Skyfall Part One and Two

Montreal. Do you live there? This is a message for the people of Montreal, Canada. On February 2nd, 2026, at Lesinoche Video, at 6 p.m., there is a triple bill. Of the movie Groundhog Day. That's right. The same film. Three times in a row. Also, as part of that event, there will also be a screening of Sam Meach's short film 10,000 Years, which features words by me. Ross Sutherland. It's an adaptation of one of the stories from the Groundhog Day episode of this podcast.

So, come see that film in between three screenings of Groundhog Day. That's on February 2nd, 2026. And then, same venue, Le Sinos Video, on February 18th, there will be a rare screening of my documentary film from 2015. Stand by for tape backup. It's called Standby for Tape Backup. This is a film about a videotape I found in my attic, which I pair with a monologue that synchronizes poetically with the images on the tape.

That's part of a double bill with the film Home Video System by Charlene Bambot. That's a film tracing the convergence of popular culture and politics in Pakistan during the 1980s and 1990s. Showing the connections between pop culture and nationalism and how bootleg economies kept the cinema industry alive during periods of censorship. So that February 18th for the VHS inspired double bill and before that February 2nd for the Groundhog Day triple feature.

Screening at Lessinos Video Montreal. Links to both in the show notes of this episode. Thank you, Montreal. Thank you for listening.

Ross Sutherland here. A podcast. Odd stories. Confusing audio experiments. And this episode is certainly no difficulty. This story takes the shape of a DVD commentary track for the 2012 film Skyfall. That means it has been written to synchronize. with the film Skyfall, i.e. you play this recording and the film at the exact same time.

And if you want to do that, there's a sync point coming up very soon. If you want to jump straight to that sync point, then just scrub this podcast forward to this point. Six minutes. And you can get started straight away. Now, of course, you don't have To watch Skyfall at the same time as listening to this podcast. That is purely optional. The story also works on its own as a standalone piece of audio. Making this audio piece has been uh a huge undertaking.

Did I realize just how big when I cavalierly launched into writing it back in November? Uh no. No, I did not know what I was doing. And I feel some elation, I have to say, in finally closing the file on it today. I finally get to come up for air. Good god. Point I'm making is that a show like this, a show that takes risks This and makes mistakes like this. A show like this needs your help to survive. Help me keep.

This ridiculous show going. Support my Patreon via patreon.com. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com forward slash Ross. Sutherland, or you can make a one off donation to the show by going to buymeacoffee.com forward slash imaginary advice. Links to both of those are in the show notes of the episode. Finally, some listeners have contacted me and Why can't you just secretly upload a version of Skyfall somewhere on the internet that has your story already overlaid upon it?

So we don't have to go through the painful process of finding a copy of this fucking stupid film and tryna line these things up ourselves. B we're busy. And we're tired. Why must you make things difficult? And to that I say, yeah, I get it. I get it. This whole project was probably a mistake. And I wish I could. I wish I could just give you guys access. To my own personal version of the film with my vocal already overlaid, but sadly that would be illegal.

It's against the law. And that's why my online copy of the film is password protection. The password is a three-digit numerical code. It's uncrackable. The Enigma machine could never. You'll never guess the three-digit code. It's a reference to something very few people know about. You'll never get it. I mean if you want to try and guess it, because I have put a link to the film in the show notes of this episode, if you wanted to try and guess it you could. But I'm telling you, don't bother.

Don't bother because you won't be able to guess it. And even if you could guess it, which you won't, you would still be incapable of watching the film because your conscience would prevail. Okay. Um let's get into it now.

If you're syncing up Skyfall to this recording, if you've got the DVD ready or the file on your computer ready, just have it paused at 000 before the MGM logo appears. We go from there. I am gonna start the countdown now. So unpause on zero, five, four, three, two, one. Hello. This is Trevor Lang, director of the motion picture Skyfall, or the original director, I should say, before I was replaced by my colleague Sir Sam Mendes.

Thanks to the good people at MGM Studios, in collaboration with the Scottish Prison Service, I have been granted Temporary parole to record this special director's commentary, which I believe will be on the new 4K edition. Little bit out of focus this opening shot. I will cop to that. Still getting my sea legs if I'm honest, this was the first day of filming. People said that I was crazy for wanting to shoot the entire film chronologically.

But it is much better for the actors. And also there wasn't a script, so couldn't jump around, even if I wanted to. All I had was a napkin, that I had shown to the broccolies, that said, in all caps. Spy movie? question mark. And the Broccolies, thankfully, were excited enough by that to get the ball rolling. And we worked out the rest of the details on the fly. So when we shot this opening set piece in Istanbul, we were really launching ourselves into the unknown

Before we go any further, though, let's talk about Danny Craig here, magnificent actor. First day on set. I was a little nervous to meet Danny. We'd only met once briefly at the Broccoli House. Before we were on the opposite ends of the camera here. So just before the first take, I decided to corner him. On the way back from the lavies. and I pushed him against the wall and I said to him Look you, I appreciate you don't know me from Adam.

All my previous films are centered around the teen beach party genre, it's true. I know it looks like I got this job purely because I roll with the broccoli. But trust me, I know my shit. And I know you know your shit, so I just want to reassure you that this is going to be a fun. collaborative sets, we are going to have a really, really good time telling this story together. Whatever story that might turn out to be. Who knows at this point, eh?

Not only that though, but I promise you the next 133 days is basically going to be the coolest, craziest holiday either of us has ever been on. And If you wanna get into some shit while we're out here, we Get into some shit, you know? Cause I am. Fucking wild man when I get off the leash. All you have to do is say the word. And we can off-road, if you know what I'm saying. You and me, if you want, we can go to the dark side. want to get in Willy Wonka's

Great glass elevator. I can make that happen. You wanna forget who you are out here? I can Man, we can get into some real trouble out here. Like Two years of therapy just to re-establish a stable emotional baseline kind of trouble. Just say the word, yeah? And you and me We are out on the town fucking beast mode. Do you understand? Anyway, I looked Deep into those beautiful eyes of his. That to him.

And Danny didn't say anything back in return, which is kinda his style. He was a cool customer. He just nodded. Nothing too demonstrative, but Through that. I knew, but that was his way of saying. Absolutely. You go for it, Trev, if you lead. I will follow. And I've got to say, that instant support from Dan, that reassurance really did give me the confidence to really go for it out there. Take bigger and bigger risks. Both in relation to the film and of course.

the other stuff. And obviously there were terrible consequences to some of the things that I did over those a hundred and thirty three days. Things that destroyed my career and put me in prison and will likely haunt me for the rest of my days. But nevertheless. I will never forget that first proper conversation with Dan at the start of this whole journey where he put his trust in me. He instantly saw my passion.

my honesty, my drive to explore the limits of human consciousness. And he empowered that. And that meant so much to me. And I'm not trying to say that it was Danny's fault for encouraging me. Not at all. I take full responsibility for everything that went wrong out there. It was all me. None of that had anything to do with Daniel Craig. And you know what? There is actually a very good possibility that I wasn't talking to Daniel Craig at all. And that in actual fact.

I had cornered his stunt double, Dawid, who's from Gdansk and only speaks perfunctory English. It's his fourth language, after all. So if that's the case, then I guarantee He didn't understand a single word I was saying. Nevertheless, um I felt empowered.

This is quite a long action sequence, isn't it? You know, first the Range Rovers, then motorbikes, now we're on the train. If you think it's too long to watch, imagine how long it took to shoot the fucking thing. What's going on? I'm still with them. Jerry CCTV. Hated every second of this. Oh, except this day, actually. We had these amazing chicken baguettes for lunch. I actually um remember Craig saying to me, hmm, I like chicken. Now this day was feta flatbreads, I think.

Sushi lunch this day. Uh this was kind of dull, I think. Um can't remember that day. That one's Masaka. Oh pizza rolls. The day we squibbed Craig was a um mushroom risotto, I think. Some kind of grain Cottage cheese. It was quite forgettable. What was that? Uh jack o' lanterns filled with taramicalata. Maybe that was some sort of special occasion. That was quiche. That was crab legs. Duck pancakes. Bratwurst.

Uh just toast that day. Uh meatballs, uh eggnog, mini craps, sherbet dib dabs. Jesus, months and months of my life are literally passing in front of my eyes here. It's enough to give you a panic attack, it really is. I mean, really. What were we thinking? This whole sequence is like the ranting mind of a

demented pensioner. Not that I myself got too much into the weeds regarding the technical execution of this stuff. I just bring everyone together for a meeting every morning and say something like Today, Skyfall is gonna do a big jump. And then He's gonna walk forward five paces. Sometimes I'd throw in what I called a vibe word, like Laguna or Embassy. And then I'd pretty much clock off for the day, and the crew would get to work.

bringing my vision to life. W Sven's still in pursuit. Sometimes afterwards people would come by the cabin and say to me, You know that the name of the main character is James Bond and not Skyfall. to which I would say, you know, fuck off. I've been friends with the broccolies since I was a baby. I know the name of the main character is James Bond. It's James Bond. Codename Skyfall. This is like very basic stuff. The fact that some people on set didn't know that.

It's kind of shocking. And yet I'm the one always treated like an idiot. And um you know, I I don't want to sound paranoid, but I I definitely got the impression that sometime People were deliberately not consulting me about creative decisions because They didn't actually think I'd ever directed a film or knew anything about the Bond franchise. Which is utterly absurd. I absolutely love all the James Bond films. Like um Well there's too many to name, isn't there? Um Dr. No? Never been kissed. Um

Oh god, what's the one with goose in the title? The goose one. All of them, all of them, I love them all. I um you know I w I worship them. Unfortunately, in prison. Um they don't have any of the Bond films. They only have one DVD, and it's um

Coin Scuttsy. So haven't seen the Bond films in a while. Sadly. Uh lots of cutting back and forth here to MI6 in London. Dame Judy Dench looking pissy as fuck. Wonderful actor. Uh take the shot, says M, and so Moneypenny with the sniper rifle tries to shoot the baddie off the train, but spoiler, she hits Skyfall. Skyfall then falls.

