Did you know ? In addition to being a children’s author, Roald Dahl was a screenwriter for James Bond

You may know Roald Dahl, this youthful author with an overflowing imagination. Perhaps you have read, or had your children read, his many fantastic stories such as Charlie and the chocolate factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, Holy Witches or The Good Big Giant. Many of these works have also been adapted into films, such as Charlie and the chocolate factory with the unbeatable Johnny Depp. But Roald Dahl has not only distinguished himself in children’s literature: he has also been a screenwriter for films, and even for James Bond: You Only Live Twicemade in 1967 and whose main role is played by Sean Connery.

Roald Dahl was a versatile author, with more than one trick up his sleeve. Indeed, in addition to being a children’s author, we have seen him as a film scriptwriter. He notably wrote the screenplay for James Bond: You Only Live Twice, released on the big screen in 1967. We imagine that his knowledge, as well as his personal experience, could have been used during the writing of the screenplay. Indeed, Roald Dahl was engaged in the army during the Second World War and after being dismissed, he joined the English intelligence services of MI6, where James Bond is precisely supposed to work.

He also had the chance to meet Ian Fleming, author of james bond and himself a former British spy. The film contains many dogfight sequences, which shows how involved Roald Dahl was in writing the screenplay, as a former Royal Air Force pilot. This film is also the first in the saga to deviate so much from the original work.

But Roald Dahl has always maintained close ties with the world of cinema. In 1942, he met Walt Disney and discussed with him a fiction project, the scenario of which would involve small evil monsters called… Gremlins. Chris Columbus, screenwriter of the eponymous film released in 1984, took up the writings of Roald Dahl and was inspired by them. It should be noted that the Gremlins were, for the pilots of the Royal Air Force (of which Roald Dahl was a member), the small creatures at the origin of the mechanical problems.

Roald Dahl also wrote many short stories, some of which were then adapted by Hitchcock in the late 1950s, such as The inspector sits down Where The coat. In the 1980s, the series Tales of the Unexpected, consisting of 112 episodes spread over nine seasons, adapts many of the writings of Roald Dahl. Finally, we could not mention the interest of screenwriters for the works of this author without mentioning all the successful films made from his writings. We think in particular of the fabulous Charlie and the chocolate factorydirected by Tim Burton, but also, at the Good Big Giant directed by Spielberg, or at Fantastic Master Foxdirected by Wes Anderson.