Last month Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported that Danny Boyle had pitched a strikingly different idea for the 25th James Bond film (i.e., 007 resigns, shaves his head, becomes a Hare Krishna devotee and embarks on a quest to crawl on his belly across the entire continent of India), and that he might actually agree to direct Hare Rama if John Hodge’s script, which should be completed next month, is good enough.

Okay, I’m lying about the Hare Krishna stuff but Boyle and Hodge are cooking up Bond 25, and maybe it’ll happen. But hold up a minute. Boyle and Hodge aren’t cinematic super-wizards — they’re just a couple of talented, hard-working guys who hit the motherlode 22 years ago and have decided that an opportunistic paycheck attitude at a relatively late stage in their careers (Boyle is 61, Hodge is 53 or 54) wouldn’t be such a bad option. And it wouldn’t be.

Boyle to himself, stuck in London traffic: “People will call me Danny ‘Paycheck’ Boyle, sure, but this is just a one-off. And then I can move on to the next legit film, whatever that might be. The elite press will understand that I had to do this. The last time I was really in the game and the groove was 127 Hours, and that was eight fucking years ago. Trance was minor except for that Rosario Dawson nude scene, Steve Jobs didn’t really work because a lot of people hated Fassbender, and nobody paid much attention to T2 Trainspotting. I have to get back in the big game and this is one way to do that.”

Five years ago Boyle was asked by Collider‘s Sheila Roberts whether he’d ever direct a Bond film. “They’re not really for me,” Boyle replied. “The budgets are too big. I’m better working at a lower level of money really because I like that discipline of not having enough money to pull off whatever it is you want to pull off. So I wouldn’t be the best person to do those…no.”