MI6 got to attend "The Orange Word" Screen Writers Season 2004, and can bring you the full transcript from the interview. In this in depth talk Neal Purvis and Robert Wade discuss Bond, their careers, loves and pet hates of film...

Interview - Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Part 2)
23rd March 2004

MI6 got to attend "The Orange Word" Screen Writers Season 2004, and can bring you the full transcript from the interview. In this in depth talk Neal Purvis and Robert Wade discuss Bond, their careers, loves and pets hates of film...

Continuing...

Peter Florence (Chair): [The Sweet Smell of Success]... it was written by Ernest Lehman?

Robert Wade: I'm not sure. I think that Ernest Lehman sort of … he wrote the novella and then he did the script and he kept working on it and then I think he felt a bit unwell after a while, which is not unusual…

Above: Ernest Lehman

Neal Purvis: And he was hospitalised I believe and Clifford Odets came in … Robert Wade: No he went off on a cruise. Neal Purvis: Who did? Robert Wade: Ernest Lehman. Neal Purvis: Ah, but I don't know, I mean I don't know who did what.

Robert Wade: No it's very difficult to tell. The interesting thing is that I wanted to show a clip from North by North West because that's another Ernest Lehman movie and it's completely different. The only reason why I didn't think it was a good idea to show it is because it goes on and on and on but it's only when you show it as a clip that it goes on and on and on. If you watch it in the context of the movie, it's just … but I won't go on about that.

Peter Florence (Chair): But his versatility is something you admire.

Robert Wade: He's a fantastic writer. His structure is always really rigorous. He wrote so many movies. He wrote The Sound of Music, North by North West which almost invented a genre which really is effectively what the Bond movies inhabit and a movie like that which I can't imagine being made nowadays, so he's, I think he's still alive, he's done pretty well.

Peter Florence: Tell me about Let Him Have It, because the Bentley case was not in the public arena at the time that you chose to write about it. Robert Wade: No that's right, um … Neal Purvis: Well I mean, someone we knew actually came to us and told us about the story of it because Bentley had gone to his school many years before and it was known in that school that story so we went and tried to find some books on it and there weren't any books in print. We went to The British Library funnily enough, and … Robert Wade: Yeah, not here.

Above: Robert Wade and Neal Purvis at The Orange Word session at the British Library, London.

Neal Purvis: : … no, oh no, no and there was a book that was ghost written by Bentley's father and it was a bit, I mean it was sort of something they'd serialise in The Mirror in those days and it was, you couldn't believe everything in it, but there was something very awful about it coming from the father's point of view and …

Peter Florence: What, because the father was a war hero and …

Robert Wade: Well he was just an ordinary man and reading this account of an ordinary, you know patriotic man's helplessness at seeing his son being inexorably led to death was incredibly depressing but very effecting and we, we were aware that there had been quite a few attempts to make a movie out of that story.

Peter Florence: What was the story, as you understood it, the story bit of it? Robert Wade: Well the story for us was it was about two guys … Neal Purvis: Having fun. Robert Wade: … yeah, they were both sort of retarded, well not really, one of them was kind of hyperactive is what you'd say now I suppose and one of them was retarded and they didn't fit in, there wasn't a world for them in those days. There wasn't, there was no place to go as a teenager, I don't think the word had even been coined and they'd found a kind of common ground in comics and dressing up as gangsters and gangster movies so it was about these two boys having fun and then it all goes terribly wrong and a policeman gets killed because there were a lot of guns floating around after the war so …

Above: Let Him Have It (1991)

Peter Florence: What year are we in?

Robert Wade: '52. So suddenly this boy is in the hands of the law and an example must be made and we felt that the actual, there are lots of in and outs about what really happened, but we felt that even the official version of events was so terrible to look at from the outside that it would make a good story and we didn't need to bang a drum.

Peter Florence: And terrible because Bentley should have been treated as someone with diminished responsibilities.

Robert Wade: Yes he was, he had a mental age of 11, wasn't it?

Neal Purvis: 11½

Robert Wade: Yeah.

Peter Florence: And was this recognised at the time?

