Little-known director hired for new Bond film – and just look who he’s pals with!
HE IS the favourite to succeed Daniel Craig and become the first black 007.
And Idris Elba looks even more likely to take on the role after Cary Joji Fukunaga was announced as the next director of the film franchise.
Fukunaga, who has previously worked with Elba, will be the first American to direct an official Bond movie.
He replaces Danny Boyle, who stepped down from the 25th Bond film last month – weeks before shooting was to begin – over ‘creative differences’ linked to who would play the villain. The film will now be released on February 14, 2020. It was originally expected to hit cinemas on October 25, 2019. Filming begins at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire on March 4.
Fukunaga, 41, may not yet be a household name, but he is best known for writing, directing and co-producing the West African civil war film Beasts Of No Nation, which starred Elba as a violent warlord. It won several industry awards, including the best supporting male for Elba.
Speaking in 2015, Fukunaga said it would be ‘pretty cool’ for him and Elba, 46, to do a Bond film together. Asked if he’d like to take over from Spectre and Skyfall director Sam Mendes in the near future, he told the Metro newspaper: ‘ That would be pretty cool to have Idris and I do a Bond film together. I wouldn’t say no to that.’
The filmmaker has been described as a ‘left-field’ choice by the James Bond International Fan Club, but ‘in keeping with the art house, independent sensibility’ of other names that had been attached to the franchise.
Fukunaga was announced as the director by producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli yesterday, who praised him for his ‘versatility and innovation’. The film is rumoured to centre around the ‘New Cold War’ between West and East.
Broccoli is said to have told a friend last month that ‘it is time’ for a non-white actor to take the role of Bond and that it ‘will happen eventually’.
Elba, the 2/1 favourite with bookmakers to be Bond, recently insisted: ‘I keep saying if it were to happen it would be the will of a nation because there haven’t been any talks between me and the studio about any of that.’
Other contenders are rumoured to include Tom Hardy, James Norton, Aidan Turner and Tom Hiddleston.
‘It would be cool to have Idris’