Cary Fukunaga’s Shaken, Stirred Bond
For Daniel Craig’s last 007 adventure, the maverick director brings his personal touch to the franchise
‘What’s twitching in the corner?” Cary Fukunaga is slumped on a couch in a London editing facility, his Birkenstock-clad foot resting cross-legged on his bouncing knee. The director is running the opening sequence of No Time to Die, the swan song for Daniel Craig’s tenure as James Bond. It starts quietly, at a gravesite in Matera, Italy, before turning into an action set piece that took months of prep to pull off.
What’s bothering Fukunaga, however, is a tiny fly that’s flitting around a marble tombstone. The bug was to be removed via VFX, but it’s still in the shot, and they have to lock the picture in less than a month.
The knee bounces faster. He’s assured they can get it ixnayed ASAP. The knee slows down. “My job now is sanding the distractions down,” he says later. “It’s the little things that matter. That’s the challenge.” Luckily, Fukunaga thrives on challenges. A former snowboarder, the half-Japanese, half-Swedish Bay Area native spent two years researching and riding migrant trains in Central America for his 2009 drama,
Sin Nombre. After getting offered “every border thriller” that came down the pike, he decided to do something completely different: an adaptation of Jane Eyre
(2011). The long, single-take shootout between Matthew McConaughey and skinheads in HBO’s first season of True Detective?
That was a Fukunaga challenge too.
He thought that a tentpole blockbuster was the next summit — so when rumors spread that Craig was stepping down as Bond after 2015’s Spectre, Fukunaga pitched himself to series producer Barbara Broccoli as a collaborator. “We spent an evening spitballing potential Bonds, and left it at that,” he says. Then, when Craig returned for one last go-round and director Danny Boyle dropped out, Fukunaga found himself in Broccoli’s New York apartment. “It was, ‘Here’s what we want to do, what do you think?’ ” he says.
A few weeks later, Fukunaga met with Craig for an informal chat. The next thing he knew, he was in charge of a $250 million movie and a cadre of screenwriters (including Phoebe Waller-Bridge), set to shoot in three countries.
“He’s a very individual filmmaker and very comfortable making brave choices,” Craig says of Fukunaga, via email. “You need someone who’s able to make those brave choices at the helm of a Bond movie.”
And though Fukunaga admits No Time to Die is the biggest project he’s ever done, he was determined to make a bona fide Bond film — car chases, exotic locales — with a personal touch. “What I love about Craig’s Bond films is the emotional stuff,” he says. “There are personal stakes. There are real losses. . . . When I decided I wanted to do something outside the independent-film world, Bond was the character I identified with the most. If you think about all of my films, from Sin Nombre to Beasts [ of No Nation], they’re about orphans, outsiders, people who operate on their own wavelength — or are on their own, period.”
You could assume that’s how Fukunaga felt growing up, moving around Northern California a lot, as well as spending part of his childhood in Mexico when his mother remarried. “I’m not an orphan, obviously,” he says, laughing. “I just know that being exposed to so many different kinds of cultures, family structures, class levels . . . without turning this into a therapy session, those types of stories definitely make sense to me. I’ll just say Bond felt very real to me by the end of this.”
“The end of this” would be a bit of a moving target. By the time we talk for a third time, at the end of August, No Time to Die has the distinction of being the first major film to postpone its release (more than once) due to Covid; Fukunaga found out that they were “pressing pause” while driving to lock the movie. Now that it’s finally set to debut (October 8th), the director is ready to say goodbye to Bond. But having had time to reflect on the exhausting experience of helming a franchise blockbuster, Fukunaga has come away with a new appreciation for the process. “It was a lot like the blind man feeling the elephant,” he says. “I could only understand what was in front of me and then imagine, ‘What does all of this look like?’ But now that I’ve done it, I’d definitely do it again.”