Danny Boyle has confirmed that he is directing James Bond 25, while also revealing that the plan is to start shooting at the end of the year.
The English filmmaker made this admission to me on Wednesday night at a special screening of his new FX show “Trust” at New York’s Florence Gould Hall Theater.
Considering all the rumors swirling about Boyle and Bond I asked the director if he was indeed going to oversee the 25th installment to the franchise, and he responded in the affirmative.
“We are working on a script right now. And it all depends on that really. I am working on a Richard Curtis script at the moment. We hope to start shooting that in 6 or 7 weeks. Then Bond would be right at the end of the year. But we are working on them both right now.”
When I pushed Boyle for more details on “James Bond 25” he confirmed that John Hodge is currently expanding an idea the pair had for 007 into a script. Hodge and Boyle previously worked on “Shallow Grave,” “Trainspotting,” “A Life Less Ordinary,” “The Beach,” “Trance” and “T2 Trainspotting” together.
“We’ve got an idea, John Hodge, the screenwriter, and I have got this idea, and John is writing it at the moment. And it all depends on how it turns out. It would be foolish of me to give any of it away.”
While Boyle was rightfully playing it safe regarding his take on “Bond 25,” “Trust’s” writer Simon Beaufoy, who won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Slumdog Millionaire” on the same night that Boyle picked up the Best Director gong for the same film, insisted that he was the perfect choice.
“I don’t know why he hasn’t done one before. I think it’s meant to be,” Beaufoy insisted, before warning that Richard Curtis and Boyle’s untitled comedy with Universal might still cause some issues, though.
“It might not be so straightforward, because there appears to be two scripts being written at the same time. I’m quite to happy to say that I’m not involved in either.”
But while Beaufoy believes that Boyle will work wonders on the next James Bond film, he did admit that things might be a little more difficult for Hodge, because any screenwriter that has to try and outdo the previous 24 films from the series would have a tough job on their hands.
“I think it’s really hard to get involved in something that’s so established. It’s very hard to express yourself within that. You have to be very strong and faithful to all the films that have come before.”
“It is really hard to do anything new as a writer. As a director I’m not sure that’s quite true. I can see Danny punching a few holes in the way that those Bond films are made. It will be really exciting.”
Beaufoy then told me that his next project is the “polar opposite of a ‘James Bond’ film,” though.
“I am in the midst of writing a story about Elizabeth Taylor in her post Richard Burton years when she was doing a lot of work for AIDS. And the story of the untold love of her life, which was her gay assistant. And nobody really knows about the one that got away. It’s another true story, too.”
Before then, though, make sure you check out Boyle and Beaufoy’s work on “Trust,” which premieres on FX on March 25 at 10pm.
“Trust” is set in 1973 and tells the story of John Paul Getty III (Harris Dickinson) being kidnapped by the Italian mafia. They assume that his grandfather J. Paul Getty Snr (Donald Sutherland), the richest man in the world, will simply pay the ransom, only to discover that he has various reasons not to.
