NO TIME TO DIE
After 14 years, Daniel Craig is saying goodbye to Bond. It is, says director Cary Joji Fukunaga, going to be emotional
IF YOU EVER happen to bump into Cary Joji Fukunaga, tap him up for the following week’s lottery numbers. Because he saw this whole damn lockdown fiasco coming, long before it actually arrived. “There were a lot of conversations happening as early as January,” he tells Empire. “My first movie, Sin Nombre, came out during [the 2009] swine flu [pandemic], and it came out in cinemas in Mexico right when the President of Mexico said, ‘Do not go to cinemas.’ So I had trauma from that experience, and as
I was following the news of this, almost every day I was asking [the producers], ‘What’s the plan, guys? Because this isn’t stopping.’”
London’s Royal Albert Hall had been booked for the world premiere. Tuxedos had been ordered. Olives had been set aside for the numerous after-party vodka martinis. And then, in March, with just a few weeks to go, it all got put on ice. Covid-19 trumped 007. And Fukunaga’s No Time To Die was the first major movie to bite the bullet and push back its release date, moving to November from its April berth. “I don’t think anyone could have foreseen how the world came to a complete standstill,” he says, “but I did think audiences would not be going to cinemas.”
Interestingly, despite the fact that he had suddenly been gifted a few extra months in which to tinker, Fukunaga chose to leave well alone. “You could just fiddle and tweak and it doesn’t necessarily get better,” he says. “For all intents and purposes, we had finished the film. I had mentally finished the film. Mentally and emotionally.” And from what he tells us, in No Time To Die emotions overwhelm 007 too.
Where the character, and the franchise, has often fallen down is in the emphasis on physical explosions over emotional ones. Fukunaga aims to change that with his movie, which sees Bond come out of a five-year
retirement when he becomes embroiled in a fiendish plot hatched by the mysterious Safin (Rami Malek); a plot that will push 007 to the limits. “Because it’s Daniel’s last movie, I wanted a sort of emotional heart to it,” says Fukunaga. “He started off in Casino Royale a pretty tough character, but he falls in love. But for the rest of the films, that heart is pretty closed down. I wanted to see if I could open it back up again for the final film.”
Bond tends to dispense with his lovers at the earliest convenience, no matter how interesting they are. Even though virtually every movie ends with him locking lips, and sometimes more, with characters as interesting as Barbara Bach’s Anya Amasova, or Carey Lowell’s Pam Bouvier, or Halle Berry’s Jinx, by the time the credits roll on his next adventure, they’re gone. Notches on his bedpost. Faint memories to be jogged by a pop-up reminder on Facebook. Fukunaga decided to change that by bringing back Léa Seydoux’s Dr Madeleine Swann. Last seen in Bond’s Aston Martin at the end of Spectre, No Time To Die’s five-year jump splits the two apart, but through her mysterious connection to Safin, brings Bond back into her orbit. And it’s there that the shit really hits the fan.
“It’s something I was fascinated with,” he explains. “I thought that Madeleine Swann was an enigma and in Spectre you don’t really get a chance to understand her, or what her attachment is to Bond. So I wanted to dive deeper into that. I felt like therein lies the secret to whatever was going to open the box in Bond’s heart. And how is she different from Vesper Lynd?”
In this, and the addition of Lashana Lynch as Nomi, an MI6 agent who the smart money says has taken Bond’s 007 code number after his retirement, Fukunaga has freshened up the formula. No mean feat when you’re dealing with a franchise entering its sixth decade. But one idea he pitched to producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson was, perhaps, a bridge too far. “I was thinking about Total Recall,” he says. Which is always a perfectly valid thing to do. “And if you think about Spectre, when he’s sitting in that chair, and that needle goes into his head, suddenly everything just works out really well for him.” Fukunaga’s theory? That the end of Spectre, and the first half of No Time To Die, actually took place inside Bond’s head. “I thought it would be a really interesting meta way of telling the first half of the story,” he laughs. “But it was a pitch. Both hands were being used passionately.
I might have been standing, walking and pacing as I said it. But it didn’t finish with everyone standing up and applauding.”
When a man who can see the future talks, it’s usually a good idea to listen. But even without a journey into Bond’s psyche, No Time To Die promises to take Bond on a refreshingly emotional trip.
WRITING A SLASHER-MOVIE sequel is a lot like being a character in a slasher movie — you’re pretty much doomed from the off. “It really is one of the hardest things to do!” laughs Danny Mcbride. “Even in the ’80s, when the genre was totally kicking ass, it was always diminishing returns after the first movie, because the temptation’s always to follow the same formula.” The co-writer of 2018’s box-office-slaying Halloween reboot/update has a point. Follow-ups to John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic have been more trick than treat over the years, which is why Mcbride and director David Gordon Green decided to go another way with Halloween Kills, their second big-screen resurrection of the murderous Michael Myers (a third is set to follow next year). “It’s a different story that grapples with different themes… but has the same gore,” teases Mcbride. Lock your doors: cinema’s most famous boogeyman is coming back for another round — this time, with some old faces and new twists...
2018’s Halloween brought Michael Myers’ story full circle and gave closure to Laurie, Jamie Lee Curtis’ character from the first film. How does Halloween Kills move the story on?
Danny Mcbride: It takes place the same night, picking up where the last movie ended. Events in the film bring together a lot of characters who were in the 1978 film who we didn’t see last time. They gather to try, once and for all, to take down Michael, to stop this madman.
