Spectre Deleted Script
Spectre (2015) is the 24th 007 movie, the fourth with Daniel Craig playing James Bond. It is the movie in which all the dots come together and 007 finally realises who's to blame for all of his sufferences and troubles.
James follows a man who is apparently dead, meeting old shadows of his past (such as Mr White), to then find out he was really onto something. This is more or less the general plot.
I recently found out this movie has got a deleted script, which was actually so good to get me wondering why it got changed for the new one.
It affected Bond and Q, more than anything else. The rest was more or less the same.
We might have had the chance to see Q getting in the action, but it got a different turn and the whole idea was deleted.
It all was going to start in Austria, after Q gave Bond a lecture about his questionable behaviour. Even in the finalized version, we can see the quartermaster get into a cable car cabin, when two men, sitting there with him, keep Q from getting out.
At this point, Q starts fearing for his safety and runs to escape the men once he has the chance. He manages to get away from them and lock himself in his hotel room, waiting for 007.
Bond and Madeleine arrive and, after a short discussion and some apologizes, Q gets back to London safe and sound.
But, initially, it was going to have a really different turn.
According to the deleted script, Q was still chased by those man and made it to the hotel room, but his pursuers broke in the place before Madeleine and Bond arrived to the quartermaster.
Once 007 and Doctor Swann make it to the hotel, they find evident signs of intrusion and Q is gone, with just his laptop in self sabotage mode left.
At this point, it's likely that the plot took a different way, probably because Bond found himelf busy trying to get his quartemaster back.
But, in the end, James is captured by Blofeld and thrown into a cell where he finds Q, who presents evident signs of an interrogation.
The two are left in there with no way to get out, despite how they must escape because of Q's not so good physical situation and the place quickly getting warmer and warmer (I think it was something like a oven, I forgot the correct word in both the languages I speak).
Anyway, after Q has recovered his senses he suggests Bond to use the exploding watch to unlock the cell; which he does and successfully gets both out.
However, while they're on their way out of the building, a man attacks them and Bond is forced to fight him. 007 is clearly losing the clash but Q quickly grabs a gun and shots the man, saving James' life.
This last scene is the main reason why I'm so upset with the producers.
How could they conceive such a great plot line and then relinquish it for a torture scene, exchanging Q with Madeleine when Bond meets Blofeld in his headquarters?
I still need to comprehend it.
The rest of the movie is left unchanged, since the deleted script says nothing about the other scenes.
Still, I think that the deleted script was better than the one we've got in the end. It's mostly because I adore Q and he would have gotten more screen time, but also because that script would have lead to a character development.
We know Q as the slender techie who buries himself in tons of work and never gets out of his branch (Fanfictions seem to agree with it).
In Spectre he literally flew to another country (despite his fear of flying) and got chased by a couple of men; which, by itself, already is a big change.
If he had gotten kidnapped and forced to kill a man in order to save Bond, we could have seen how he deals with such a trauma and how much shit he can take: it would have been a complete character representation.
What I mostly like about the deleted script is how it shows Q's strength: thin bodies like his are commonly associated with weakness, but Q isn't weak; his strength shows through his profession, his behaviour and how he deals with Bond.
That deleted script could have been a last confirmation about his might.
I'm also sure that it isn't some kind of fake news because Ben Whishaw talked about a deleted script during an interview: he said they had recorded a scene in which he was holding a gun and shooting at someone. He was also clearly unhappy that they decided to cut all of that and change the plot.
I'll leave here the link for a comic about this issue about Spectre script. It's really good, but it's uncompleted, I'm afraid.
Right under it there also is the link for the script.