Through the sky, hmm bit of a theme of the movie there. Does he fall to his death? Could that be the end of the film? Well, maybe. To be honest, when we shot it we didn't know. Um We'd been shooting by that point. uh for three months in Istanbul. I genuinely thought that maybe by that point we had enough in the can to wrap up the film. But um no, as it turns out, uh everything we had done uh up to that point only got us to the fucking opening credit sequence.

It was about that point in production that I decided that I was going to. intentionally foster some kind of dehabilitating alcohol addiction.

Let's flash back now. to twenty ten. I was dead. vague pre-production work for the film. I probably should have been working on the script, if I'm honest. But at the time The priority was following go-karting. with Adele. It was all part of Adam. elaborate wooing campaign. on my part to bring Adele into the project. Adele is Um she's a private person. And rarely takes a meeting with a stranger. But she can't say no to a go-kart.

So if somebody formally challenges her to She simply has to accept, so I rented out this Enormous race circuit in Milton Keynes. And sure enough, Adele. Turned up with her heavy steep. dressed in these custom gold rally fatigues. Actually, um she even had sponsorship for her racing team. Dell Computers. Anyway, I accidentally ran over her witch doctor. It's d dreadful accident.

He had neglected to stand in the designated safe zone and uh I came off the track at quite a speed and ostensibly smeared this poor witch doctor into the timer. By a miracle, he lived. was touching go for a few weeks, but I hear he's now made a full recovery. Adele, to her credit.

didn't hold a grudge. I mean, she won the race, which probably helped. Also, I did agree to hold on to all of the witch doctor's drugs so it didn't get confiscated by the police. I thought that was the least I could do.

That night. I went back to my hotel and um I decided that I was going to take one of the witch doctor's pills, which turned out to be a capsule of a drug called DMT. Within about twenty minutes, the walls off my hotel room dissolved away. And I basically experienced that night what would turn out to be a prophetic vision. in my mind's eye, I saw A crumbling house bombarded with what looked to me like giant sperm. Instantly I knew that this house would be my final location.

And something terrible was waiting for me there, upon a set washed in blood. Waiting for me. to erase me. When I finally came around from my vision, I discovered to my horror that tide, climbed inside the wardrobe and done the little wee in there Utterly mortifying, really. And I think this is one of the reasons that I blocked out the whole psychedelic episode for so long. Totally forgot about it. Until of course. It all came true. But that wasn't until much later.

Periodically um Throughout my stretch in prison, I've asked myself if I'd paid proper attention to that prophetic vision of mine, would I have done things differently? Would I have perhaps left the project before it even started, if I knew that at the end of the production I would face this blood-soaked record? And if I'm being honest, I have to say probably not.

I would probably have just used that information to get myself to that blood-soaked reckoning a little faster because let's be honest, the film is way too long. And if I already knew what the ending was going to be, I probably could have shaved about forty minutes off the runtime.

I think that would be a good idea. The Prime Minister's concerned. So we have the introduction now of Rafe Feinz's character, Mallory. M's boss. Forgive me, but why am I here? exquisite human being. Who simply by being his perfect self inadvertently makes everybody else feel like an utter piece of shit. Um it's excruciating, actually, being in his presence.

When your current posting is completed, you'll be awarded G C M G little story about Rafe. Um while we were setting up for this scene, Rafe was in the garden, playing a quick game of five a side with the crew, keeping up morale, which of course he does effortlessly, according to my gaffer. He scored a hat trick.

Then, just as Wafe was coming back in from the garden, uh he got a text to say that a painting of his that he'd painted just been sold for a million pounds at Sotheby's, which he'd already arranged to be anonymously donated to a children's hospital. For cunts.

Now if all these London scenes feel a little bit like padding, you'd be right. I initially brought the crew back to London so I could have a couple of cheap weeks while I worked out the rest of the story. But sadly, rather than work out the rest of the story, I reconnected with my drug dealer friend, Christopher.

My one big creative decision that I'd made so far was to kill James Bond, and now that was out. Broccoli's told me I had to reverse it, so fine. But now I was stuck in this narrative cul-de-sac, but I had to film something, so I did a bunch of stuff with Judy. So here we are with M and her laptop butler. Laptop Butler is showing M that MI6 has been hacked and that M's office computer MI6 is the source.

Laptop Butler here, of course, played by Roy Kinnear, fresh from playing Hamlet at the National. And I think that experience carried Straight into his role here. So now, uh, the Butler's laptop has also been infected with this lame Terry Gillingham style animation. Hackers are sort of the modern equivalent of Monty Python, I think. They both had that same combination of being extremely silly whilst also being deeply unpleasant misanthropes.

It was actually Judy who suggested we use this film to draw attention to Britain's long history of war crimes carried out by our intelligence services. I actually found the idea so compelling. I suggested we immediately go and blow up the MI6 building. That idea of mine eventually got watered down to us pretending to blow up MI6. as a scene in the movie. Still bit of a nothing.

And now we cut from this fiery earth shattering explosion to a sexual explosion, i.e., intercourse Dan Craig midcoitus with a woman. Danny boy, danny boy, the pipes are calling. So yes, we are now back with Skyfall himself. No longer dead, not anymore. He's just been laying low these three months. Shagging his way through a Turkish beach community.

The film crew had only just left Turkey a few weeks earlier, so um yeah, they were pretty pissed that I now wanted to go back again and shoot an extra week. But well Once the Broccolies and I came collectively to the decision to not kill James Bond in the opening ten minutes of the film. Uh it just felt necessary to add in this little beat here to paper over the new change in direct.

Almost the entire crew in this shot here. Sadly, most of the people in this shot ended up testifying against me in court. But this day was a good day. Look at this scorpion here. God. Magnificent actor. Let me just briefly return to that editing decision from a few minutes ago, where I cut directly from an exploding building in London to The climactic moment of a sex scene because discovering that juxtaposition was

Quite revelatory for me on a personal level. Making art is always a journey of self discovery. I had no idea that blowing things up would have such a profound effect on me in a erotic sense. I found that. I was quite um beguiled sexually. by the image of spontaneous eruptions of fire and smoke, particularly if I was in some way responsible for the eruption.

It's called pyrophilia. I know that now. It's quite tragic, really, because most pyrophiliacs go through their entire life without ever knowing that they even have the condition. It's just an aspect of one's personality that one simply doesn't learn about oneself until one finds themselves, you know, directing a Bond film.

So all these feelings are regrettably awakening within me throughout this shoot, and um Yeah, I will admit I did actually talk to my crew about the possibility of these coffins here, draped in Union Jacks, whether they could be rigged to explode and blow up M here. But Thankfully, I was so out of my mind on cocaine during this period that my creative requests mostly came out as a kind of incomprehensible cackle. So a lot of this stuff went graciously unnoticed. Even at the time.

I knew my judgment was off. I was self aware enough to recognise that I had a problem. So to protect the film from this growing kink of mine, I decided to put some Additional guardrails in place. By rails. Yes, I mean cocaine. Which I had found in large enough quantities would prevent me from Any kind of sexual proclivity. So whenever I felt the sudden sexual urge

to blow something up. I would simply pop back to the hotel for a quick cold shower and a drug binge, and then I would be straight back on set to direct our magnificent actors. Like this wonderful bit of sparring between Danny and Judy here. Skyfall sneaking into Em's house to call her a bloody bitch. God, this is real. Electric cinema, yeah. Speak for yourself. Ronson didn't make it, did he?

No. Actually I don't think I was on set for this. I guess I must have been back at the hotel that day. Bravely, you know. Fighting my sexual perversions. I am sorry to go on about this stuff. I'm just trying to share my side of the story, which was somewhat mangled by the courts and the British press. I just feel one doesn't get credit for all the explosions one doesn't set off. People tend to fixate on the small amount of explosions that actually happen.

Put your things into storage. Standard procedure on the death of an unmarried employee with no next of kin. In case you hadn't noticed, production has moved once again back to London. Um But this time I felt like I had more of a plan going forward, which was this. I thought, what if Rather And jumping straight to another fancy international location. And kicking off our high octane espionage plot. What if, rather than that, what if for the next hour of the film?

Skyfall basically just hung around. waiting to be sent on a mission. And then we can just Fill that runtime with various conversations with his colleagues, saying, hmm, you look a bit peaky, Skyfall. Maybe you shouldn't be allowed to go on a mission after all. Now that might seem like an unconventional structure for a spy film. But I had three very good reasons why I thought this should be the direction. Um, first reason was

I saw this as a kind of intentional mirroring of my personal experience making the film. There were lots of questions circulating regarding my competence, and so I wanted to use my art. to explore all of the emotions that that was stirring up. I could have just written a sad poem in my journal, but you know, I had this billion-dollar sandbox at my disposal. Am I seriously not going to use this incredible resource? as a therapeutic tool to make me feel better about myself.

My second reason for keeping Bond off work in London was W well, I I was becoming increasingly worried about potentially losing control of myself, libido-wise, if we attempted any more big action sequences. So I just thought it was safer if maybe I steered the rest of this Bond film towards something more conversational, more philosophical, something a bit closer to my dinner with Andre, for example.

My third and final reason though, for keeping the crew. here in London for as long as possible was really from a practical standpoint. I needed to stay local. Since returning to London I'd become in the city. Particularly in relation to organised crime, I'd racked up a rather significant amount of debt due to the various medical supplies required to keep my pyrophilia in check, but eventually various pipers needed to be paid, and so I came up with an arrangement. Through which a portion of

we had made for the film would be donated to a local crime family known as the funny bastards. Absolutely delightful bunch of that. Young guys, um very entrepreneurial. The name Funny Bastards I believe is due to their close association with laughing gas.

