Danny Boyle has confirmed that a dispute over the script was the reason he left the latest James Bond movie.

In a reply to a reader question in Empire magazine, Boyle said that the screenplay he had been working on with regular writing partner John Hodge had not found favour with producers, and that he quit the project rather than jettison that script and work with another writer.

“I work in partnership with writers and I am not prepared to break it up … We were working very, very well, but they didn’t want to go down that route with us. So we decided to part company.”

He added: “What John Hodge and I were doing, I thought, was really good. It wasn’t finished, but it could have been really good … You have to believe in your process and part of that is the partnership I have with a writer.”

Boyle did not reveal any precise areas of disagreement, saying it would be “unfair” on his replacement, Cary Fukunaga. Fukunaga, director of Beasts of No Nation, was named as the Bond 25 director in September. Rumours of contention included a suggestion that Boyle and Hodge wanted to kill off the Daniel Craig 007, and that Boyle wanted the little known Polish actor Tomasz Kot, star of Cold War, to play the villain.

Boyle’s exit last August played havoc with the film’s production schedule, as producers hired new writers, including Neal Purvis and Robert Wade and Scott Z Burns, to work on the screenplay. As a result, the film’s release has been pushed back to April 2020.