Writer Steven Knight has been sitting down and taking notes from real-life spies for ten months while piecing together a version of James Bond nobody has seen before. He’s meeting with actual operatives in the field and having daily conversations “with the SAS and even more secret outfits” in an attempt to keep the upcoming film more grounded. This already tells us a lot about what we can expect in the next 007 film – And it probably won’t be swaive suits, big explosions and sexy women named Pussy Galore or Honey Ryder.
Knight, who is best known as the creator of Peaky Blinders and the writer behind films like Eastern Promises and Locke, got the Bond gig as part of a major franchise overhaul from Amazon, who paid off producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli to gain full creative control over the franchise. The reported price tag is around $1 billion on top of the $8.5 billion MGM acquisition they paid back in 2022.
But Amazon is taking the Bond franchise incredibly seriously, pulling in an impressive creative team that includes Denis Villeneuve directing, Amy Pascal and David Heyman producing, and, of course, Knight handling the screenplay.
Knight is taking the responsibility so seriously that he’s meeting with people who do the work James Bond does in real life (via Screen). “I am talking to them about what they do every day. It’s all real. The author was living that life. In the war, he was doing those things. He knew people doing that stuff, going out there and killing people. Ian Fleming was such a great writer. To be a writer, you have got to know about people.”
That’s pretty heavy research. Clearly, he is trying to close the gap between fiction and what inspired the franchise in the first place.
Fleming spent years inside British Naval Intelligence during World War Two. He didn’t imagine spies — he knew them personally, drank with them, and in some cases helped direct them. Bond’s original backstory placed him as a Commander in the Royal Navy, updated to the SBS — the Special Boat Service — when Daniel Craig took over in 2005.
Knight’s research with his new sources suggests that the next version of James Bond could have a new background that fits with a more grounded approach to the character. But, if we’re honest, the franchise has survived enough reinventions to make that feel less risky than it sounds. There’s a sharp contrast between Daniel Craig’s Bond films and Pierce Brosnan’s. Brosnan’s Bond had all the gadgets and the tech, whereas Craig’s Bond movies seemed to be inspired by the Bourne films starring Matt Damon.
“Bond has been bulletproof. People have been able to make mistakes and variations, quite elaborate variations, and the character has survived because the core of it is like a diamond. You can’t touch it. The person you are talking about is folklore,” said Knight, giving himself permission to push for a new version of the character.
Knight has always been a fan, and his personal relationship with Bond goes all the way back to childhood. “It was always Connery. You’d be watching as a kid with your dad. The certainty, the confidence and the escape from something, everybody buys into that. That’s the thing with Bond, everybody wants it.”
Being a fan that long means that he probably understands the character better than most. I mean, a writer who grew up with Connery’s version isn’t going to purposefully strip the character of what makes him tick just for the fun of it.
Writing a Bond script has always been on Knight’s bucket list, and he’s said he hopes his admiration for the franchise will help him produce “something that’s the same but different, and better, stronger and bolder.”
But the script isn’t done yet. Villeneuve won’t be free to join production until July, as he is currently wrapping post-production on Dune 3. Meanwhile, the casting process is officially underway, with names like Jacob Elordi, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Callum Turner circulating as potential contenders for the role.
Fans will appreciate just how much homework Steven Knight and the team at Amazon are putting into creating the perfect Bond 26. The foundation is being laid (daily briefings with spies, a deep respect for Fleming’s source material, a mandate to reinvent), and it sounds like this is the perfect team to tackle it.
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