Is it the cool gadgets, the smouldering stare or the sexy car? Or is it something more elemental that makes Bond distinct from his rivals?
When Ethan Hunt can HALO jump out of planes and Dom Toretto can race over a submarine, in the escalating blockbuster showdown, what makes a Bond movie unique?
Daniel Craig’s 15-year tenure in the six-decades old franchise culminates with No Time To Die, a movie that’s as much about the famously detached super spy’s emotional arc as it is about stunts and action sequences.
Sure, Bond has great posture, wears a tuxedo exceedingly well and always has a sardonic quip on hand, but if you can’t connect with him, then there’s nothing to distinguish a Bond movie from its rivals.
For director Cary Joji Fukunaga, it’s Bond’s outsider status that he relates to.
“Non-negotiable Bondisms for me is the outsider aspect of him,” Fukunaga told news.com.au. “He’s got to be someone who rails against authority, who operates to a moral compass that is the right one.
“That looks – at least on the outside – unmoved by any bit of danger, whether it be to his heart or to his actual body, but on the inside he has that deeper stirring, a more violent core.
“And then there’s the suits and cool cars.”
Fukunaga is the first American in 25 movies to direct a Bond film but he’s not a stranger to capturing worlds outside of his own lived experience.
His first feature was the 2009 sensitive indie drama Sin Nombre, which followed a Honduran girl trying to make her way to America. Next came an acclaimed adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, followed by Beasts of No Nation, the story of child soldiers in an unnamed West African country’s civil war.
In between were TV series True Detective and Maniac.
While Fukunaga’s previous works seem wildly divergent from each other and from No Time To Die, what links them is that outsider streak, these characters that don’t belong in the worlds they inhabit.
It’s something Fukunaga, the California-born son of a Japanese-American father and Swedish-American mother, knows all too well, and maybe why he’s drawn to the stories he’s told.
“In my work, studying the outsider, feeling like an outsider too, and then having that somehow transformed in the fictional world of cinema makes it relatable to me,” he said.
“I can take [Bond] – and even though I’m not Bond by any means, I’m probably closer to Q – I could get it and get with it.”
The experience of directing a Bond film has been “surreal” for him, having been a fan since he was a kid when he wished he could be an international spy, travelling the world in cool cars and taking down super villains.
“It’s way more interesting than most office jobs.”
It was Daniel Craig’s Bond that brought Fukunaga back to the series as an adult. He remembers the intensity of Casino Royale’s action sequences, particularly the parkour scene.
Craig’s tenure has had more of an emotional through-line than any of his predecessors who promptly forgot what happened in the previous films. Craig’s Bond carried with him the pain and loss of Vesper and her betrayal. It’s what distinguishes his Bond from the others.
Fukunaga understood the assignment. This fifth and final film was a culmination of all that came before under Craig.
“There was no desire on my part to reinvent the wheel,” he said. “I was, at least in my mind, clear that a big part of my responsibility was landing the final chapter to five films, you can’t just make something that feels completely outside of that world, tonally and thematically.
“It all needs to connect. It all needs to feel like a progression. Even if there’s an evolution of character, it can’t be so great that it doesn’t make sense in relation to Casino Royale. That’s how I approached it.”
In that sense, of all the Bonds that came before Craig, it’s George Lazenby’s version that most closely resembles.
Lazenby only had the role for one film, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a divisive entry that ardent fans either loathe or love. It’s also the only time in the pre-Craig era that Bond fell in love.
No Time To Die has many references to OHMSS, not surprising given that it’s one of Fukunaga’s favourites, and it foreshadows Bond’s emotional journey in this final Craig movie.
“I went back to a lot of the Fleming novels and short stories, especially in the writing period,” he said. “And what I was struck by was the level of psychological introspection that existed in those stories, which one might not be ready for if they’re used to the first Bond films which were more debonair and didn’t enter in that psychology.
“One of the short stories has Bond on his way to assassinate this guy, and he was struggling, really wrestling in his mind with this idea of being judge, jury and executioner.
“I thought that emotional component was really interesting to explore, and I thought George Lazenby’s OHMSS also did a similar thing, especially when it came to Bond and Theresa and the marriage, a side of Bond we hadn’t seen before or since.”
In Fukunaga’s hands, what makes Bond unique is the one thing that the Sean Connery or Roger Moore Bonds never attempted – emotional consequences.
No Time To Die is in cinemas on Thursday, November 11
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Originally published as No Time To Die: Cary Fukunaga on what makes James Bond distinctly James Bond
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