Posted in: Movies | Tagged: 007, Comics, daniel craig film, dynamite, ian fleming, idris elba, james bond, Vargr, warren ellis

James Bond Writer Warren Ellis Calls For Idris Elba To Succeed Daniel Craig In The Role

In his regular-ish newsletter Orbital Operations (sign up here), Warren Ellis talked about James Bond again.

Ellis is the writer of the new James Bond comic, VARGR, published today by Dynamite, drawn by James Masters.

We've covered his thoughts on Bond before, that may have led to him getting the gig. He talks about the Bond in his comic.

This is a commission via the Ian Fleming estate, and is very specifically the Bond of the books, not the films. If you're an aficionado of the books, consider this, even though it's set in contemporary times (because neither I nor the estate wanted to do period pastiche), to fall somewhere in the last half of the literary canon. This is why there are no significant changes to the Bond of the books in VARGR – the film Bond is necessarily more fluid. This is meant to be Fleming's Bond.

His approach to writing the book

This job turned out to be both incredibly hard — I had to do a LOT of research, a lot of thinking, and a lot of reading to try and approximate Fleming's method, and ended up writing a huge long treatment to assemble the thing — and incredibly easy, as the estate has been an absolute pleasure to work with.  They even forgave me for not being able to resist a film-style cold open for the first issue. Come on. I might be writing the proper Bond, but some things are just too tempting, and I may never get another chance to do that.

How he worked with the artist.

Jason Masters is, of course, the other half of this book, and the other half of the Fleming method – he brings all the detail to the page, makes the world real and observed in the way Fleming did in prose. I feel a bit terrible for making him do things like Google Street View his way down the route I take into Friedrichshain from Mitte, but I can't deny the pleasure of getting him to draw the TT tower or a favourite bar.

The process and the choice of location

It's a wintry book.  I wanted to go to places I knew, more or less, as Fleming did. My Berlin is, perhaps, his Jamaica – a place I go to drink and think and write. And the first time I went to Berlin was in deep winter. I believe I finished my original outline in a coffee shop off Torstrasse. The front of that notebook was full of all the things I knew about Bond: his preferred breakfasts, the source of the shirts and suits he liked, the brand of cigarette he smokes when he can't get his bespoke cancer sticks.

And also justifying a nice headline, on his thoughts on a replacement James Bond for the movies, ahead of what appears to be an upcoming GQ interview.

As I said to, I think, GQ, the other day, I think Idris Elba is the only choice to succeed Daniel Craig in the films. Idris is a massive presence, a brilliant actor, and incredibly smart about story construction.

I have to say, it makes the most sense to me….

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