Has BOND 25 Got A View To A KILLING EVE Writer?
It’s been curiously quiet on the Bond 25 news front: the expected press conference announcing the title and cast is still to take place, and there’s an almost total absence of reliable leaks. If this is all a reaction on the part of EON Productions to the fallout from the Sony hacks which revealed so much about the production of SPECTRE, it’s almost watertight.
That said, reports emerged over the weekend from The Sunday Mail and The Observer that Phoebe Waller-Bridge, writer/producer of Killing Eve and creator/star of Fleabag has been tapped up by Daniel Craig personally to add further punch and polish to the work of script doctor Scott Z. Burns. Waller-Bridge’s distinctive voice would certainly be a welcome addition to the Bond 25 writing roster, representing the first time a female writer has had input to a Bond script since Dana Stevens took an uncredited pass on The World Is Not Enough for director Michael Apted.
While Fleabag has finished airing in the UK, the second season of Killing Eve has only just begun on BBC America, and its star Jodie Comer has also been touted as a Bond Girl for the new movie in the kind of “bookies slash odds” tabloid story we generally take with a pinch of salt. However, if the show is already on the Bond 25 radar anything’s possible, especially in the absence of any official EON announcements.
In the meantime, director Cary Joji Fukunaga was photographed last week in Matera, Italy on what appears to be a scouting trip for the location shoot believed to be scheduled for August and September. This follows a brief visit to Norway for the “B25” frozen lake shoot at the end of March, spoiler-filled pictures of which can be found in this Daily Mail report.
An interesting spoiler-free tidbit from that shoot emerged in a since-deleted Instagram post from the set which showed the unmistakable bulk of an IMAX camera mounted on a telescopic crane. It was understood that Bond 25 would be a digital shoot, but Indiewire now reports that cinematographer Linus Sandgren is aiming for a more classical and spectacular look by shooting on film and using IMAX 65mm for action sequences.
From the outside it might not seem like the production is making much progress, but MGM’s Christopher Brearton stated on an investor call last week that 2020 will be “a Bond year” and reaffirmed the pre-Easter release date for Bond 25. Everyone involved in the production may be playing their cards close to the vest but there’s an air of confidence in each piece of news that emerges which suggests they’re taking every opportunity to craft the best Bond movie possible.
Over to you: excited to see what Phoebe Waller-Bridge can bring to Bond? Got some Killing Eve or Fleabag takes to share? Just wishing they’d tell us the title already? Sound off below.
As of this writing, Bond 25 will be released in the UK on April 3rd 2020 and April 8th 2020 worldwide.
