It’s Bond, James Bond Week here at For The Win, where we’ve shaken (not stirred) five days’ worth of content to celebrate the premiere of the iconic franchise’s 25th movie, No Time to Die. (No spoilers!)
James Bond, particularly Daniel Craig’s version, is a sarcastic, dark and untrusting character. But in No Time to Die, Craig’s fifth and final film in the role, Bond is also humanized in a way unlike his four previous movies.
Director Cary Joji Fukunaga, who also helped write the movie, said Craig was “enormously helpful” with his insight into the complex character, and Craig told For The Win he “tried to put as much of myself into” Bond’s emotional journey as he could.
Still, writing a charming but still enigmatic James Bond role and story fitting for the iconic character’s end in this era is no easy task.
“One of the first things I saw when I was writing Bond is like, ‘What the hell does Bond say?'” Fukunaga told For The Win. “Because Daniel has done a much more quiet, brooding version of Bond.”
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“He’s certainly not just vomiting out monologues, right?” Fukunaga continued. “So when you try to get down to figure out what is the right thing to say here, sometimes it just ends up being almost too short and too abbreviated.
“And so having Daniel around and sort of talk about this — one that one of the first things he said was like, ‘No one knows how to write Bond.’ It’s just one of those things. … It was challenging, and it was it was fun at the same time. That’s what made it sort of refreshing, I think, for me in terms of that exploration is like finding new layers to him that maybe we haven’t seen before.”
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While there are several allusions to Craig’s previous Bond movies — and it’s clearly a sequel to Spectre — Fukunaga and his team also worked to connect and conclude Bond’s entire narrative from Casino Royale through No Time to Die. That, of course, includes going back to Vesper Lynd, Bond’s tragic counterpart and love interest in Casino Royale who’s demise continues to haunt the 007 agent.
With a more personal and emotional plot, Fukunaga said the key question they needed to answer was: What could open James Bond’s heart again?
And No Time to Die picks up about where Spectre left off with Bond and his latest love interest, Madeleine Swann (played by Léa Seydoux), driving off into the sunset.
“Probably the main element for me was bridging that arc from the first film, Casino Royale, which was established with the Vesper Lynd character,” Fukunaga said. “The beating heart that was closed down at the end of Casino Royale when he calls back M [Judi Dench], and he says, ‘The bitch is dead.’ This is like an old-school Fleming line. And you could feel that heart just going whoosh.”
While James Bond has had plenty of love interests over the last several decades, the female characters in the more recent movies have evolved tremendously. They’re no longer portrayed merely as accessories for 007 with often fatal endings.
Of course, Bond still has love interests. But the women in recent movies are also agents — from Judi Dench as M to Naomie Harris’ Moneypenny and Lashana Lynch’s Nomi, who debuts as briefly retired Bond’s 007 replacement in No Time to Die — with more developed characters who play central roles in pushing the plots forward. No Time to Die audiences also will learn even more about Madeleine’s backstory and her connection to Rami Malek’s disturbing villain, Lyutsifer Safin.
“This has been a development that’s been happening for years,” Fukunaga said.
“If you look at when Judi Dench was brought into the franchise on GoldenEye and she sits Pierce Brosnan’s Bond down and calls him ‘a misogynistic dinosaur’ and ‘a relic of the Cold War,’ that was a sort of calling out of a change happening there in terms of the people running not only the series, but also [the] 00 program and MI6. So 25 years later to have female 00 agents is not preposterous at all. It seems like it’s about time.
“But also, I think, just for me in general when I write stories, you can only have a richer story by having more layered characters, regardless of what their sex is, right? So if a character is simply just a prop and they’re supposed to be a central character, it’s not doing you very much favor in terms of interesting conflict and drama. So that was the main thing, just to make sure every character was really interesting and multi-dimensional.”
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