Neal Purvis: Well it was very difficult because they didn't have, I mean they had a test for sort of whether you were mentally able to stand trial and it was a bit 'of its day' and he came across as trouble because he was slow so I can understand the situation, you know, in a sense he was there and he was involved in it but it was just of its day that they couldn't spot it. In those days they would put you to death within, I mean he went within three months of the actual event so you didn't really have a lot of time to make a case and it happened to be that there had been a lot of trouble around. Some policemen or something had been shot in Shepherds Bush and they were really out to get anyone who was going to cause any trouble.

Peter Florence: Rather than focusing on the miscarriage of justice, you, I think in this film, focused upon the impact on the family and the relationship between then didn't you. Would you just like to introduce what we're going to see?

Robert Wade: So this is the terribly melodramatic moment of the family saying goodbye to this boy who didn't know, he didn't grasp that he was about to be hanged and this is really taken from the family's account of what happened and we, I don't think there's any writing going on, it's just…

Neal Purvis: Record.

Robert Wade: … serving up reality and then it's filtered through actors and direction and everything.

[Clip of Let Him Have It shown] Click to see the trailer

Peter Florence: This as a very British film was your big passport wasn't it?

Neal Purvis: Well we thought it was going to be a passport but it didn't really, the film business was in such a state in those days we, I mean we thought the phone wouldn't stop ringing, but it didn't ever start.

Robert Wade: I mean we wrote this thing and it got made which was really kind of, you know you have to be incredibly luck to get a film made but particularly then, I think there were four British movies got made that year and …

Neal Purvis: And because of the publicity it had caused they decided to, rather than do a small opening, which is probably what it should have had, they decided to put it on at the Odeon Leicester Square … Robert Wade: Which is, that's the biggest cinema in Europe so it was sort of, you know, when you've got a 2,200 seat auditorium, even if a 1,000 people are there it feels half empty and you know it wasn't really the right place to open that movie, it was only a little film but …

"...you have to be incredibly lucky to get a film made but particularly then, I think there were four British movies that got made that year..."

Neal Purvis: And we went and stood …

Peter Florence: But in America it wasn't loaded with all the political baggage that it was over here.

Robert Wade: On no that's right and it got fantastic reviews and I just think that the humanity of it is … well I think the thing was that we weren't trying to bang a drum about it and that made the story survive and it touched people because of that. I think if it had been sort of an agitprop movie it would have turned people off.

Peter Florence: There is - not that I'm suggest a morbid - but there is a theme running throughout your work of execution and the dubiousness of crime isn't there?

Robert Wade: Yeah it's interesting because you kindly invited us to be here tonight and we sort of looked at things that we'd done and I started noticing nooses and the kind of thing, little emblems but I think that obviously it doesn't happen everyday but these things really do happen and it creates an intensity in life if there's someone about to get the chop.

Peter Florence: The other thing that I think, and we will examine how this pertains to James Bond in a while, there is a real desire to engage with or to put in very substantial pieces of conversation or dialogue (and dare I say it philosophy?) into your films sometimes that are also represented in the clip from Josey Wales that you want to show. I'd just be interested to know why you chose this part of Josey Wales rather than any of the other stuff that is fun or comic?

Above: The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

Robert Wade: I mean personally I think it's a fantastic movie. I think Clint Eastwood is one of the giants and I think it's a sort of overlooked movie in a way and I've always remembered this exchange. It's funny, when we're working we have a shorthand and even with the people that we work with we have a shorthand and you can refer to this scene in one line, it's that 'you have iron in your words', that may not be the right line, but I just think that it combines philosophy and character and entertainment all in one - what I thought was a sort of three minute moment, it's more like five minutes. Peter Florence: But it's a great five minutes. Neal Purvis: Indeed. [clip from The Outlaw Josey Wales shown] Click to see the trailer

Peter Florence: Now the glory of that is that they take one of the greatest clichés of Westerns and give it this fantastic context, but as you said, they've earned that very long, very intense, really laden dialogue haven't they?

Robert Wade: I reckon so. No I think that's right. I think that obviously it's funny seeing these things out of context but it moves into a different area where you kind of know that this is saying more than, it's more than just cowboys and Indians and it's relevant now, but I don't think that you could have a scene like that today, unfortunately. There's a sort of, the pressure on the script is so intense that you might start off with a draft like that and it would be cut down and cut down.

Peter Florence: The pressure to deliver what?

Robert Wade: To get the idea across in as quick as possible way without repetition. I mean you pointed out when we looked at that earlier that there was a kind of, it does repeat itself in certain ways and you feel, I don't know, do you feel uncomfortable seeing that?