David Gordon Green: The first one was more about Laurie’s life of isolation after Michael and her attempts at revenge. It was personal. This is more about the unravelling of a community into chaos. It’s about how fear spreads virally.
How did you approach Michael this time? Some sequels have tried to delve into his psyche — but your 2018 film stripped him back to this mysterious, unknowable force...
Green: Yeah. We were and still are just following Carpenter’s lead. We’ve stuck to not really knowing much about him. We don’t try to humanise or justify who he is. Our Halloween films track his transcendence from the boy in the opening scene in the original
Halloween to the legend he represents today — the paranoia and fear that inhabits our culture and community. He’s come to represent much more than a man with a knife in a house.
Why do you think he’s so enduring as a character, 40 years on?
Mcbride: I think it’s the simplicity of him. The original movie was lightning in a bottle: you had Carpenter’s direction, an incredible score and Jamie Lee Curtis being awesome. Then on top of it all, you had this monster…
Green: A lot of horror stories are ghost stories, haunted-house movies, and you have all these rules that explain the world. Here, it’s all laid out in a very straightforward way. The monster is not some horrific creature. He’s a man with this blank-expression white mask that people project their own neuroses and fears onto.
Did you have more confidence this time, after the success of the last film?
Green: I think so. When you see the box office and hear about all the people who liked the movie and were excited to see more, of course you feel good. We learned a lot from the last film.
Mcbride: What did we learn again?
Green: Well, we learned that Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie is capable of anything! We didn’t know what to expect working with her. The fact she could do her own stunts, kick everybody’s ass and be a joy to work with — that definitely meant re-evaluating what we wanted to do with the next chapter of the story. We were excited to write without limitations about what Laurie can do.
John Carpenter is composing the score again — has he been involved in other ways?
Green: Oh yes. His music’s incredible. But he also really helps us navigate. Although he didn’t direct [1981’s] Halloween II, he was very involved in the writing of it, and he’d asked himself the same questions we’ve been asking ourselves: how do you continue this but make it satisfying and different? We’d also do Skype sessions where I’d watch him watch scenes, then he’d give feedback. He would jump, laugh and sometimes give a thumbs-up. Which for me, who grew up on Escape From New York and Big Trouble In Little China, was pretty incredible. [laughs]
How did you land on the title?
Green: We wanted something that was simple, not to get too eloquent or poetic.
Mcbride: It was actually the only fight we’ve ever got into while making this. David was really keen on Halloween Kills while I wanted to call it Halloween 2: Electric Boogaloo.
The title of the next movie, due in 2021, is Halloween Ends. Will that really be the end?
Green: The name Halloween Ends is meant to bring some finality. From our creative standpoint, we wanted people to know that this is a contained trilogy and that after three, we’ll be moving on. We’re trying to make it a satisfying close to the story we set out to tell.
WEST SIDE STORY is the culmination of a career ambition: Steven Spielberg is finally directing a musical. There have been abandoned attempts (musical-about-a-musical Reel To Reel), false starts (Hook started life as a songfest) and tiny tasters (the jitterbug contest of 1941, the ‘Anything Goes’ showstopper that opens Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom), but this is the first time he has gotten to showcase that old razzle-dazzle for an entire feature.
The film is actually less a remake of Robert Wise’s 1961 ten-time Academy Award-winner than an adaptation of the original 1957 Broadway show, the cast album of which Spielberg listened to over and over again as a kid. In the midst of a gang war between the American Jets and Puerto Rican Sharks for supremacy of a New York neighbourhood, ex-jet Tony (Baby Driver’s Ansel Elgort) and sister-of-the-sharks-leader Maria (newcomer Rachel Zegler) meet at a dancehall and fall instantly in love. Intact will be the stunning songs — ‘Maria’, ‘Tonight’, ‘America’, ‘Cool’ — that form the greatest collection of bangers in Broadway history, here arranged by composer David Newman, conducted by legendary baton-waver Gustavo Dudamel and choreographed by New York City Ballet’s Justin Peck. It’s Romeo & Juliet with the same emotional wallop but way more finger-clicking.
But this is 2020 Steven Spielberg, so don’t expect just a glitzy, beautifully shot and dazzlingly choreographed opiate. Instead the director is revitalising the material, bringing out notions of racial tensions and the stark realities of the immigrant experience — the struggle to exist in a xenophobic and racially
prejudiced landscape — that the 1961 film ignored.
Shooting on location in New York — Spike Lee was a regular on-set visitor — Spielberg has also instilled some much-needed authenticity. Whereas Wise’s movie adaptation mostly used white actors wearing ‘brownface’ to play the Sharks, Spielberg has exclusively hired Hispanic actors to portray the Puerto Ricans and listened to his cast — including Rita Moreno, a Best Supporting Actress Oscar-winner for playing Anita in the original film — to ensure fealty to the Latinx community. Moreno is playing a new character, Valentina, a re-interpretation of the original show/film’s Doc, who ran the pharmacy that provided neutral territory for the Jets and Sharks. Valentina provides a similar peace-keeping role, with Moreno adding a little more bite. The rest of the cast is mostly filled with musical theatre’s rising stars: Ariana Debose fills Moreno’s dancing shoes as Anita, while David Alvarez plays the Sharks’ leader, Bernardo. For the Jets, Mike Faist plays the gang’s top dog, Riff. The result promises to deliver what Steven Spielberg always does best: style and spectacle with substance.