High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Never Say Never Again is a 1983 spy film based on the James Bond novel Thunderball, which was previously filmed in 1965 as Thunderball. Unlike the majority of Bond films, Never Say Never Again was not produced by Eon Productions, but by an independent production company, one of whose members was Kevin McClory, one of the original writers of the Thunderball storyline with Ian Fleming and Jack Whittingham. McClory retained the filming rights of the novel following a long legal battle dating from the 1960s.