Absolutely love this scene. Really wish I'd been there on this date. Skyfall is having a psych evaluation, running a little bit of fun word association. Now this draft plays fine, but I do still prefer my original draft of Bond's responses. If I remember correctly, it was something like Penis. Agent. Penis. Woman. No cry. Heart. Break hotel. Bird. Shack M and M's, i.e. the sweeties. Bored Moonlight Board Murder Interested Country Dancing Skyfall Hello Delivered in a kind of unhinged way.

M on the other side of the two way mirror. is supposed to say Christ I wouldn't trust that little skank. Bat his own eyelids. Which was something I actually overheard Judy say about me just a few days earlier. Judy was probably a little bit shocked to see her words from a private conversation suddenly appear in following day's pages, but what could I say? I know a good line when I hear one. I was trying to use this production.

As a cipher for my own contemporaneous experience. So, in fact, lots of the horrible things that people were saying about me made it into the script. I actually wrote a scene in which Mallory, the Ray Fine's character, calls Bond an incompetent Coke weasel. Um, I also decided to shoot a scene where we saw Bond snorting coke off a framed picture of the Queen and then go watch The Lion King.

on the West End whilst totally off his face and um accidentally evacuate himself during the song Um Hakuna Matata. She's ready. It's uh quite subtle, but if you squint, you can sort of identify the autobiographical elements beneath the surface.

I can't actually remember if any of those scenes made the final cut. Um well, we'll see. Stealing all the replica guns from the set was a little bit trickier. Than I'd anticipated. All of the weapons were kept in a gun safe. which was itself kept inside a special room with a combination lock, and both of those combinations were known only to our onset armorer. But I thought to myself, What if?

the numeric combination. They've just I mean they wouldn't be stupid enough to have just used as the combination Double O seven. But they had, so that certainly made things a bit easier. Here's the plan as I presented it. to my gangland friends. I said to them, Listen, I'll be your inside man, but you guys have to come on set to get the guns yourselves.

I'm a professional storyteller, so I know how to create a good cover story that will give you guys access to the set. And for that story, we're going to play on your two main assets. Asset number one. Some of you guys are very, very young looking. Most of you guys are still teenagers after all. So let's pick a handful of guys from your organization, the youngest looking guys, to do this job. Asset number two.

Your chronic addiction to nitrous oxide means you guys always have a ton of balloons on you at all times. Nothing says innocent more than a child holding a bunch of balloons. So let's get these young lads, hand them a bunch of balloons each, put them in a nice shirt, we're not gonna have any problems. So when your delegates arrive at the security gate, get them to ask for me, I'll sign them in as kids from a Make a wish foundation.

I'll walk them on set if they want. They can even do a quick meet and greet with Danny and Dame Judy. Not rafe, because we'll be here all fucking day. But then At some prearranged time, I'll give them a tour of the fuse box in the basement. They can then tie me up, kill the power, and then they'll have a good six minutes or so to pop into the armory and as many replica weapons as their heart desires. And then they can, you know,

themselves out, but there's no security footage of the crime. I can plead ignorance of the whole heist and claim I was duped to. You'll get your guns and we'll consider my debt paid.

I will admit um the gangsters were a little unsure about the potential risks to begin with, but I storyboarded it all out for them. and that put their minds at ease somewhat. Sadly though, it turns out I'm not very good at storyboarding and due to a couple of mistakes made um on my part, the gang regrettably ended up turning up twelve hours early for the heist.

Also due to a communication breakdown, rather than a small delegation of the gang, the entire criminal organization turned up at the gates, all three hundred members in nice shirts festooned with balloons. Also I'm led to believe that the balloons were not filled with air, but you know. Chuckle gas. Yes, ma'am. But of course, at the time I was not at Waterloo Tunnels to walk them past security. I was still busy shooting this scene out on location. And um because I have a no phones policy on set.

I had absolutely no idea about the the extremely upsetting events that were simultaneously unfolding on the other side of the city. I was just laser focused on these wonderful performances from Dan here and Benjamin here. Fantastic watching these two guys go at it. And of course, getting to film inside the gorgeous National Gallery. What a treat. It's like a palace. The royal owners have been executed.

The furniture destroyed and now the peasants get to just hang out inside making excuses just to be there, even though it's boring and there's nothing to do. My initial plan was to have Dan and Ben sit in front of the painting The Ambassadors by Hans Holben the Younger because of that wonderful hidden memento mori, which felt like a nice

motif uh appropriate somehow. But Danny and Benjamin wanted to use a Turner and had worked out this whole exchange, so I said, fine. You know, I haven't written any script anyway. It's hard. unbeknownst to us, this was the exact moment that a gang of some Three hundred teenage criminals forced their way onto our water loose set.

and were proceeding to burn the entire place to the ground. I don't know if you can imagine being in the shoes of the people on set that day, to um suddenly find oneself surrounded by adorable looking children from the Make a Wish Foundation. who all then suddenly start huffing on their teddy bear balloons and throwing Molotov cocktails. Judy Dench, I heard, had to scramble under a bit of loose carpet.

Seeing as I'd already given them the combination, they still managed to steal all the replica guns, and all three hundred lads somehow managed to flee the scene before any emergency services arrived. No fatalities, thankfully. But my life was very much in danger, you see, as um because I hadn't been there in person to walk the boys in and facilitate the cover story. the gang still believed that I had essentially welched on our arrangement.

So the word was that the funny bastards had now put me on their kill list. I was to be murked on site, uh which yes is as bad as it sounds, sadly. So hearing that, I thought maybe this would be

a really great moment in the script for Bond to go and do something on the other side of the planet. So, uh we moved production to Shanghai, which was um About as far as I could get from both the British police and the huge criminal gang that I just armed to the teeth. Skyfall, having a lovely midnight swim here. Danny Craig was pretty sick of me by this point. I mean He was already being forced to improve.

Most of the script. I think he also probably suspected my involvement in the teenage fire assault upon our multi million pound London set Look at Dan, giving me the evil eye there. Eyes of a strangler. I'm not sure whether Dan was picking up on my guilt or um My arousal, I hate to say it, but this is the burden of the pyrophiliac. One simply cannot help one's horniness around a magnificent blaze.

like that. I mean I was obviously mortified. Absolutely wretched with guilt and fear. Also, I was terrified about the potential repercussions. And yet. I was also feeling Very erotic. I couldn't help myself, and Dan might have you might have picked up on that. Of course. The biggest shame about fire attack was that No one bothered to be a little bit more than a little bit. It turn on any of the cameras.

We could easily have worked that whole escapade into the story. I'm absolutely sure of it. One hates to have one's livelihood go up in flames and not even have a camera running. Dan barely said a word to me for the entire time we were in Shanghai, so I basically said to him, Fine, don't want to talk. Don't talk at all. We'll do the entire sequence without any words. See how much you like it then. You can just tit about like Charlie Chaplin for a Couple of weeks.

When the light on Danny's gun lights up. Look at this little smile here. Ooh. Ooh, Betty shot someone. Oh no, sad face. Maybe guns aren't funny, after all.

What incredible non dialogue scenes, Shakespearean action. I flew in the baddie from the Istanbul sequence and uh I said to him, We're just gonna shoot you and Danny wandering around for a few days. Roger's gonna make it look like both of you are trapped inside a giant pinball table. Work the rest out amongst yourselves. I'm off to the State Security Bureau to request asylum status as a political refugee.

Cause um as I mentioned, I was a little apprehensive about returning to Britain. Um plus I really like China. I'd happily relocate, but you know, I didn't have time to go through the official green card process. So I thought selling state secrets might Be a quick way to secure a residence and maybe get the MSS to pay for it as well. And the thing about making a Bond film is You have a lot of Very official. Military documents just knocking about the place.

And perhaps this is a good moment for me to shout out our magnificent prop department. Fantastic bunch of artists, um incredible eye for detail. Always working through the night because at two AM Called somebody up and said, Oi, tomorrow I need a I don't know to pull an example out of thin air ultra-realistic MI6 dossier containing information on every British counterintelligence agent currently embedded. than the People's Republic of China. Something like that.

So anyway, I wasn't on set for a lot of this whole sequence. I was mostly, um, sitting in a waiting room, over at the SSSB, waiting for someone to process my spanking new Chinese passport. Now you must believe me, at the time I genuinely thought my plan to sell spy information to a foreign power was an incredibly good idea. As good as any creative idea that I'd had for the plot for Skyfall. It wasn't until much later that I realized that

It was actually the same idea as the plot for Skyfall. God, I sort of I did know that I heard it somewhere before. I mean it's no big deal really. I mean it's not a crime to plagiarise yourself, is it? Um fraud and um conspiracy to commit espionage under the Official Secrets Act. Those are crimes. So maybe I shouldn't have been quite so cavalier with my creative license.

In the end, the Chinese secret police didn't give me a passport. They just kept me trapped in their waiting room for three days without food or a toilet whilst they ransacked my hotel room. Eventually they did release me from their building, on the understanding that I threw myself down their fire escape a couple of times. And I was happy to oblige. They did follow me though, uh the secret police. I I ended up sort of running, shrieking through the city, fearing for my life.

Anyway, eventually I lost them and um at that point it was safe to finally return here to the set. I was a little bit hysterical when I arrived, uh you know. babbling, rolling around on the floor like a baby. Sheer terror. Shockingly though, um not one member of the crew had noticed that I'd been missing for the last three days. Which um was a little bit galling.

