Danny Boyle's stint at the helm of Bond 25 sadly didn't turn out the way anyone wanted it to, but the director has told the Guardian that he suddenly realised recently that the natural choice for the next James Bond actor was a man very few people had put in the running.

While putting the finishing touches to his Beatles-film-without-the-Beatles Yesterday, Boyle had popped out to see Claire Denis' elegantly bleak intergalactic shag-a-thon High Life, in which Pattinson stars as one of a group of convicts being held captive on Juliette Binoche's spaceship-slash-reproductive-laboratory.

"It was so bizarre, because I was sitting there thinking: ‘Oh my God, they should get him to be the next Bond'," Boyle told the newspaper. But isn't he a bit young though?

"No, no. He must be in his 30s. How old was Connery? He's ready now."

To answer your questions, Danny, Pattinson is now 33, and Sean Connery was 32 when Dr No was first released. The bookies have Pattinson as a rank outsider, currently - SkyBet put him at the 200-1 bar, alongside the likes of Sam Claflin and Orlando Bloom, and considerably longer than such never-in-a-month-of-Sundays names as Jason Statham and the 47-year-old Richard Armitage.

While Boyle's still not really at liberty to say much about the specifics of the Bond 25 palaver, he did add a little more detail to the mechanics of the split and seemed pretty sanguine about the whole experience.

"I was with John [Hodge, Boyle's regular screenwriting partner] and they didn’t really like what we were doing and so it’s far better to part company. What we were doing was good. But it was obviously not what they wanted."

It was put to Boyle that big films like Bond are more producers' films than directors'.

"Yeah, you’re right. That’s ultimately what you learn. But you’ve got to go into that stuff optimistically. It’s like falling in love. You can’t go in guarded and trying to protect yourself. You have to be open-hearted and prepared to be hurt – and so what if you get a bit of bruising? You get well-paid and well looked after. So at the end of the day these are champagne problems."

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