When your main character has a license to kill, you have to expect a good amount of death in your film franchise, but the makers of the 23rd James Bond movie Skyfall decided that in order to move forward, they needed to prove nothing was sacred and that anyone could die in this world of spies and assassins.
(Seriously, if you haven’t seen Skyfall, this is your last chance to stop reading!)
The decision to kill Dame Judi Dench’s M, who has been the handler of 007 for seven movies going back to 1995’s GoldenEye, was something that had been rumored for many months, and in Skyfall they created an entire story around a former MI6 undercover agent named Silva, played by Javier Bardem, who wanted revenge on M for her deserting him in the field.
A few weeks back, ComingSoon.net interviewed Sam Mendes, an interview you can read here. Towards the end of the interview, we asked him about where the idea to kill M came into play and how it was developed.
He told us:
“That was an idea that was floating around when I came onto the project and it was in an early treatment written by Peter Morgan, but it was not done, I thought in the right circumstances and in the right way, but the fact of it is there. It was one of the things that we were most interested – it was the only thing that we kept from the Peter Morgan treatment was that one idea. I was amazed that they would allow it to happen, and when they said yes, I thought, ‘Right, that’s something that needs to then be built into the story from the very beginning. So, let’s go back and work that through.’ That’s what we did, you know? That’s where we were headed the whole time.”
Skyfall is now playing in theaters across the nation. If you’ve already seen the movie, let us know in the comments how you feel about the decision and Mendes’s thoughts on it.
