No time like now
No Time To Die director Cary Fukunaga on the frustrations waiting for the new James bond film to finally drop.
THE film business is inherently full of starts and stops, but few have experienced the phrase “hurry up and wait” quite like No Time To Die
director Cary Fukunaga.
Fukunaga, the 44-year-old filmmaker of Beasts Of No Nation
and the first season of True Detective, took the job directing the 25th Bond film after Danny Boyle dropped out.
What followed was, for a bigbudget movie like No Time To Die:
A sprint to rewrite the script (with Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Phoebe Waller-bridge), begin production in spring 2019, wrap by the fall and have the film ready for release in April 2020.
But when the pandemic arrived, the fittingly titled No Time To Die
was put on ice for a year and a half while studios MGM and United Artists Releasing awaited the right conditions to open a film that cost at least Us$250mil (Rm1bil) to make.
Fukunaga, the first American to direct a Bond film in the franchise’s 58 years, has since moved onto other projects.
But the wait for the biggest movie of his career has been – like most things during the pandemic – discombobulating.
It’s even affected his dreams. Fukunaga recently talked about No Time To Die, which is tentatively coming out on Sept 30 in Malaysia, in a phone interview from London.
What has this experience been like, waiting for No Time To Die to be released?
I’ve never experienced anything like this. There have been releases that come out later but never by that much – especially because we broke our backs just trying to get done in time. So it’s been strange.
You want to watch it with an audience and see how people react. But you just kind of put it behind you. What I haven’t gotten on this one is the satisfaction of anyone else seeing the film and saying “I hated it” or “I like it.” That’s the part you’re waiting for.
Some people are going to like. Some people aren’t going to like it. But you still want to hear it. Even if you don’t want to hear it, you want to hear it.
Do you ever wake up and wonder: did I really make that movie?
I had a dream last night where (Skyfall and Spectre director) Sam Mendes was there. We were on vacation on some frozen lake.
There was a feeling like: he was done with Bond films. And he was like, “Oh, you finished one. Now you get a break”.
Then we started, like, water skiing on a frozen lake. It was a weird dream.
Hollywood has been struggling
during the pandemic to decide what’s best for its most expensive films – like No Time To Die – which need to sell a huge amount of tickets to break even. Do you feel that pressure?
Of course. You want the film to perform as best it can. You have the industry professionals telling you everyone’s optimistic, but no one really knows what’s going to happen.
You have the out to say Covid is the reason it underperformed. You want to be the exception and have people show up in mass. You don’t want a pandemic to be the reason people didn’t show up to see your film.
What was your original interest in making a Bond film?
I talked about doing Bond films quite a ways back. I talked to (producer Barbara Broccoli) even about doing one of these shortly after Spectre.
I always wanted to have a chance of competing – and I consider it competing even though I want my fellow filmmakers to do well – to see if I could make a movie that people actually wanted to show up to cinemas for.
To me, Bond always made the most sense out of any of the tentpole, iconic figures out there as a character.
If you were to look at my work in the past, I’ve always kind of focused on outsiders.
This guy is somebody that for 60 years now has been an outsider. He felt like the kind of character that I would want to take on.
Almost every one of my characters has been an orphan.
The film has been called more a psychological thriller. Is that accurate?
If there’s a needle that bent one way or the other based on genre, it’s still categorically a Bond film.
But it would lean to the psychological side.
And are you happy with the film you made?
Yeah. Whenever you make anything, you’d want to change it and make things better. But I think considering everything, this film looks (like) it took years to make instead of a year. – AP