Screenwriter Joshua Zetumer Puts The Polish On 'Quantum of Solace'

It’s been no secret that the script for the 22nd James Bond film has gone through several stages from beginning to end.

Despite rewrites, polishes and starting from scratch, the only names associated with the storyline were the same Bond scribes from 2006’s Casino Royale: Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade … until the brief mention of a ‘new writer’ by actor Mathieu Amalric.

Thanks to a set report posted at Rotten Tomatoes, that new writer finally has a name: Joshua Zetumer.

As director Marc Forster describes the situation: ‘Once I signed on to do [Quantum of Solace], we pretty much developed the script from scratch because I felt that it wasn’t the movie I wanted to make and started with Paul [Haggis] from scratch,’ he said. ‘And I said to him these are the topics I am interested in this is what I would like to say, what’s important to me. And we developed it from there together. Then Barbara and Michael said they liked where we were going and they liked the script.’

Despite worries that the Writers Guild strike would possiby interfere with the Bond script, Forster says that the timing managed to work out in the end. ‘The good thing is that Paul and I and Daniel all worked on the script before the strike happened and got it where we were pretty happy with. Then we started shooting and the only problems I had with the script we were shooting in April, May and June so as soon as the strike was over we did another polish with someone and it worked out with all this stuff coming up. So I was pretty happy with all the work we’d done in January and February so [there won’t be any need for reshoots].’

The man chosen for the job was Joshua Zetumer, a relative newcomer to the screenwriting world (check out Variety’s profile of Zetumer as one of 10 screenwriters to keep an eye out for in the future).

‘He’s a very young writer and he only wrote two or three scripts,’ said Forster. ‘And I read a script of his that I was very fond of and Barbara and Michael liked it. There were a couple of polishes and changes that I wanted to do and I felt that he was very well suited and I thought that he would be good for it and that’s why I hired him.’

Stay tuned to the CBn main page for the most up-to-date and complete coverage of Quantum of Solace.