Having recently wrapped up shooting on his latest project, the bonkers-sounding “vicious beauty” horror film The Neon Demon, Dutch visual mastermind Nicolas Winding Refn is in the market for a new script. According to Deadline, he might have found it in a story from Neil Purvis and Robert Wade, the screenwriting team that’s contributed work to every James Bond film produced in the last 17 years.
Not much is known about the new film, except that it has both “thriller and action elements,” suggesting that Refn hasn’t decided to take a hard left turn into lavishly photographed, hyper-kinetic period drama, and an Asian setting, worryingly reminiscent of Only God Forgives, his over-the-top follow-up to 2011’s critically beloved Drive.
Still, Purvis and Wade—whose Bond run stretches from 1999’s The World Is Not Enough to last year’s Spectre—are old hands at crafting stories of taciturn, if occasionally quip-prone, professional killers, so this might represent a return to form for the brilliant but erratic Refn. It also leaves us with a sudden craving to see the Dutch director take on 007 himself, although that’s probably just bloody, wishful thinking.