However, I've got to say, I think they did some of their best work on the film while I was away. I still love what they came up with here. We may not have used my choice of painting in the gallery scene. But how's about this for a painting with a hidden memento mori? All it takes is for the viewer to slightly alter their perspective, and suddenly what do they see within the paint? But Bang! Death

This was all invented by my DOP, Roger Deakins. He came up with this whole assassination sequence, but apparently, Roger tells me that he um initially got the idea for it from a drug fuel. fueled rent off mine, uh on the plane when we were flying out here. Apparently I was shrieking at him about how All art is secretly approved. And you know I've no memory of saying any of that, but Roger took it in and It it's incredible, really.

see the persistent thoughts of one's own demented brain reflected back sober. crisply. Powerfully. Felt as if Roger. had pulled something. From my understanding. Into my waking mind. And watching back the dailies of this moment, I found myself. Starting to obsess over this concept. Art that secretly contains a death.

Those of you that have read about me in the papers probably know where this is heading, but This is the moment when I first began to formulate the possibility of using this motion picture of ours to Well there's really no nice way to say it. To conceal a real life killing. Just as a still life painting might contain a skull to remind us that one day we will die. Could a motion picture, I wondered, contain within it.

A real life death one that could only be seen from certain angles with certain eyes, but It would be there for those who knew where to look. A real life death as a message, a reminder of. human fragility of our mortality. It was a uh an unconventional idea. Perhaps a little dare I say it, a little art house But this was something I just kept turning over in my mind as the shoot continued on to the Macau Gambling District.

That's where we are now. Uh in a casino hotel in Macau. Danny and the wonderful actor Nomi Harris having some flirty banner. By this point I'm happy to say that I had managed to curb the majority of my drug taking. China, after all, has some of the most stringent anti narcotics laws in the world. Just the ambient amount of cocaine found in my beard back in England would be enough to get me executed for trafficking in China. So much to the relief of my crew, I was no longer a drug addled mess.

Of course I was now in withdrawal, um, permanently covered in sweat and invisible beetles. And without drugs in my system twenty four seven, my pyrophilia was reawakening and I was beginning to have quite disturbing, elaborate sexual fantasies about having sex with burning buildings. Not inside, with. Um

And I was unable to sleep or eat. And I was still utterly terrified to my core that the Chinese secret police were about to you know, pull me off the street, take me into a secret facility, and then drop me into a giant food blender. So I was still inebriated around the clock basically to try and take the edge off it all. He's a bureaucrat. You should do your homework. I'm embarrassed to share that um these guys had to do this scene multiple times because I kept forgetting not to talk.

I just kept thinking that it was just the three of us hanging out together in a hotel room and having a chat, and so I'd just strike up and say something like, Uh, shall I put a C D on? And then Everything would stop and Danny would yell at me, oh Trevor, this is a dramatic scene. Did you forget again? And I'd go, Oh yes, sorry, sorry, my mind was wandering again, got a lot on my plate. Sorry about that.

And then Danny would pace about and punch a couple of wooden beams and then we'd start all over again. And I did have a lot on my mind, to be fair. I knew it was only a matter of time before either the British authorities or my gangland friends or the Chinese secret police caught up with me. And the only thing me from my enemies was this film, really. Through the funds and the means it provides, I can stay on the run for the time being.

But it was like being on this melting ice floor, like the budget was dwindling. One way or another we were going to have to wrap in five, six weeks and No matter where I'd escaped to wherever I was, when the music finally stopped, I would be royally fucked. Killed or arrested basically.

So this is what got me thinking, if my life was already going to be over when the film rapped, why give someone else the pleasure of taking my life? If it's going to end, I should be the one to end it. And also, while I have it, I should use my power as director to really make it a bloody good suicide. I can use this Bond film, I thought, to engineer an incredible end to myself, using whatever influence I have remaining over the story. I can create an incredible set. To facilitate my death.

What's more, I can get it on film. And more than that, I can get it in the film. If I engineer my suicide so it happens in a shot so expensive that it would be impossible for my successor to edit around the footage. It would end up in the film. This was the idea I suspect that had been percolating in the background of my brain ever since I took on the project. Now, at last, I realized its purpose. Skyfall was to be my coffin. Yes, but on the screen I would live forever. Mostly in infamy.

Nevertheless, it would be the Easter egg to end all Easter eggs. A folk legend that of course everyone would deny that Broccolies would make sure no one ever spoke of it. But yet The rumour would remain.

So here we are on the gaming floor of our Macau Casino. Skyfall now finally coming face to face with our female anti-hero character, Severine, played by Bernice Machlaw, who is a Wonderful actor. Do I use that phrase too often? Wonderful actor? Maybe. I just think acting, all acting, is wonderful. Somebody in front of you, pretending to be someone else. What's not to like? So, um, we've just seen Skyfall collect a large suitcase of money.

I wanted to use real bills for this scene, but the broccoli's requested that we use fake cash instead. In fact, the broccolies insisted that the money should be purposefully bad replicas. To um prohibit any potential risk of the prop being stolen or misused. So I guess the Broccolies were on to me by that point. I uh I did feel a little bit personally victimized by that decision.

Because as you might imagine, uh a big suitcase of free money would absolutely get me out of my current Life threatening situation. I could bribe my way out of China, pay my way off that Merck list back in England, pay my way clear of any connection to the Waterloo fire, and still have enough left to buy myself a nice super yacht. or a zoo, maybe. But no, no, we had to use fake bills with Woody Woodpecker's face on them.

I don't know. If you like that sort of thing. Technically I directed this scene, but I I think I was mostly just hiding behind the monitor with my notebook trying to come up with a fantastic way to kill myself. Because I wanted to factor my suicide into the background of some future action set piece, I ended up doing the most amount of story development that day than I did for the entire rest of the shoot. I actually worked out some future scenes for once.

Specifically I came up with this idea for uh a big action sequence that I wanted to set on the Japanese island of Hoshima. Now, if you've never heard of Hoshima, it's basically an island sized ghost town. Once it was a mining community, it was abandoned in the seventies, untouched ever since, and now it's this crumbling ruin. It looks like positively post apocalyptic, a wonderful atmospheric place for one to attempt suicide, particularly given the budget that we could spend on the whole thing.

So I came up with a scene that we could shoot there that could also potentially conceal my death. And then I passed it on to the crew to work out the rest of the details. Obviously I kept stum about the whole suicide business in general. It helps for a director to hold some stuff back lest it jeopardise the whole scene. Of course, uh was deeply unwell at the time. And I feel quite sorry for this past version of me that was seriously considering ending his life.

And the fact that I had turned my suicide into this grandiose cinematic gesture only made it harder for me to recognise the error of my ways. It's hard to locate reason within art because art creates its own reason. And so I found myself quite seduced by this creative project of mine that I'd mapped out in my little notebook. At the center of it all, uh yeah, I'd lost hope, you see. And what I failed to realise at the time is that there's always hope.

Fundamentally so one never knows what the future might bring. But those days filming in Macau, for some reason I changed. Couldn't imagine a future.

Until uh one night, after we'd rapped filming for the day, when I won one hundred and eighty-five million dollars on the Baccharat table. As you point out, that's Hong Kong dollars converts to about 20 million British sterling. Now I had put up about a million pounds of the film's budget on the table to begin with, but that still meant I was up about 19 million.

Quite unbelievable turn of events. I spent the rest of the night in the back office of the casino, filling out forms, going through the tedious verification process. So it was actually about 7 a.m. when I found out. received the cashier's cheque for my winnings. And I was offered a security detail To escort me straight to the bank to deposit it. But I was already due on set by then, sadly. And I did also really want to rub it in some people's noses. So I said to the casino, it's cool that.

I'll take the check in myself later. Anyway. I get on set and I see Danny. He's limbering up for this Kimodo dragon fight scene here. FYI. We weren't allowed to use a real Komodo dragon for this scene of the film, so sadly instead we had to use CGI. But so the actors still had something to react to. In the space where the Komodo dragon should be, I placed a large Argentinian rattlesnake. Little tricks in filmmaking like this really do make all the difference.

So anyway, in between setups, I took Danny to one side, check in hand. And I said to him, Look, I know I have been an incoherent mostly antagonistic presence on set throughout this process. A dead weight at best. You've all had to carry me, do my job for me. I appreciate that. I really do. And yes, if you're wondering

I am personally responsible for the destruction of our Waterloo set. Also, this entire production is now being monitored by Chinese intelligence. You might not know that, but we might all be at risk, and that's my fault too. I think you already had your suspicions. Well, you were 100% correct. I'm just being a straight shooter here by telling you this, okay Dan? Just respect my candor, okay? Respect it.

Because I'm not just owning up to my mistakes here. I am promising you that I am going to fix everything that I've broken. And then I handed Danny the check. And I said to him, Read that. Because with this I am going to make everything right. This is me showing you that you can put your trust in me again. So, do you trust me? Danny looked at the check, and then he looked at me, and he nodded, and I thought We understood each other.

So when Daniel Craig suddenly started screaming, I was confused. And that was when I realized that I had just been bitten. by an Argentinian rattlesnake that had somehow Slithered. Off its mark. And I had to be rushed to a hospital to receive a critical anti-venom treatment. Got myself stuck on a ward for forty eight hours, which meant I didn't get back behind the camera for this bloody chow sex scene, which had been my idea in the first place.

Anyway, when I was in hospital, I thought leaving my check in the possession of Hollywood actor Daniel Craig was probably one of the safest places that I could leave something that. But when I caught up with him back at the hotel that night, he acted like he had no idea what the fuck I was talking about. What check, Trevor? What heartfelt confession of all your wrongdoings?

I told him, don't play fucking games. I literally saw you complete an extremely acrobatic action sequence. Then I walked over to you. You were eating a chicken sandwich. And then we had that conversation and then I passed you the check. And then I was bit by a snake. Dan was like, what the fuck are you talking about? I I'm vegan. I hate chicken sandwiches.

