They have written seven James Bond screenplays, including all the Daniel Craig films, and their previous collaborations date back over 20 illustrious years.
Yet Neal Purvis and Robert Wade seldom discuss in public the complex way the Bond scripts come together.
The 60th anniversary of the release of Dr. No got them to open up about keeping the franchise alive – and killing Bond off.
When, in the late 1990s, the team of Purvis and Wade signed on to write The World is Not Enough, they already had a couple of successful screenplays to their credit.
However, it was their first Bond – Pierce Brosnan’s third – that lifted them into the top rank of screenwriters.
But they weren’t alone in the writing process. The film carried another writing credit too – the American writer Bruce Feirstein.
In fact, almost all their Bond screenplays have then been passed on to at least one other writer for what Purvis terms “a polish”.
“When we’ve finished our job on the screenplay, it’s basically goodbye Rob and Neal,” Purvis says. “With Casino Royale, for instance, Paul Haggis took over. And with Skyfall it was John Logan, but obviously always working with the director.”
Last year, with No Time to Die, Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge was on the writing credits too.
Wade adds that it can get complex. “In the case of Skyfall, John Logan came on after us and then we did a bit more again. Skyfall in particular just kept developing and it developed really well I thought.”
Any discussion with movie writers tends at some point to include the term “story arc”. Purvis and Wade faced the ultimate challenge: developing Daniel Craig’s arc as Bond over fifteen years and five films.
Purvis recalls they started work on Casino Royale when the situation paralleled how it is now: a Bond had left and a new actor was yet to be cast.