WTF? Why would you do that?

QUANTUM OF SOLACE could have benefited from Tom Stoppard.

Prisoner Monkeys wrote:

Erica Ambler wrote:

Fairbairn-Sykes wrote:

9. WHY change the title from "Tomorrow Never Lies" to "Tomorrow Never Dies"?

Because teen scum demands death and lots of it. Lies aren't such a box office draw.

Or, to give an actual answer, it was because the early title got misprinted during shooting in Thailand and EON liked it, so they kept the name.

Going though life without a sense of humour must be tough. The rest of us will have to grin and bear it.

Fairbairn-Sykes wrote:

I've never read anything anywhere that has explained starting with DN.

Bigger supporting cast in LALD, no? In Dr No you basically have Quarrel, Honey, Bond, Dr. No Leiter and Dent. Quarrel and Honey are barely speaking parts. Solitaire is not. You also have more locations (Florida, Jamaica, New York, London) vs Jamaica and London. The action scenes (a big shoot out in a warehouse full of fish tanks, being dragged across a coral reef on the back of a boat) are also way more complex than what they wound up doing in Dr No.

IIRC Peter Hunt said a big reason they did YOLT instead of OHMSS had to do with poor snowfall that winter and the ski stunts required (I'm guessing insurance?) - didn't they also throw a lot of money getting the Piz Gloria location up and running? I'm sure that was a factor.

The big one that gets me is throwing out Purvis & Wade's original script for Bond 22 altogether when everyone and their mother knew that there was going to be a writers strike. Maybe Haggis overpromised what he could deliver by the deadline (it would make sense given his axing) but given the issues they had with LTK and TND you would think they'd err for caution.

Vesper wrote:

The big one that gets me is throwing out Purvis & Wade's original script for Bond 22 altogether when everyone and their mother knew that there was going to be a writers strike. Maybe Haggis overpromised what he could deliver by the deadline (it would make sense given his axing) but given the issues they had with LTK and TND you would think they'd err for caution.

The film's production was so troubled on so many levels that I have to question how much control EON actually had. Marc Forster seemed to have some extraordinary powers that other directors didn't have.

Erica Ambler wrote:

Fairbairn-Sykes wrote:

12. WHY would you shoot Quantum of Solace without a finished script?

Contractual obligation: Eon was legally bound to deliver a finished film to Sony by a given date, strike or no strike.

imo This is perhaps the biggest threat to Bond in the future, the early films could be made at a rapid rate because the stories were already there to provide inspiration and foundation, setting an arbitrary schedule (no matter how theoretically 'doable') for the future is inevitably going to impact on the quality of the scripts. The lesson of Skyfall is surely that getting the script right brings its own added reward - the series is rich enough now to afford itself proper development and should be wary of any commitment that dilutes or undermines its credibility.