That was the point when I just started screaming. Because liking chicken is one of the few things I know about Daniel Craig. I had no idea what was going on anymore. Dan then bops me on the nose. Down I go, utterly stunned. And then Dan says, we're done. He says, he's gonna go tell the broccoli that he wants me off the project. I'll get to direct the scenes on Hashimer Island next week, but after that, I am gonna be officially relieved from my duties and he's gonna make sure of

I know the crew are separating us, and both Danny and I are getting frog marched into separate taxis to the airport. You see, whilst we'd been finishing up on Macau, the second unit had also been working hard, prepping for the scenes I'd written for Hoshima Island. Although if the crew really knew what I had them building. Perhaps I'd have been less in a hurry to get there. Here they are, Skyfall and Severin in this beautiful boat, heading out towards this dead island construction of mine.

They're supposed to be heading to the lair of the main villain of our story, the man behind all the pain. I remember being on the other side of the camera here, looking at Daniel Craig and wondering why are you doing this to me? Why are you torturing me like this? I had so many questions. But there was one thing I knew for certain. I was still the one telling the story. For now, the story was still mine to tell, and I would write my way.

A happy ending. I would not let this film kill me by suicide or any other means. I had fleetingly seen. A path to happiness. I didn't care how convoluted I had to make the second half of this Bond film. I was going to get what I wanted. However, that was probably going to involve murdering Daniel Craig. Yes. It was definitely going to involve murdering Daniel Craig.

So here we are, following both Severine and Skyfall, as they are escorted at gunpoint through this strange island, this crumbling ghost town, which is being used as a secret base for our hitherto unseen arch criminal, Raoul Silver. Now we decided to hold back this meeting. with the central villain character to the halfway point of the film because uh I I hadn't written them. Not the foggiest.

this guy was gonna be, apart from the name, of course, had the name. Great name. But that was it. But we couldn't kick that can down the road any longer. You've really got to get the villain in before the whole film is over. Now I had a long list of potential villain ideas. Um a Russian circus strongman who can fire poison blow darts from a harmonica. Um a man with a split personality that was one idea one personality is Greatest sniper in the world. The other personality.

Airman of Mensa, so both very smart and very dangerous, but only one at a time. That's the Achilles heel there. Um there was also talk of a Kind of feral dog man? A sort of genetic experiment gone awry. McJagger was interested. The one I pitched really hard to the broccolies, though, was I wanted Raoul Silver to turn out to be. Skyfall's evil twin brother. And I was gonna get Danny Craig to play both sides. Um the evil one was gonna have buck teeth and a pet cockroach.

Doubling up like this is obviously great for budgetary reasons. But also it would significantly increase the chances of me being able to injure Daniel Craig on set, which was part of the private campaign of violence that I was now launching against the man.

The way I saw it, if I knocked Craig about a bit, I could probably scare him into giving me back the money that he'd stolen off me. And if that failed, I would simply engineer a deadly accident onset and prize that cashier check of mine out of his cold dead hands.

And you're not nearly the agent I was. I can tell you that. You have to remember my state of mind here. I was a man in the throes of narcotic withdrawal, on a kill list for a London gang, pursued by both British and Chinese authorities. And also I didn't know that you could cancel and reissue cashier's checks. I thought they were different from normal checks. But yeah, apparently

Anyway, I didn't know that I could have just called up the casino and had it reissued. Hence the whole plotting of murder business. So obviously, I have some regrets there.

Anyway, the Broccolies hated the evil twin idea. Instead, they wanted to hire Javier Bardem, and so here he is, wonderful actor, goes without saying. But Because we only hired him twelve hours before his first scene. Harriet only had the length of his plane ride to come up with a chstick. So apparently Javier based the look of silver on his childhood orthodontist, a man he clearly despised. The way that I originally planned this whole confrontation was

Very different from what you're seeing here on screen. Silver was originally supposed to take Skyfall out to the courtyard where he had this giant catapult set up. Silver was supposed to threaten Skyfall with it, you know, plop em in the big spoon. Threatened to fling him into a building. And then during the ensuing fight sequence, Skyfall was supposed to launch one of Silver's goons in the catapult, propelling said. into a passing helicopter, and blowing it up.

Of course almost all of the effects would be done in post. We just needed the physical catapults and a small to medium sized explosion for the helicopter. Digitally added later. That was the scene that I pitched to my team. Um, I originally had a secret plan to use this scene to take my own life. I was originally going to. run on set during the filming of this scene and launch myself for real in that catapult into the explosion. And uh That was gonna be my legacy. Capture forever and celluloid.

Now that I had refound my lust for life, so to speak, I thought to myself, well, you know, if I'm not gonna fling myself, maybe I could use the catapult to fling Daniel Craig into something. Ideally not. Kill him. Yeah. But absolutely severely incapacitate him, so I could force a filming extension, search his room, psychologically dominate him, etc. etc. But then in comes Javier Bardem with his strong opinions about catapult. Oh no, Trevor. That doesn't feel right for the character at all.

I don't think Raul Silver would use a catapult. He's too sophisticated. He would use a trebuchet. Well, Javier, I said, we haven't built a fucking trebuge. We've built a catapult. Okay, he says to me, but I'm telling you, if Raul Silver is going to use a catapult, I'm gonna have to redesign the entire character from scratch. He's gonna need a completely different silly wig. Maybe a big Don King style back-combed electrified look. Maybe pair that with a zoot suit and a single sequined glove.

'Cause that's the kind of villain who would own his own catapult. If that's what you want, Avier says, I can give it to you. Of course that means we're gonna have to reshoot everything that I've done so far, like that huge one shot monologue scene of mine. We're gonna have to do that all again with my new look. Except this time, I'm gonna need to arrive in a slow metal lift that's even slower than the one we shot today.

And for the record I was willing. I wanted to see where this was going. I thought Javier was cooking here. But Broccolies wouldn't stump for the reshoot. So in the end, no catapul and no trebuge. And Javier instead got to come up with his own action set piece.

Craig was now mostly keeping to his trailer whenever he was off camera. He'd hired extra security to keep me away from him. Even on set, he would only talk to me by passing me notes. Most of which were aggressively sketched. Small penises. From Craig's perspective, he just had to get through the rest of these Hoshima scenes, and then I'd be relieved of my duties. According to the Broccolies, my successor, Sam Menders, was apparently already en route.

But what the Broccolies didn't know, and Craig didn't know, is that I already had my contingency plan in place. They were playing Twat Draft. with a chess master, and I was already ten moves ahead. You see, The art department had already built me my catapult. Now that it wasn't needed on set, no one was paying attention to it, I was free to move that catapult wherever I wanted.

Ironically, my new plan was in fact inspired by the scene that's playing out on screen right here, where Bond is forced to try and shoot a tumbler of whiskey off the top of Severin's head here. So in a funny way I have ye to thank for inspiring me with this crummy William Tell ripoff. See I'd carefully positioned my catapult just beyond this courtyard on the other side of these buildings here.

on the catapult I had positioned, an office chair that I'd stolen from my Video Village. Video Village is the little trailer where I have all my monitors set up to review footage, etcetera. So I'd borrowed a chair. I Googled the exact weight of the chair, very important information. And then I'd loaded it onto the big spoon. And precisely Angled the catapult so that it would fling the chair over the wall into the courtyard, taking out that little drinks table right next to Daniel Craig.

Yes, it was an incredibly difficult shot, but I knew the scene. I had detailed drawings of the location to work out my trig. It's a very static scene, so I knew precisely where everyone was standing as long as everyone stayed on their fucking mark. Craig was going to literally shit his pants. It was the perfect message. Once he knew that I could get to him anywhere, anytime, the check would be back in my hands faster than you can say. Cowboys and aliens.

Anyway, I fired the office chair at these poor fuckers. Didn't even make it over the wall, but it's not my fault. I'm pretty sure I would have precisely taken out that little table if I'd remembered. To properly secure the catapult before firing. Sadly, I forgot to put the brakes on. And the force of the fired catapult instead caused the catapult to shoot backwards.

Rolling down the hill behind me and colliding with Video Village at the bottom. Sending the entire trailer, I'm afraid to say, over the edge of the cliff and into the sea below. And so I thought to myself Looks like I'm Going to be faking my own death.

So that's what happened. The story returns to London now. Skyfall has brought in the baddie, having snatched him up off his secret island. From here on out, officially this is Sir San Mendez. behind the camera. He's the one officially calling the shots. And I'm sure Sir Sam would like to take full credit for the rest of the film from here on out. In actual fact. I still had a significant hand in the direction of the story.

From now on, I'm more influencing things from the shadows. Phantom of the Opera style. I'm in the walls now. I'm under the floor. I'm a voice in the wind, subliminally influencing the story. Best I can through small. Subtle acts of sabotage and a dab of neurolinguistic programming. The catapult accident on Hoshima Island did halt production for a while.

Death was investigated by the Japanese authorities. They found my The underwater wreckage of the video village, which I had intentionally discarded there for this reason. There were plenty of it. NUCKS on Hashima Island for me to hide myself away until the crew was ready to return to the UK. I was able to smuggle myself home. Inside a flight case for transporting candles. Part of Daniel Craig's rider is that he insists.

having in his trailer. Something called a candle tree. It's a raw iron structure that holds fourteen giant luxury Parisian candles which as luck would have. who's roughly the same weight as a human being. So I dumped the wax and Really not that different at all to coming back to England in the coffin. In fact, it would have been considerably better, on the whole, to have travelled home in a coffin, actually. If you can imagine being crushed into a fetal position, breathing through a tiny crack.

