The latest word on Bond 22

By rights, you should be reading this after plucking it from a dead letter box in a park somewhere in a big city, but that seems far too much work. Just remember that the hawk is dead. Repeat, the hawk is dead. And a warning to those who want to stay spoiler-free – there’s possible plot information lurking below, so don’t say you weren’t warned.

So on to the message itself: Casino Royale may have only just left our screens, but that hasn’t stopped the production company Eon from cooking up the next mission for Britain’s best secret agent to capitalise on the success of Bond’s big reboot.

Chatting with The Trades , writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (who have written the last few Bond movies and shared credit for Royale with Paul Haggis) revealed that you shouldn’t expect things to suddenly revert back to the OTT Bond movies of recent years. Nope, the focus will be squarely on 007: "With the way Casino Royale ends, you know there’s still unfinished business for Bond,” says Wade. “He may say, 'The name's Bond, James Bond,' but there's still a lot of stuff churning up inside him. So, if you're going to explore that, and we’ve got this great actor to do that with, what you don’t want to do is suddenly clamp it down with all these familiar elements that keep your focus off him. He's the great asset."

And while Miss Moneypenny might not be much of a squeeze, it looks like gadget hound Q (or John Cleese’s R, his successor) won’t be cropping up any time soon. "Q presents more problems. People have all got gadgets now. Other films have lots of gadgets as well… The idea of Q coming back, for the moment, it's just not a high priority."

The writers found time to debunk the current hot rumour that the next film would take as its source Ian Fleming’s short story, Risico. And while the villains have yet to be decided, word is that production will begin by the start of next year.

Also gabbing about all things Bond is Giancarlo Giannini, who told an Italian paper that – spoiler alert for those who scoffed at the earlier warning – he’s likely to return as Mathis, turning double agent again to help Bond track down more of Le Chiffre’s paymasters. Frankly, we’d rather have Eva Green back, but unless there are flashbacks, we can’t imagine Vesper Lynd’s corpse being all that useful. Well, unless they drop her on people…

Source: ( The Trades )