Filming on next James Bond movie underway in London after script leaked by Sony hackers

LONDON — Filming is underway on James Bond thriller "SPECTRE," despite the leak of a draft script in a huge hack of material from Sony Pictures.

Daniel Craig and co-star Rory Kinnear took to a London canal in a speedboat on Tuesday for a waterborne sequence.

The Sam Mendes-directed movie is filming at several London locations this week, and will later travel to Italy, Morocco, Mexico and Austria.

The film's title is the name of a terrorist organization featured in several early Bond films, but details of the plot had been a well-guarded secret — until Bond producer EON Productions acknowledged on the weekend that an early version of the script was among material stolen in the Sony cyberattack.

Details of the "SPECTRE" script and executives' email exchanges about it have since circulated online.

Ajay Chowdhury of the James Bond International Fan Club said the Bond franchise would survive the leak, but the attack was damaging.

"If this can happen to Sony it can happen to other studios," he said. "It is a form of economic warfare."

But reams of sensitive material have already become public, including embarrassing emails in which executives and producers criticized stars and made racially offensive jokes about President Barack Obama.

Speculation has raged about the identity of the hackers, with some suspecting North Korea struck in retaliation for Sony-produced movie "The Interview." The comedy depicts an assassination attempt on leader Kim Jong Un.

North Korea has condemned the film, but denied the hack.

Chowdhury said the saga was "almost a Bondian plot — the world entertainment industry, a trillion-dollar industry, held to ransom by nefarious hackers."