No Time to Die sequence almost appeared in a Pierce Brosnan Bond movie

By Morgan Jeffery

Published: Monday, 03 October 2022 at 12:00 am

James Bond screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade have revealed that the villain’s lair from No Time to Die almost featured in a much earlier 007 film.

Daniel Craig’s last outing as Bond saw antagonist Safin (Rami Malek) operate from a HQ in the sea of Japan which featured a garden populated by poisonous plants.

The setting for the film’s final act was inspired by Ian Fleming’s novel You Only Live Twice, in which Blofeld possesses his own “Garden of Death” – with Bond producer Michael G. Wilson revealing at a recent BFI event that this idea “has been in every one of their [Purvis and Wade’s] scripts at some point”.

“In the novel, Blofeld lives in this castle with a poison garden in Japan, on an island,” Wade – who along with Purvis has co-written every 007 movie since 1999’s The World Is Not Enough – related at the BFI’s ‘In conversation: 60 years of James Bond’ event.

“[It’s] that thing of always using Ian Fleming as a touchstone[…] – we really wanted to get that in there and we did literally write it into several scripts.”

“It was in Die Another Day at one point,” said Purvis, referring to Pierce Brosnan’s 2002 swan song as Bond. “We always wanted to use it but what was good about this [No Time to Die] is this is actually about poisons, so it was relevant.”

In the most recent Bond outing, villain Safin was born to a family of chemists who supplied poisons to criminal organisation SPECTRE.