As early reviews are showing, it appears Cary Fukunaga did really well as the filmmaker behind the new James Bond film, “No Time to Die,” crafting a big-budget franchise film that also has a ton of emotion. Well, according to the filmmaker, it was far from the most conventional filmmaking process, including crafting a script well after production actually ended.
READ MORE: ‘No Time To Die’: Daniel Craig’s Final Bow As James Bond Is Worth Toasting [Review]
Speaking to Esquire Middle East, Fukunaga talked about the unusual situation surrounding the scriptwriting process for “No Time to Die.” You see, due to taking over the film from Danny Boyle late in pre-production combined with the injury of Daniel Craig and the uncertainty about when he would return, the production of the film had to keep moving ahead with a collection of scenes that could be molded into what Fukunaga wanted.
“With ‘Maniac,’ we were writing as we shot, and after we finished, I told myself that I was never doing that again,” said the filmmaker. “But then with Bond, we were still writing when we’d wrapped. I was even writing in post!”
“The only set which was really ready to go was M’s office in MI6,” Fukunaga added. “I knew more or less in the outline that I made what I wanted to have happen in that section, but none of the body of the script had been written yet. Luckily, I was sitting there with some of the greatest actors in the world.”
So, with a collection of amazing actors and a general idea of what the story was going to look like, Fukunaga worked out a variety of scenes that were “vague enough” to be pieced back together in the editing room and would create the finished story of “No Time to Die.”
“I was writing dialogue that was intentional enough, but vague enough, that I could apply it to a number of different things happening in the third act,” explained Fukunaga. “It was almost like a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ novel writing these pages: ‘If this happened here, and you have to go here, then this page will work for that.’”
He added, “When we finally put the film together, it all made sense, somehow all fit together. But I’ll tell you a secret, that I think is okay now that we’re so close to release, there are pieces that Ralph Fiennes says in the trailer that neither Ralph nor I knew exactly what he was saying it for.”
Obviously, if this was made public during production, you would have had fans freaking out over how the film was destined to fail and how the studio is just figuring it out as they go. But now that we know about this situation after the film has premiered, it’s clear that sometimes these sorts of issues can still be figured out and worked out fairly seamlessly. Clearly, it could have gone a lot worse.
“No Time to Die” hits theaters in the US on October 8.