Cary Fukunaga Supports ‘No Time to Die’ Date Push: There Are ‘Bigger Things Happening’
It came as no surprise last week when “No Time to Die,” director Cary Fukunaga’s first crack at the James Bond franchise and Daniel Craig’s final hour as 007, got pushed by MGM/United Artists Releasing off the 2020 calendar and into 2021. The movie will instead open on April 2, a year after it was supposed to release. But director Fukunaga isn’t upset about the studios’ decision to move the film, according to a wide-ranging recent interview in The Wall Street Journal.
When Fukunaga first heard the news of the movie’s initial push back to November back in March, he said, “There were a couple of hours of F—, it’s not happening. And then pretty quickly, I mentally moved on…I was at peace with it.” As for the studios and executives’ decision, he said, “I think they made a very smart decision to be one of the first to say out loud, ‘This is a big thing. We’re moving the film.’ Because a lot of people were in denial. Some still are.”
As for the most recent date change for the 25th Bond film six months later, Fukunaga said, “I look at it unemotionally right now…. There are so many bigger things happening. I have friends who are losing businesses, restaurants, and other friends who have lost family members.” He also acknowledged that the movie could even move again.
“The film will come out when it’s right,” he said, “and it will perform in the context of this new world, in which no one really can define what success or failure means.”
Meanwhile, according to the WSJ piece, Fukunaga has been plenty busy amid the pandemic. He’s returned to the script for Stanley Kubrick’s much mythologized, unproduced “Napoleon” from 1961, which Fukunaga is set to direct for HBO. He’s also been collaborating with playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard on the screenplay for his long-awaited film about the bombing of Hiroshima, announced back in 2017. He’s also traveled to Greece to make a short film for a commercial production house, and serves as a producer on the Toronto International Film Festival tearjerker “Good Joe Bell,” picked up by Solstice Studios back in September.
Head over to the Wall Street Journal to read the full interview.
