There was a great deal of excitement when Danny Boyle was brought on to direct the next James Bond film. It came after months of will he/won’t he speculation as the director tried to work out a hectic schedule, and complete work on a Bond script he was writing with frequent collaborator, John Hodge. And it was that script which led to conflicts between Boyle and producers, ultimately ending with the director’s departure. These aren’t the sort of problems we normally hear about when it comes to the Bond franchise, and for a while the film appeared to be in jeopardy.
Now with a new director in Cary Fukunaga and a fresh script by Scott Z. Burns, Bond 25 is moving full steam ahead. It’s also allowed Boyle to get some distance from the project and open up to Empire (via Yahoo) about his departure and how much it affected him personally.What it came down to was loyalty, and Boyle’s unwillingness to work on the movie without Hodge’s input…
“I work in partnership with writers and I am not prepared to break it up. We were working very, very well, but they didn’t want to go down that route. So we decided to part company, and it would be unfair of me to say what it was because I don’t know what Cary [Fukunaga, the new director] is going to do. I got a very nice message from him and I gave him my best wishes… it is just a great shame.”
“What John Hodge and I were doing, I thought, was really good. It wasn’t finished, but it could have been really good. You have to believe in your process and part of that is the partnership I have with a writer. It’s like saying ‘Hey, we are going to give you a different editor…’ Those fundamental partnerships are vital.”
Disappointing that we’ll never get to see what Boyle had planned, but I hold out hope that someday he’ll get behind the wheel of a 007 film. Franchises aren’t really his thing, though, and it may take a change in leadership at the Bond estate for that to happen.
Bond 25 hits theaters on April 8th 2020.