Peter Florence: Well no I feel kind of thrilled actually seeing it because I'm very used to being hurried through every scene.

Robert Wade: Well that's what we nowadays, you know writing scripts, it's really difficult. I mean that's Philip Kaufman writing for Clint Eastwood, a strong director and a strong producer who can control it and maybe even in those days, that was a luxury I don't know, but it seems like a luxury now.

Peter Florence: There's something else about that film which is why I was interested that you chose it, which is the tone of the whole thing, and I would just like to kind of refer that to a movie you wrote, Plunkett & Macleane which didn't work, for various reasons. I am interested to know why you think it didn't work, or if you think it didn't work.

Robert Wade: Well we re-wrote it and then we got re-written so all the good bits are by us.

Neal Purvis: Yeah, I mean there isn't a great deal of our dialogue left in that film to be honest and you know we'd done a lot of research into that period and it was quite enjoyable.

Peter Florence: This period is?

Above: Plunkett and Macleane (1999)

"There isn't a great deal of our dialogue left in that film to be honest..." Neal Purvis: 17th century. Robert Wade: 18th century actually. Peter Florence: And Plunkett and Macleane are? Robert Wade: One is an apocrypha and the other is a fop and it's a true story and a man called Selwyn Roberts wrote a script based on it, which was good. He found the story and he wrote the script and then it … Peter Florence: What's the story? Robert Wade: They teamed up. It was a kind of unlikely teaming but they were highwaymen so if you were going through Hyde Park, which was the King's road to Kensington…

Peter Florence: And was then country.

Robert Wade: … it was country. That's why the barracks are there now, it's that there were so many highwaymen that people used to gather under a bell on a tree to get into a group so that they could move through the park to get to Kensington and the barracks are still there because to make the road safe they barracked troops there in tents, but now they've got a big tower and um … what were we talking about?

Neal Purvis: I don't know.

Peter Florence: I'm talking about the story of Plunkett & Macleane and what you did because I think what's interesting about Josey Wales as what's interesting about Butch Cassidy and other similar adventure movies which involve a lot of killing is that they have quite often a freshness and humour of tone which I kind of understand is what your version of the script was, that is entirely lost in the way that it's been shot by Jake Scott.

Robert Wade: I don't know, I think that there's a sort of delicate thing with the film which is that, you're absolutely right, tone is everything and Clint Eastwood can manage it beautifully in a movie like that, where it's funny and entertaining and yet it's got a real serious heart to it and you're right, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the same thing but what happens when you're making a movie and there isn't one kind of guiding hand and we had re-written someone else, you know so it wasn't our baby. We felt very strongly about it.

Peter Florence: How did you get to re-write it?

Robert Wade: It was a project that was sort of languishing on the shelves at Working Title and it had about three or four good writers on it, but it had just sort of gone into the dust and we always liked the period and we liked the characters and we came up with a new story for it. Am I going into too much detail?

Peter Florence: Do you know how Odets and Lehman worked on it?

Neal Purvis: No, no, I mean it's just that we got the job by coming up with a good beginning for it, which was seeing someone swallow a jewel and then die and then two people go to where he's been buried with the intention of digging him up and cutting the jewel out of his body.

Robert Wade: I mean separately.

Neal Purvis: Yeah.

Robert Wade: Yes.

Neal Purvis: And that's how they meet and that's how they team up.

Robert Wade: And then one of them swallows the jewel again having cut it out of the body so it was a great beginning obviously, but we sort of got to a point where we were very happy with it but it's difficult because people always want to spend a bit more money on the script and we sort of feel now that if you've got the script at about 80% then you enter a dangerous point where you can keep working on it and throw the baby out with the bathwater or you can say it's going to be, if we shoot that really well, that will be pretty good. We prefer to sort of get to 80% and then not muck about with it, because the tone can completely go with just a few changes.

Related Articles:
Interview - Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Part 1)
Interview - Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Part 3)
Interview - Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Part 4)
Interview - Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Part 5)
MI6 "The World is Not Enough" Coverage
MI6 "Die Another Day" Coverage

Many thanks to Peter Florence, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Ellie Ward, The Orange Word and The British Library. Transcript courtesy The Orange Word. Image courtesy Amazon Associates and The Orange Word