Writing Bond: Crafting the Legend of 007
Written by Camryn Carmichael. Photograph by Trinity Ray.
SCAD Savannah Film Festival welcomed special guests and screenwriters Robert Wade and Neal Purvis on Wednesday, Oct. 29.
Wade and Purvis knew that their James Bond reboot film, “Casino Royale,” the first of its kind at the time, needed to bring something powerful and different. After viewing the film’s iconic opening scene — a parkour filled chase — the screenwriters went into detail about what elements they wanted to bring to viewers with the film.
“We wanted to make Bond feel more real,” said Wade. “We were writing for the character in the book. We wanted to do something different.”
Different it was, Bond jumped from terraces, to roof tops, to cranes, in pursuit of a parkour-savvy villain that gave him a run for his money. “It’s just down and dirty,” said Wade. “He’s not as good as the other guy–but he just keeps on going and he’s going to get him in the end.”
“We wanted to make it about his tenacity,” said Purvis.
A tenacity that Daniel Craig mirrored in real life upon his casting. The screenwriters recalled the negative response Craig received in the press. Instead of shying away from critics, like Bond, he took the role head on and ultimately won them over. Over the next two decades, he’d go on to be part of a $4 billion franchise and one of the highest paid British actors of all time.
“The story of Bond in this movie echoes what Daniel’s journey was,” said Wade. “Everything was against him, but he kept going, he kept getting back up and fighting — and he wins.”
Inspired by the rise of parkour culture in France at the time, the stunt-filled opening scene was the writers’ way of expressing exactly that.
In favor of maintaining a consistent rawness and humanity throughout the film, Wade and Purvis also wrote their new version of Bond with more internal vulnerabilities that highlight the nuance of a character with a tragic backstory.
“We emphasize the fact that he’s an orphan in the script,” said Wade. “As a matter of fact, we make the woman he’s in a relationship with an orphan too.” A creative choice that made Wade and Purvis realize that Bond was more than a highly skilled, well connected, covert operative with guns to boot.
The new 007 series was truly the story of an orphan trying to find a family. For the writers, Casino Royale was more than just the continuation of a revered classic, it was the beginning of an era.
“We had the novel, the original, that had never been properly filmed,” said Purvis. “That was the mandate that allowed us to do a different kind of Bond.”
