With months to go before we finally see director Cary Fukunaga’s “No Time To Die,” the helmer sat down with fellow filmmaker Miranda July for Interview Magazine and discussed the work that went into crafting this fifth and final outing for Daniel Craig as Bond.
One of the most intriguing parts of the interview indicates that Fukunaga toyed with the idea of making the entire third act of “Spectre” and the first two acts of “No Time to Die” a dream with much of the new film taking place inside Bond’s head during the chair/drill torture scene in Blofeld’s lair in “Spectre”.
That possibility was thrown out of course and Fukunaga ended up doing something else. Even so, the making of the film was an almost non-stop job for a full year – work that took its toll on the man:
“During the shoot, I feel like I stopped moving as an animal and started slowly becoming some kind of inanimate object. I could feel my body deforming.
We were originally going to release the film in November, but when Danny Boyle left the project and I came onboard, there was a whole reset. So we pushed it back to March, and then I was fighting to push it back even further, because I just didn’t think we had enough time to finish it.
Something I hadn’t realized, even until now, is how far in advance studios swoop up these windows for their films to come out, in order to give them the best chance of having a good box office.”
Fukunaga did end up having more time thanks to the coronavirus pandemic delay, but Fukunaga already claimed the movie was ready to go before this hit and he wasn’t doing any additional work on it. Fukunaga also spoke about Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s contributions to the script saying it wasn’t just her that makes the films more feminist:
“Well, first of all, Barbara Broccoli, one of the main producers, is either the first or second most successful female producer. Feminism is something she has slowly been turning up the dial on for decades.
The inclusion of a new female 00 agent had come from Barbara. I only found out through working with her that she had wanted to do a spin-off of Jinx, which is Halle Berry’s character in Die Another Day. The female characters in the film, who they are and what they stand for, was definitely something Barbara had already had in mind.
And Phoebe – who is a brilliant writer regardless of her gender, but is writing really fun and more fully fleshed-out female characters than anyone else right now – brought a lot of ideas about how to make the characters we already had that much more interesting.”
In related Bond news, former Bond star Pierce Brosnan recently participated in a live watch party for “Goldeneye” and cleared up an old story about Quentin Tarantino’s brush with the franchise. Tarantino has previously spoken about a time in early 2004 (after “Die Another Day” but before Craig’s hiring) that he wanted to make his own R-rated version of “Casino Royale” starring Brosnan.
Brosnan has now revealed more to the story, saying the talk came up during a martini-fuelled drunken meeting at the Four Seasons hotel in Los Angeles:
“It was after Kill Bill Vol. 2, and [Quentin] wanted to meet me. And I went up into Hollywood one day, from the beach, and I met him at the Four Seasons. I got there at 7 o’clock. I like to be punctual, I’m always punctual. 7:15 came round, no Quentin; he was upstairs doing press on Kill Bill. And someone sent over a martini, so I had the martini. I waited, it was 7:30, I thought, ‘Where the heck is he?’ Word came down, ‘Apologies’, so I thought, ‘Well, I’ll have another martini.’
Eventually he came down, and he started ordering apple martinis. Well… we were fairly snockered. I was fairly snockered, but he did. He was pounding the table, saying, ‘You are the best James Bond! I wanna do James Bond with you!’ and it was very close quarters in the restaurant. I said, ‘Quentin, please, calm down, calm down.’ But, you don’t tell Quentin Tarantino to calm down.
Anyway, he wanted to do James Bond. I went back to the shop and told them, but it wasn’t meant to be. No Quentin Tarantino for James Bond. What a shame. That would be a good one to watch.”
Brosnan was also asked during the webcast would he return to the franchise as a villain to which he responded: “If asked, yes! I believe so.”
“No Time to Die” opens November 25th.
Source: Cinema Blend
