Bond 25 director Cary Fukunaga talks 007

30-Oct-2018 • No Time To Die

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American director Cary Fukunaga, who will helm Bond 25 after taking over from Danny Boyle, spoke to IndieWire recently on a wide range of topics. His personal history with the Bond series and what he thinks he will bring to the table were front and center of the conversation:

The filmmaker wouldn’t choose a favorite classic Bond, though did say that the first film he ever watched was “A View to Kill” with Roger Moore. “I don’t think you can pick one though,” he said, “because every single one of them has brought their thing to it and it is nice to have that difference, it’s nice to have the change of the character over time.”

Doing a Bond film represents a new genre for Fukunaga to explore, but its specificity is an advantage. “Over the years, you’ve seen a lot of different iterations not only of Bond, but of films that have mimicked it or copied it,” he said. “So I think the exciting part actually is going to the original source, and being able to play in a sandbox.”

That’s part of why he has liked working with specific genres over the course of his career. “Genres come with tropes and expectations and in the post-modern era, you can deliver exactly what’s expected of the genre, or you can try to twist it in an intelligent way which subverts the genre but still stays faithful to it,” he said. “So, when you’re drawing from a certain style, you can play with audience expectations while still surprising them — and the nature of creativity is that limitations are often times good things, because when you’re facing the overwhelming vastness of creative potential, to have defined routes to take for a story or style are helpful in determining how far you want to veer from it.”