Casino Royale - Bond Does Million Dollar Baby?

A few months ago, you couldn’t move round these parts for rabid James Bond speculation. Who was going to play Bond? Pierce Brosnan? Daniel Craig? Clive Owen? MC Hammer? Dr Fox? Witchy Mary from Big Brother?

Truth be told, we’re still none the wiser. Although we’re pretty sure it won’t be Brosnan. But we’re kind of expecting the new Bond film - Casino Royale - to be relentlessly miserable and downbeat. Why? Because 007 producers have asked Paul Haggis  - writer of Million Dollar Baby - to rewrite it.

Pierce Brosnan (DVDs) was apparently told in a phone call last year that
his services as Bond were no longer required. But that didn’t stop
speculation - from no less than Dame Judi Dench - that it was all a big
trick and that Brosnan would be the star of Casino Royale after all.

That doesn’t seem to be the case, though, as Pierce has decided to gracefully bow out of the role. Well, we say gracefully; in fact he said this about his producers…

"The pomposity and rigmarole that they put
directors through is astounding… I thought ‘Fuck it’".

So with Pierce ‘Fuck it’ Brosnan out of the running, the speculation
over the next James Bond is bound to reach fever pitch in the next few
months.

In the meantime, Paul Haggis will go about rewriting the Casino
Royale script. The choice of Haggis seems to suggest that there has
been a winner in the fight over the direction that the new Bond should go in. It was thought that
was a big production division between people who wanted the new Bond
film to be darker and more realistic, and people who wanted there to be
loads of zappy laser guns and invisible cars and Matrix-style wooshy
noises.

Casino Royale, a book where nothing much happens except for a card
game and a near-castration, doesn’t exactly lend itself to a megabucks
explodoflick adaptation. So it seems that hiring Haggis to rewrite the Neil Purvis
and Robert Wade script is an effort to draw out some of the emotion of
the story.

The career of Paul Haggis has had a violent upswing in quality of
late. He started off writing fluff like Diff’rent Strokes, then went on
to create the bizarre-in-a-bad-way Chuck Norris vehicle Walker, Texas
Ranger.

We’re not sure exactly what events happened to him after that, but
he went on to write Million Dollar Baby (DVDs), a harrowing film where a
female boxer gets injured, has her leg amputated, bites off her own
tongue and then gets euthanized. He followed that up with Crash,
another depressing movie where everyone is racist to everyone else
until the audience becomes so full of self-loathing that they feel
obliged to go home and hang themselves.

Something tells us there won’t be many space lasers in Casino Royale…

Read more:

‘Million Dollar’ scribe bonding with 007 - Reuters

[story by Stuart Heritage]