SPECTRE has come and (just about) gone from the cinematic consciousness, garnering some decent box office dollars and mixed reviews along the way. It’s no secret that the film proved to be one of the most expensive endeavors in cinematic history, but perhaps that’s more suggestive of how the story was shaped together. Spoilers for those who haven’t seen the film, but Christoph Waltz turned out to be the new iteration of Blofeld, and in turn, surprised absolutely no one. However, this was not the case in the early draft of the script.
Sam Mendes on Andrew Scott being the main villain of SPECTRE:
There was a long period in the script, and this is months before we started, where it actually flipped and it turned out that he was the person who was running the show; the person that Bond had been looking for all along. Blofeld didn’t feature in that version of the story. It was a long time ago. But he was a very easy figure to find parallels for in the contemporary political world. And look, not all of them deserve death by Ralph Fiennes from a great height, so please don’t quote me as saying I’m all in favour of killing the head of MI5.
C embodies all the things I most dislike about the security services. The obsessive need for surveillance, the sharing of surveillance between international security organisations, the fact that they are immensely powerful, unelected and almost entirely unknown to us. And the fact that drone warfare is encouraged. M has a very good speech about this, I think, where he says, ‘to kill a man you have to look him in the eye and the licence to kill is also a licence not to kill’, and all the bugs, drones and surveillance in the world can’t make up for that…
Given the previous films featuring Blofeld, as well as the lampooning courtesy of AUSTIN POWERS, I felt that Mendes and Co. were in a good position to play with audience expectations regarding SPECTRE, Blofeld, and who was in control. I was disappointed to see that SPECTRE played out almost exactly how everyone thought it would, right down to Blofeld wearing a stupid jacket, wheeling around on a roller chair and playing with his pet cat. I’m not sure how much of a factor the head of SPECTRE may have been in this draft, but C almost seemed like an afterthought in the finished film. For fans of BBC’s Sherlock, we know Andrew Scott is capable of so much more.
Would you have preferred Andrew Scott to be the main villain?
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