For roughly twenty three hours. Plenty of time there for me to consider my life choices. On the plus side, now that I was technically dead, there was considerably less chance of me being murdered by my gangland associates back in London. Equally, I was less worried now about British authorities tracking me down. for the Waterloo fire or conspiring to sell secrets to the Chinese. As long as I was able to maintain this particular cover story and

dead convincingly, which I was pretty confident I could do. That said I still had unfinished business with this film shoot. Scores to settle, vengeance to enact, havoc to cry. Hence my decision to stay close and sequester myself away. on the film set, usually hiding in a bin, and to try and steer the chaos of film production towards my own dark ends. Silver, removing his teeth here to reveal a past injury at the hands of MI five. Some grand, gignalesque, grotesque refrum. Have ye here?

And yet, just imagine how much scarier this all would have been if this guy also had Don King hair in a zootsuit. I mean the version of silver that we got is fine. It's fine. This version is very Guy at Mar a Lago whose golf caddies keep disappearing. Which is great.

I really wish we'd gotten to see Javier's second draft of the character. I don't know exactly why MY5 have built this weird plexiglass cube to hold the baddie in here. He's not fucking Magneto, is he? Also, um, very soon it's going to be revealed that Silver wanted to be arrested all along and it was all part of his villainous plan.

Which is just like the plot of the Dark Knight, which incidentally several of our crew had just rapped on. Which is interesting, isn't it? Funny how things suddenly became so much more derivative as soon as I exited the project. It's almost as if my coked up murderous energy had actually been vital to the creative engine of the story. Here we have Q breaking every single intelligence protocol and just blindly connecting the laptop of a terrorist hacker.

straight into the MI6 mainframe without any prior screening, thus unwittingly allowing Silver to take over all of MI6's computer systems.

I do remember watching this scene from my bin and feeling quite frustrated. You can actually see my bin in some of these shots. I removed the base so I could shuffle about the set quite freely. Fortunately the Continuity Department were preoccupied with Ben Wyshaw's hair, I actually spent about a week loosening the bolts on Q's big TV screen here, hoping it would fall onto Daniel Craig's head.

Just to be clear, Hurt and Craig was pure malice by this point. I just wanted to end him, really, for destroying my life. I was no longer interested in retrieving the money that Dan had stolen from me. Even if I got a cheque back. Since I'd already been declared dead, control of my bank accounts had already transferred to my executor, the American rapper Pitbull, who is my second cousin and the only member of my extended family I'm even vaguely on good terms with.

But no, even if I offered Pitbull a percentage of my winnings, I trust that guy about as far as I could throw him. So the money was lost, I thought. And I put all of that squarely on Dan's shoulders. Square shoulders. It really felt like Dan was the one who had killed me. indirectly, but also kind of directly if I'm honest. He made me do it. And now I was nothing more than a avenging ghost, trying to settle the score.

This big screen Q is looking at here with all these um squiggly lines. This is supposed to be a visual representation of Silver's encryption system, which Bond is somehow able to just Squint at and somehow make out a critical word which just happens to be floating across the screen for some reason. I mean. I'm no encryption expert, but I'm pretty sure my fucking handwriting is a more secure form of encryption than whatever Silver's using here.

Now, you can make the case that my successor, Sir Sam Mendez, is really doing the best he can with a somewhat undercooked plot, and that really it's my fault. For never getting around to writing a script or setting up any stakes or creating really any discernible momentum towards an ending. Which now means that Sir Sam has to cobble together a series of

plot holes and contrivances in order to manufacture some kind of meaning to everything we've seen so far on screen. Not to mention, due to ongoing investigations into my maybe treasonous activity in Shanghai, the crew had now been ordered to remain in the UK for the rest of the shoot. Whilst the real MI6 investigated exactly how fake documents from our prop department ended up in the hands of the Chinese government. So, sure. Sir Mendez might have been handed somewhat

A poisoned chalice. But a poisoned chalice is still a chalice, isn't it? Oh, I'm sorry your bejeweled chalice isn't all it's cracked up to be, Sir Mendez. You still get to be the credited director of Skyfall while I rot in the maximum security prison in the Highlands, so excuse me if I don't weep too many tears for you, Sir Mendez. Please just allow me the small blessing of enjoying your desperate attempts to claw together a movie from the beaver dream of nonsense I left for you.

So as you've probably surmised, when Q connected Silver's laptop to the MI6 mainframe, it uploaded a I think it's called a worm that Hacked into the security systems, allowing Mr. Silver to hatch himself free from that. Big plastic cube and France off into the tunnels beneath London. Bond is now in pursuit, playing catch-up, but don't worry, Bond has Q guiding him over the radio from his operation room. Although for some reason, Q is

Still using the virus infected map that you found on Silver's laptop? Q, what are you fucking doing? Do you not have your own map of London, Q? Use your own map. I mean, I expect this level of incompetence when it comes to real policemen, but when it comes to fiction, you really do have to raise the bar a little bit.

Ty4 is nearly hit by a train here, as was Danny Craig actually. Um This whole scene was supposed to be shot at one third speed and then sped up, but I sabotaged the train so it actually came at Dan full speed. No cigar, sadly, but it was worth it to hear the little squeaky noise Dan made. When the train shot towards him. See this was becoming a norm now. Little accidents on set, every day, one scene at a time, one near miss at a time.

A loose screw here, a faulty wire there. I could tell that I was wearing them down. And every day I was getting bolder, getting closer and closer to finishing the job. So we see Danny here, um pushing his way through busy tunnels on the London Underground, oblivious to the fact that one of the extras behind him here is none other than The man whose life he'd ruined. sneaking into the background of these scenes.

Crazy that Danny didn't recognise me, but few months living in a bin at Pinewood Studios had been quite slimming, I have to say. They were recycling a lot of the crowd throughout this sequence. So I'm gonna keep popping up on screen actually throughout this whole bit. Oh, there I am. Inside my jacket I had this little wooden knife that I'd been whittling at night. On the uh the handle of the knife I'd engraved this uh rudimentary picture of a Komodo dragon,

And my plan was to um stab Dan with this little knife if I could get myself close enough. Then simply melt back into the background like a naughty little ghost, vanish into the tunnels, leaving Danny, if he survived, to uh dwell on the possible meaning of the image on the blade that penetrated him so easily. Would he realise, I wondered. Would he connect the image to that day back in Macau when he had pocketed my winnings and then denied all knowledge of doing so? Would Dan recognize the dragon?

As a symbol of his own guilt. A terrible debt that was coming due. You are being hunted by an avenging angel, Daniel Craig. Do you think this is all in your mind, Dan? Or is this real? Anyway, I was able to maneuver myself quite close to Dan for a couple of these shots. However, um ever since that flight back from Hashima Island, I Regrettably smelt. Extremely potently. of sandalwood and vanilla orchid. The er flight case that I'd been locked in for twenty three hours was

Fully permeated with the aroma from Daniel's luxury candles. A smell that then was permanently transferred to myself. I um seemed to be surrounded. by this thick cloud of Candle stank at all times. And Dan, more than anyone, knew that smell intimately and would freak the fuck out whenever he got a whiff. I got the impression. But when his candle tree had vanished in transit, Danny suspected an old-fashioned candle snatch had taken place.

and that probably a crew member had been behind it. So any whiff of Luxury Candle and Danny would immediately blow the take and start sniffing people, and then I would have to Shrink back out of the way. Do a little smokescreen fart. If I could muster one. So in the end, the train scene's wrapped without me managing to stick Dan with a homemade knife. Which was frustrating at the time. That said, the candle smell had provided its own form of psychological torture, so it was still a win for me.

So Silver has now ingeniously disguised himself with a policeman's hat that in no way conceals his extremely distinctive bleached micro mullet. And yet, Bond. Instantly loses him, despite being less than two meters behind him. It's actually quite easy, Bond. It's the policeman that looks like Javier Varde. Now that the crowd scenes were over, I retreated back to Pinewood Studios, where the crew was preparing to shoot this public hearing scene.

You can actually see my bin in the wide shot. The hearing scene took a very long time to film and there weren't many opportunities for sabotage till the very end, so I'm mostly just there. crouched in the corner for about fourteen days. Not much to do really, but entertain myself with outlandish, violent fantasies. I was Quite insane by that point, I have to say.

So just to recap the absolute nonsense of Silver's plan here. Silver wanted to be captured. Silver also wanted Q to plug in his laptop. But not only that, it also seems that Silver knew that Bond was going to be pursuing him, and even knew exactly Just how far behind him Bond was going to be. With a margin of error of less than a meter, because it turns out that Silver got one of his goons in advance to set up a bomb right here.

To blow a hole in the side of this crypt, a hole which seems specifically timed to derail a tube train in an adjacent tunnel. and cause this derailed train to then careen down into the crypt below precisely where Bond is standing, which really suggests But Silver made the encryption on his laptop deliberately easy to break.

Because Silver needed Bond. To discover his secret plan, he wanted Bond to pursue him into the tunnels so that he could trigger the bomb to kill him with a derail train. Silver Having created such a complicated ruse, a plan years in the making, deliberately exposes his plan to MI6 30 seconds after putting their plan into action.

just so he can hopefully get a chance to kill Bond along the way. Even though revealing his plan puts all of London on high alert and the explosion reveals Silver's exact whereabouts. Silver has clearly meticulously planned his assassination attempt down to the smallest detail. It's just weird that he's planned it to be deliberately mediocre. Very frustrating for me. As the previous helmsman of the story, seeing these guys

completely get over their skis here. Classic issue seriously overcomplicating the bad guys plan. However, I will say I did find this clusterfuck quite instructive, particularly as someone trying to hatch my own dastardly plan to murder Daniel Craig. And I feel I brought that with me into my final confrontation with Daniel up in Scotland, which we will get to soon enough.

Here's M being grilled in a tribunal about the many failures of MI6. You might think, seeing as this is MI6's last chance to justify its own independence, that M would really bring out the big guns here. She should be passing round the dossiers, sharing any unclassified win she can. She can still be honest. She can say, look.

