John Hodge

There's a line, there's a brilliant, well, I thought it was brilliant, although it may not have been terribly accurate, play about Mikhail Bulgakov, the Russian playwright, and Joseph Stalin.

called Collaborators by, I think, by John Hodge.

And there's a bit in that where Golgoth goes to the doctors because he's got an incurable condition.

And the doctor says, oh, I saw one of your plays.

And getting that mix right, so hard.

So John Hodge, writer, and Danny Boyle and Irvine, you know, masterpiece I think for me, Trainspotting.

Good, good one.

Uh, uh, song and an album.

And by the end of its run at the cinemas, it was the second highest grossing British film of all time.

And then the screenwriter, his name was John Hodge.

So he won a BAFTA for best adaptation for a screenplay.

And he was also nominated for an Academy Award the same year in the same category.

I was asked if I wanted to be involved and I think the most important thing for me was not to fuck with the energy these two guys had.

I looked at John Hodge's screenplay for Shallow Grave and I thought, there's nothing I can teach this guy about screenwriting.

A, that's very interesting.

The content, that's very interesting.

Quite a lot of the cast are made up of the crew.

Okay.

So John Hodge, the screenwriter who wrote the screenplay, is the security officer in the shoplifting pursuit.

Okay.

So that's tying Alex Garland up from being able to work with him, which means that they haven't got the script finalized for this final film.

And also Boyle's got, he's got Ink coming out, which is why he's doing a promotion tour at the moment, and he's also got an Antarctic-set film penned by John Hodge that is gonna keep him occupied.

So the back burner is not necessarily just because they need to get the financing to make it.

He's confident that they will, but it's 'cause they're busy.

What did you learn from that experience working on the Bond project?

We had a wonderful, it was a wonderful script by John Hodge and we just, I think they just lost, they just got cold feet about it.

What

about it made them have cold feet? Because in the eventual movie, No Time to Die, there's a big character choice in that movie.

Can you talk a bit about how you got that onto screen in the exact tone and shape it was or...

Well, we had, so I think, so Channel 4, it used to be run by this woman, Tessa Ross down here, young man, just so that you know, she's down here.

They developed the script, Shallow Grave, and then they sent out the writer, John Hodge, who I talked about, I was going to do the Bond with, and the producer, Andrew McDonald.

They sent them out to look for a director.