Given that this is the 40th anniversary and the 20th Bond, there are lots of in-jokes throughout the film - did you ever feel you had your hands tied by having to present Bond's greatest hits?
Robert Wade: Once we got the idea of the Q lab being a storage facility, it was obviously going to have a lot of the old gadgets, and it was a nice thing. It was a bit of a mind-warping thing when Pierce Brosnan picks up a briefcase that's the very first gadget that was handed out. It's all beaten up and old now but he isn't, it's very strange.
Who came up with the moment when Halle Berry comes out of the sea?
Neal Purvis: We originally had her coming out of the sea naked, which is very similar to how Honey Ryder comes out of the sea in the book "Dr. No". But Lee [Tamahori] wanted to put the bikini on her, so from a writing standpoint the scene's been ruined!
How much of "Die Another Day" originated with you, and how much with the producers?
Purvis: Well, we come in with lots of ideas, and we just talk to Michael [G Wilson] and Barbara [Broccoli] for many hours about those ideas. They generally reject 99% of them, and then what's left we sort of shape together. The major decision was deciding on North and South Korea as the arena.
Was that you or them?
Wade: I think it was us, because we were taken by the idea of it being the biggest minefield in the world, and we'd had this thought of having hovercrafts. In fact there were different types of hovercrafts we wanted to use, but it was too dangerous, it couldn't be done. That was an interesting idea, the image of the demilitarised zone as one of the last cold fronts, stuffed with mines. The motor of the film, we were thinking initially, is that Bond gets captured and is then traded for another spy and not trusted back home, and so his whole motive then is to get to the spy he was traded for, and kill him. But then it changed a bit.
At the beginning of the film you make James Bond quite fallible. SPOILER: Do you think fans will be able to cope with seeing their hero being captured?
Purvis: I think that fans of the books would see it was in keeping with those books. At the beginning of "The Man With the Golden Gun", the novel, he's been brainwashed and comes back and tries to kill M, and a security divider comes down and separates them, so we were referring to that a little bit having the glass separating M and Bond on the ship.
Wade: We thought it would be good for the film to establish Bond as a human being rather than a superhero. He's not Spider-Man, he's someone who can get caught and hurt. We just thought that would maybe make it a more interesting film. Also for Pierce, it gives him something to do, something to get his teeth into.
Whose idea was it to make Bond's car invisible?
Wade: Well, it was something that we had put on the table as an idea. It was not meant to be totally invisible. In the film, Q says: "To the casual eye it's all but invisible." It's based on a true technology the army are developing where they, say, take a tank, put big screens on it, and the screens show what the cameras are looking at on the other side of the tank. So, it's all true in principle, it's just about how you do it.
Were you given much freedom with the story?
Purvis: It would be boring for us to run through the formula that everyone assumes will be there, and it's dull for Michael and Barbara as well, who have got to go from the very, very beginning to the very end. So, we just tried to change it as much as we could, to stimulate ourselves and them, while working within the framework that you know.
Wade: There aren't any limitations until you come up with something that's not right, and then it's out.
While you were writing this, the 'war against terrorism' was unfolding. Were there any times when you were reading the papers and thinking it was getting a little too close to real life?
Purvis: There was a slight concern. When we first decided on the area, it was Clinton who was in power and it seemed to have a sort of status quo. And then when Bush came in, it all turned a little bit unpleasant.
Wade: We have been careful to say the villain is not representative of all North Koreans. He's a nutcase who doesn't want there to be any reproachment between North and South, so I hope that we're not insensitive to the real issue that's out there.
Purvis: The interesting thing is that Kim... um, whatever his name is [Kim Jong-il], who runs North Korea...
Wade: There goes my comment about sensitivity!
Purvis: ...he's an enormous Bond fan apparently, so I don't know what he's going to think of the film.