We have our problems and I know we fucked up on Iraq, but I'm sorry Kunz, did you forget that we killed fucking Goldfinger? And we killed Thunderball? And we killed Octopussy and the f The fucking goose one, the one with the goose in it, as I said, I don't remember the other movies in granular detail. Point is there's a clear case here. But what does she do instead? She decides to read a poem.

Not the time for a poem, M. You can't respond to accusations of administrative negligence with a p poem. Just as you can't just decide to hold up a lovely painting of a horse. Is M just hoping that as soon as she starts reciting poetry everyone in the room is just instantly gonna switch their brains off and that she'll just win the argument by default? I imagine it was a blessed relief for the people attending this hearing.

when Javier Bardem finally bursts into the room and starts shooting everyone. So what M read to the hearing was the final lines of the poem Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson. It's a poem about An old hero who Having finally completed his wild adventure and made it home to his family and country, has now discovered to his dismay that he kinda hates the people here. Also, it turns out his family bore him to tears, and so Ulysses decides in the poem that

He wants to get back out on the ocean again. He wants to go and have another adventure, despite now being old and infirm, which he acknowledges but ultimately says, fuck it, what else am I gonna do? So this is basically a poem about having a midlife crisis and wanting to dine out on past glories and die out on the waves rather than stop and acknowledge that anything has changed. Now I kind of see how that makes sense for Bond as a character, but not necessarily the official line from MI6.

Which does make me wonder if Judy Dench chose the poem herself as perhaps uh a way of hiding an ugly truth within a smokescreen of literary civility. Because this is exactly the kind of subversive Easter egg that I would expect Judy to hide. And I know this from chatting politics with Judy earlier on in the shoot. Judy is basically

And anarcho-terrorist. In fact, I have it on very good authority that she only took the damehood because she thought she might use the ceremony to get a pop at the Queen's. I think the plan was a poison-tipped brudge. Judy was gonna skewer Her Majesty with it, but sadly Judy missed her shot because she came up on her acid trip earlier than she was expecting, and so she had to excuse herself from the royal palace and walk off the high, and subsequently

Judy had to accept her damehood in the post. Anyway. Judy's a real one, and I feel pathetically guilty about nearly burning her alive in that Waterloo fire. Judy and I had crosswords sometimes, but she tolerated my buffoonery as well as she could. I think she was certainly sad. When she heard I'd been killed, she attended my funeral and brought a lovely bouquet of wildflowers.

At the funeral, um she was actually sat right next to the giant urn that I was hiding in, and she seemed appropriately glum about the whole thing. She stayed for the wake too, unlike Daniel Craig, who only made the briefest of appearances and did not wear a tie. See Even in death, Dan still could not let go of his disgust for me. How sad is that? I was so offended, I nearly leapt out of my urn and attacked him.

But no, it was not the time. I had to wait till Dan was on his own. I would get my chance, soon enough.

And I suppose that's completely inconspicuous. We're entering the final act of the story now. It's been a long road, a lot of things have happened along the way. The good news is you can pretty much forget now everything that has happened so far. All you need to know. is that Silver's quote unquote real plan has finally been Turns out Silver is trying to murder M. That's what he wants. That's all he wants. It's revenge, pure and simple. He just wants to kill his ex boss, a 78 year old.

Which is harder than it looks, it seems. Still, despite his lack of success so far, MI6 are so completely rattled by Silver's assassination attempt. Which was So complicated. So complicated I think even Silver himself was baffled. But perhaps Because of that complexity, MI6 have got so confused that they've decided to give Silver the benefit of the doubt and now they think he's a genius. They just can't predict what Silver's going to do next.

Which is the one thing that geniuses and idiots have in common, isn't it? So it is often hard to tell those two groups apart. At least to begin with. And I must say, as an idiot myself, have successfully leaned into this misunderstanding many many times over my career. It's really remarkable. How many times? I have done something so incompetent that the only possible explanation for the mistake is that I'm a visionary.

So yes, um Silva has them all so confused that they decide that the best way to protect Ed Leave her completely isolated in the middle of nowhere with a single agent. After it. They're scared of Silver's hacking abilities. So our hero Skyfall decides the best way to protect M is to go completely off grid. They need to retreat to a simple land. A savage land. A place where no one has ever even seen a mobile phone. When most communication is done by tying parchment to a kestrel.

A land where technology is feared, where they don't have plots Most of them. They just squat in a loch. It's easier in a kilt. I'm talking, of course, about the Scottish Highlands. Skyfall decides the perfect place to keep Em safe is his family home. A uh huge crumbling house in the bottom of a valley. A place which can be attacked from all sides. 360 degrees. Great location for a last stand. The house is called Skyfall as well.

That doesn't make any sense. What use is having a secret spy codename if your secret spy codename is just the first line of your address? I think what's happened here is that they've confused intelligence agency code names with personal confidential information. It's like me being a spy and choosing my national insurance number as my secret spy name. I don't know, I just think the baddies might crack that one, though. Classic Mendez, overcomplicating things, as usual.

So yes, the plan here, as I understand it, is to get the upper hand on silver by using Scotland as a way to figuratively retreat back into the past. They want to stop silver from weaponising technology again. them. Of course, this plan is going to immediately fall down when Silver turns up in a military helicopter armed with stingray missiles. Seems they didn't think about Silver weaponizing weapons. against them. But never mind.

So the house we're looking at here is actually a set. It was custom built for this production. Back down south at Pinewood Studios I was rummaging through the production office one night and I came across the plans for this building here. So I got the heads up early that this was going to be the stage for the finale. I also knew from the manifest The crew had already brought a shit ton of explosives with them to this location, which was extremely titillating.

information. Pyrophilia is for life, after all. There is no cure to being sexually beguiled by violent fiery explosions. So as soon as I saw the schematics for the finale that Sir Mendez was planning, I instantly knew this was the place where I would. Finally get my bloody, brutal revenge on Hollywood actor Daniel Cross.

If I could kill him on camera, all the better. I still loved the legacy aspects of capturing the event on Celluloid. But ultimately, as long as before Craig died, he knew that it was me behind it all. Anything else was a bonus. As soon as I saw the schematics of this house, there was something about it that reminded me of a movie I made for TV back in my twenties, I think it was 1969.

Did I forget to tell you how old I am? I was 63 when I shot Skyfall. I'm 77 now. Um Back in 1969, I did a TV movie of Macbeth with Patrick Troughton and Lulu, and the house we used for that production looked almost identical to this house here. And I suppose I liked the idea of Daniel Craig becoming my Macbeth. A figure doomed by his own vaulting ambition. And I was.

Well, I was a kind of amalgam of both King Duncan and Banquo, because I was, you know, both Macbeth's boss and his best friend, both of whom, of course, are murdered by his hand. A Banquo, actually, in my sixty nine production, was played by Reg Varney from one of the buses. Uh y he was surprisingly adequate. Now I thought just like Banquo, it was time for me to return from the dead.

A ghost returning to torment his killer. I mean let's not split hairs here. Dan Craig forced me to fake my own death. So he was my killer. The comparison tracks.

So my plan was simple hide beneath the floorboards of this house, wait for the right moment when I could get Craig alone. And then when the moment was right, I was going to quickly cover my body, head to toe, in white emulsion, my skin, my clothes completely soaked. And then, seconds later, emerge, ghost-like, from a hole in the floor, a dripping white ghost. I would pause to let Craig take in the true horror of what he was seeing and the supernatural spiritual ramifications of it all.

And then I would swiftly decapitate him with a broadsword and vanish back into the floor. Don't worry, there's always at least one broadsword in these sets. There's always one on the wall in case that's the bit you're bumping on. Trust me, I've thought of everything.

See, just like I mentioned earlier, I wasn't going to overcomplicate my plan. I was just gonna keep things nice and simple. Just one, impersonate a ghost, two, take Daniel Craig's head off with a sword. That's it. Two-step plan, nice and simple. Uh so while Cast and crew were still in London shooting the final scenes of the film, I decided to hitchhike up to Glencoe so I could arrive before everybody else and familiarise myself with the set in advance. Dig myself, whatever.

Trenches beneath the house were acquired. So by the time Daniel arrived, the house would already be fully primed for his demise. The house had just finished construction when I arrived and It wasn't until the first time that I saw the house for real. Only when I was standing in front of it and experiencing it in person did I realize. But it wasn't a good one. The exact house from my vision.

The hallucinatory episode that I had when I was on drugs that I had been holding for Adele's Witch Doctor who I hit with a go-kart at high speed. It was that house. I knew it immediately. I'd barely thought about that waking hallucination of mine since the night it happened. The whole thing had just evaporated like a dream. Until now. But now It all came back. And I thought to myself Well.

That certainly quashes any remaining doubts in my mind about what I'm about to do here. Because you feel a lot less bad about committing a terrible crime, if that crime is already mystically woven into your cosmic destiny.

On the day Daniel Craig finally arrived on sets, I was already Leave the house. I had my paint and my sword, and I was very much in the Psychosis, lusting for vengeance. Along with the arrival of the actors that day, there was also an entire minivan of stunt performers, all for Daniel Craig. In the same klobber as Danny. I think there were seven stunts. In total. The finale, of course, had been scripted.

To push Skyfall to his limit. There were many dangerous or acrobatic or otherwise specialist actions required of the character, so. Clearly a decision had been made to spread those activities across as many personnel as possible. They had done an incredible job of finding stunt performers who really were close fit. For Danny Craig. A couple had fatter faces, one had a neck tattoo. A lot of their eyes were

Slightly closer together. But on the whole, the overall impression was that Dan Craig had somehow stepped into a discount cloning machine and created seven new, slightly brain-damaged versions of himself. From my spy hole in the floor, I clocked an acrobat Skyfall, a marksman skyfall, a fireproof skyfall, a falling skyfall, a generic impact skyfall, and a Craw McGraw, Skyfall, who looked particularly gunty.

