Neal Purvis (born 9 September 1961) and Robert Wade (born 1962) are screenwriters who co-wrote the seven James Bond films from 1999's The World Is Not Enough to 2021's No Time to Die, as well as other works. Early lives Purvis's father was a photographer, and as a teenager, Purvis was in a film club that focused on 1940s cinema. Wade was born in Penarth and lived there until he was 11. His mother was an artist, and from an early age he wanted to be a writer and began making home-made films as a teenager. They met each other while attending a university at the University of Kent, when they were assigned as roommates. They began playing in a band together, which they continued to do for at least 20 years. Purvis left Kent and completed a BA in Film and Photo Arts. Wade graduated from Kent and moved to London where he was later joined by Purvis. They spent six years writing scripts together as well as ghost writing for music videos. Films Wade and Purvis' screenplay for Let Him Have It (1991) (based on the true story of Derek Bentley, a young man who gets caught up in street gangs in post war London and is later controversially hanged), displayed the writers' "outrage toward a system hell-bent on vengeance" and was called "first rate, no non-sense". Barbara Broccoli, producer of the James Bond films, hired Wade and Purvis to write their first Bond script because she had seen their film Plunkett & Macleane (1999) and liked that it was "dark, witty, sexy and inventive". Purvis described their approach when they joined the Bond franchise as to "come in with ideas, things we've found in science magazines, on the internet, interesting weapons and what's happening in technology. Then we find a journey for Bond to go through." In their Bond collaborations, Wade generally does "all the verbiage at the beginning of the script." They created a novelisation of their Bond script for The World Is Not Enough in collaboration with Raymond Benson. Wade and Purvis also wrote a script for a Bond spin-off featuring the Die Another Day character Jinx (Halle Berry), which was attached to director Stephen Frears, but cancelled by MGM because of budget concerns and "creative differences". Their 2003 Bond parody, Johnny English, received generally unfavorable reviews from critics, receiving a 33% "rotten" rating at