mentions of Bond's past are made in both (or at least in a way that more heavily touches on the Fleming material). Both the Renard and Silva are anarchists/prioritise chaos, and there's an element of personal vendetta in both.
There's some very superficial similarities too. Both use Scotland and Istanbul as locations for instance. They just seem to use very similar plot beats even though they're both very different films.
Except when Pierce goes over and gives her a good sniffing…
And not using an outline? Writers can sometimes be notoriously lazy. They fall in love with their ideas. They then jump into the script and get lost. There are only a handful of writers on this planet that can write beautiful scripts with no outlines.
To me, and I preach this to new writers, is outline, then outline, then outline more, and when you think you’re ready to go to first draft? Outline again.
Then…. Character bios. Most of my character bios are literally fifty and sixty pages. From birth, childhoods, parents, best friends, first time kisses,, losing virginity, doing drugs or drinking, college or no college, and, everything I can think of that they might have lived through right up until the start of my story.
Then I go to first draft.
And I dont show anyone my script until draft five.
Yes, and I'm done rambling. I don't want to seem like a troll like a few names in the past. I'll leave P & W coming back as a mixed bag for me.
As for building a multi-film story arc, I could see EON building up to a classic villain (probably Blofeld, but still). This way they could say they learned from their previous mistakes, which they often do.
I’m genuinely not going after you, @MaxCasino … but the more I read about P and W on this site, the more I know that many things are out of their control, yet fans blame them for everything…
Most producers are very talented and have big ideas, but many don’t know how to write, direct or act.
So they hire the writers to put form to their big ideas, a director to bring these ideas to life, and actors to play characters that experience these big ideas for us.
I mean, maybe P and W came up with Bond going rogue several times, and the producers went along with it every time, but since we aren’t in these meetings, we will never know. And knowing what it’s like to write on assignment (but not at this huge tentpole level (which funnily is even more restricting for the writers, like they’re writing in a straight jacket while locked in a box), I know that the art of this writing is coming up with a unique and fresh story that’s based on plot points and big ideas that the studios and producers want in their films! And each draft come with more and more and more and more and more notes. If the producers want flying monkeys in the next Bond film, you can protest, but either you’ll find a way to do it, or quit, or get fired. Cuz one way or the other, the producers WANT flying monkeys, and if Max and Peter can’t deliver this, then @talos7 and his writing partner will)….
That's nice, yeah. I'd say they result in quite different stories, but it's fun to find the links. I think in terms of Istanbul, TWINE actually does the better job as it has a specific reason to be there, whereas I think one of SF's few failings is that its overseas locations are totally arbitrary and could be swapped out with anywhere.