The seventh stunt double I realized was Darwid, a stunt double that had been with us from the start of production. Darwid had actually been absent. from production for some time. He left the film right after Macau because turns out his first novel had just won the Nikkei Prize. The most prestigious literary award in Poland, and he'd had to return home for the ceremony. But now he was finally back to finish what he started, and I'm sure everyone appreciated that.

Seeing Darwid from my little hole in the floor, I was suddenly struck by a quite horrible thought. I wonder if you've also had this thought. Um whilst listening to this commentary. Seeing Darwid, I suddenly realized that it was very possible that back in the Macau Casino, it might actually have been Darwid left. holding my cashier's check when I was brushed to hospital. And that was why Daniel Craig told me he had no knowledge of the money later when I accosted him. Which of course meant that

I had torpedoed my entire life. Trying to get revenge on an innocent man. A man who, in actual fact, I had wronged. More than he had wronged me. Also sing Darwid He dislodged a buried memory of mine. I suddenly remembered back in hospital in Macau, a guy who looked a little bit like Darwid trying to visit me in my bed.

But I took one look at him and had him ejected. Now I realize it was probably Darwid. He was just wearing his author clobber. He was, I suppose, already on his way to the airport to go and receive his literary award back in Poland. But Seeing Darwit in a trilby and smoking pipe, I just assumed he was a pervert of some kind, trying to get my autograph.

He probably just left the check for me at the hospital. He likely has no idea that I didn't get it back. Next thing he knows, I've been killed by a giant runaway catapult. Now even if Darwin mentioned the check to someone else on the crew, I doubt they understood him. I'm Polish Darwin has become the voice of his generation. But his English sounds like a p bucking cistern refilling. So all of this suddenly hits me and I'm thinking my god if this is true true.

Then all this time. I Boxing my own shadow. If true, then my only adversary all this time had been myself. All Danny Craig wanted was to finish this story. His grief was I could hardly be great. Dawood, equally, a complete innocent. He had no understanding of the stakes of the story he was passing through. I mean it's like reading Dostoyevsky to a cat. Branchin showed was purely coincidence. Neither of those men, I realized now, were responsible for putting me.

In the ground, this unmarked grave. Or I want it. Crawl away. and vanish into the mist. I just felt so wretched. And guilty. And With self hatred.

However, I could- My hiding place. Due to the day to night nature of this final set piece, the crew was filming on this location around the clock. All the anticipation stuff during the day, M and Bond and his groundskeeper prepping for the fight. Then come Nightfall, switching over,

the second unit for these highly technical action sequences when Silver's team of mercenaries attacked the house. And then, when the sun rose again, they would just switch back to the first team and pick up filming the anticipation scenes again. It's like we were all trapped in this twenty-four hour time loop. The same day, the same night, over and over and over. They were so far over budget, so far over their schedule. So they just worked and worked and worked and never rested.

Never left the house alone, never gave me my opening to escape. I couldn't believe I'd been fooled into mistaking one Daniel Craig for another. I had come to Scotland. See King Yet, I had found a comedy of errors. Weeks passed with me trapped in my grave until, having shot everything else, the crew were finally ready. Through my spy hole, I The checks were complete and the fuses primed. The house was finally evacuated.

I will say I was tempted to stay and burn with the house and fulfill and Just that um artistic vision of mine. To conceal my own death within this picture. But then a voice in my head called out to me. The voice of Ulysses has scrolled. By the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson. He called to me. Said come. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, Trevor, and sitting well in order, smite the sounding furrows for your part. house holds to sail beyond.

sunset and the baths of all the western stars. And so hearing In my head I chose life. New adventure. To go on. For all deserve to tell a long story. A story at least as long as 2012 Motion Picture, Skyfall. Which is a very long story indeed.

So I decided to escape. I only really had one play available to me, and so I made it. I Tipped my large tin of white paint over my body. First from my hiding place beneath the floor, and then I sprinted away from the house. Did I have to be dressed as a ghost for this strategy? I wasn't sure, but I thought The crew had retreated to a safe distance. ready for the ensuing explosion. Luckily I ran in the opposite direction.

Regrettably, however, I did run straight into Daniel Craig's stunt doubles, who had been secretly playing a game of night frisbee. Directly behind the house. Sadly, um These men were not afraid of ghosts. They immediately saw me for what I was, a sixty-three year old, extremely malnourished man, covered in white emulsion paint, dragging a broadsword. I find myself in Circle of men closing in on me, this ring of six Skyfalls. And before I can even get off a single spectral shriek.

These men descend on me like animals and simply begin to pummel me into the ground before I know it. General impact Skyfall and fireproof Skyfall are holding me down. Craw McGraw Skyfall. Giggles and kicks me in the back. Acrobat Skyfall and Falling Skyfall are fighting over my sword while Marksman Skyfall hits me in the face over and over with the frisbee, taunting me. What are you doing here? What do you want?

He was probably holed up somewhere writing the next great Polish novel of the 21st century. But still, Six Skyfalls is more than. I remember looking up from the dirt at these strange, distorted Daniel Craigs leering over me in the dark. These men did not realize just how frail I was. They had no idea what this body of mine had been subjected to over the last nine months, the drugs and the torture and the living in cases and bins and graves.

Every single one of my bones was screaming in pain, and I thought to myself, are going to kill me. They may not mean to, all the same. I am about to die at their hands. And um that was very, very important information in my trial. And then it happened. Sky. The house erupting into this. in golden infernal bloom. The Skyfalls and I were hidden from No one else on the crew knew we were even there, but Close enough to the blast that the Sideways by the shape. Everyone I can feel The hate.

On my face. As the sky ignites above me. Feel the tightening in my groin. The sexual excitement of the blaze hitting me. An adrenaline shot to the heart. Just exploding with energy. Next thing I know Back up on my feet. Once again the broad sword is right there in my hand. But, strangely, it now feels Completely weightless and

Um look, I really do want to stress how little planning went into the following sequence of events. There was a tremendous amount of improvisation happening here. I was very much just following my instincts. Anyway, I stab one of the Skyfalls right in the penis. Right in there after that, uh one of the Skyfalls managed to jump onto my back and instantly cut his own ear off. My fault. jump onto the back of a man waving a sword around. I can hardly be held responsible for that one. Next.

I remember, I think it was Fireproof Skyfall who managed to get the sword out of my hand and Get his hands around my throat. That one was a little trickier. I think I bit his nose off, and thankfully that seemed to do. From then on, the uh six Skyfalls and I were very much in a full-blown skirmish, rolling around in the mud, punching and each other. But these men, as strong as they were, they simply could not contain my ecstatic energy. All the while going round and round in my head.

Ulysses screamed. to me. Keep going, Trevor. We can always keep going. It doesn't matter how old we are, how We've become a little bit more. Accept our ending, Trevor. As Ulysses. So our empire, so James Bond, so you. It doesn't matter how Trevor, we must. Keep. Must keep going. Yes you are. by time and Strive. Find. Remember one of the Skyfalls? I think it was General Impact Skyfall. I hope it was General Impact Skyfall. managed to pin me to the ground. Shock of accidentally type. My boner.

caused him to draw back just for a second. In that moment. arm leapt to my feet and flung him. into a nearby tree. Now I admit, utterly implausible act of strength. Upset the Craw McGraw Skyfall so much that he immediately turned and ran away across the field like um like a little bitch. So I instinctively Picked up my broadsword and Flung the blade at the retreating sky. Perfect. DIVIDED Yeah. From the rest of his body. I just have a good measuring distances. I really have my cinematographer.

Thank you. So again nothing. Exclusively my friend. That I amputated a guy's arm from his body. Like everything in the movie. The arm incidents. All the other sky falls. Seemed to make the collective decision. to stay down. Apart from the one stuck in a tree. Nobody died, as my legal team. Many times. Some of them were losing a significant. Yeah. Black smoke. Reading from the sky. Daniel Craig himself. Surprised. Don't worry Daniel It's not your fault.

I don't hold you responsible for any of this. As good a line as any to leave on. So um feeling like my job. On the set of Skyfall. was finally over. I turned away from Daniel. and slowly walked off into the darkness of the valley.

I was immediately accosted by a police helicopter and about 20 armed policemen. Anyway. That's Skyfall. Not the best film I worked on, but also not the worst. Um, by a long shot. Good God, I have worked on some. really troubled productions in my time. Way, way worse. No, this was uh this was a cakewalk in comparison to some of them. I think everyone involved is pretty happy with how the film came out and

Listen guys, credit where credit's due. I was an integral part of this motion picture. So You're welcome. Of course at least some of the praise should fall to my peer, Sir Mendez, who Did a fantastic job. of polishing the thing off. So, you know, Sam deserves his flowers too. I know Danny is proud of the film. Ur I'm not entirely sure what Danny really thinks about I know what he said during the trial, but that only captures one specific angle. Of our relationship. We shall meet again.

Who knows? Maybe on a film set. I have so many ideas for motion pictures. Story ideas. I don't want to show my hand now, not until I have financing, but I'll just give you two words. As a little teaser. Dream. Never been done, never been done. Very original idea. Finally, um to all my victims, I would just like to say Sorry. I am sorry. I hope you're doing okay. Sorry. And again. The Scottish Prison Service for allowing me. Here today in this studio to record.

commentary. Also, thanks to my fellow inmate Carl for coming along with me today and providing the wonderful musical accompaniment which I think added hugely to the drama of my story. Now, Nothing more for me to do. on this smoke grenade here. And escape into the ventilation system. Okay. Uh great. Okay, till next time. For this episode of Thank you so much. For listening, giving up your time, I hope you enjoyed it. And I'll be back very soon. My name is Ross Sutherland.

All this time, you have been listening. To imaginary advice. Boy.