Danny Boyle has revealed his greatest regret about walking away from directing the last James Bond film.
The director, known for Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire and many others, was set to helm the 25th entry in the Bond franchise until departing the project in 2018 over creative differences with producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson. That film went on to be completed by director Cary Joji Fukunaga as No Time To Die in 2021.
Boyle has now told Business Insider that his primary regret about the decision to drop out of the film was that the “wonderful” John Hodge, who wrote Boyle’s films Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and The Beach among others, had penned a screenplay for the film that “was really good”.
Boyle and Hodge’s version of No Time To Die would have been set in Russia and explored Bond’s origins, while also killing off the 007 character at the end – something that the final film also did.
Since then, Broccoli and Wilson have stepped away from the creative process and handed over control of the Bond estate to Amazon MGM Studios, ending over 60 years of the Broccoli family’s control of the films.
When asked whether this change could lure him back to the franchise, Boyle responded: “That ship has sailed”.
Amy Pascal and David Heyman, producers of the Spider-Man and Harry Potter films respectively, have been reported as the possible replacements for Wilson and Broccoli.
Bond fans have not reacted kindly to the news of the franchise’s sale, with some predicting that Amazon will “ruin” the series by over-saturating the market with “mediocre spin-offs”.
As for Boyle, his new film 28 Years Later, the sequel to post-apocalyptic horror 28 Days Later (2002) is released in cinemas on Friday (June 20). It stars Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes and it is set a few decades after the initial virus struck, focusing on a group of survivors who live on a small island off the mainland.
Boyle recently said that the film, which is written by 28 Days Later screenwriter Alex Garland, is a response to Brexit and its fallout.
“It’s not a political film, but when we started work on this, it came after Brexit and that retrenchment to older values, and you cannot help but think that this film is a response to that,” he explained. “The film is full of British actors, and our obsessions.”
He added: “I cannot imagine what the Americans are going to make of it. Obviously you’d love it to be a hit there, because they’ve given us the money, but really? We’ve made the film for here, my homeland.”
English (US) · 