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The 25th episode in the venerable franchise — and Daniel Craig’s last as 007 — finds its hero in a somber mood.
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‘No Time to Die’ | Anatomy of a Scene
The director Cary Joji Fukunaga narrates an action sequence from his film featuring Daniel Craig.
“Hi. I’m Cary Fukunaga, and I am the director of No Time to Die. In this scene, we have Daniel Craig, playing James Bond, narrowly surviving a deadly attack by Specter at the Tomb of Vesper Lynd. This was one of those interesting situations where the locations drove the inspiration for story. So I went on a scout trip with Mark Tildesley, our production designer, and Linus Sandgren, cinematographer. And I really loved this bridge in Gravina. It seemed like the perfect place to run a stunt. We had a drone, and we were flying the drone around the bridge to see, what could we do with it? Could he jump off, potentially? It could be an ambush site. So we just literally designed the action sequence to the locations that we were finding. This sequence was shot on IMAX, which also meant that the movements of the cameras, the ease with which we could cover multiple angles, was hindered by the number of cameras we actually had. The IMAX cameras are massive. I mean, the kind of cameras when you pick them up, it makes you want to swear. But sometimes we just had to do the stunt over and over again and just move the camera around, because you only had two, maybe three, working IMAX cameras at the time. Which is not a lot, normally, when you’re covering a big stunt. Normally, you would have five cameras placed all over the place. So we had to be very, I would say, surgical about how the camera moved, how many takes we could do before we were running out of time. We see him try to outsmart them and outrun them, but they get a sense of where he’s headed. We do a Texas switch. And basically, you see Bond on camera. And as we pan over, it’s actually a stunt double running in, not Bond, to tackle Primo on the motorcycle. And then, when we cut up closer, we do that in one take. So all the punches have to land perfectly so that it looks like each one is actually connecting when, in reality, there was safety and space between them.” “Blofeld sends his regards.”
The director Cary Joji Fukunaga narrates an action sequence from his film featuring Daniel Craig.CreditCredit...Nicola Dove/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios
Published Sept. 29, 2021Updated Oct. 8, 2021
No Time to DieDirected by Cary Joji FukunagaAction, Adventure, ThrillerPG-132h 43m
“No Time to Die.” It’s kind of an ambiguous title. No time because we’re too busy or because now is not the right moment? The makers of the latest James Bond film have generously supplied us with 163 minutes — including a slow-moving Billie Eilish theme song — during which we can ponder this and other urgent questions. That’s in addition to the nearly 18 months of pandemic delay that we have waited for this episode [the 25th overall and Daniel Craig’s last in the role of the least secret member of Her Majesty’s Secret Service].
It arrives with a curious mixture of heaviness and insouciance. Mortality looms over the quips and car chases — not only the expected slaughter of anonymous minions, but an inky cloud of grief, loss and weariness. Near the beginning, in the midst of a high-toned Mediterranean holiday, Bond visits the grave of Vesper Lynd, the lover who died in “Casino Royale” in 2006. “I miss you,” he says, and “No Time to Die” is uncommonly preoccupied with memory and leave-taking. Tiptoeing around the spoilers, I will say that it amounts to a series of long goodbyes.
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Daniel Craig as James Bond in “No Time to Die.”Credit...Nicola Dove/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios
As someone who grew up in the Roger Moore era, when defiance of every kind of gravity was the hallmark of the series, I have trouble adjusting my eyes to the darkness and the possibility of tears. I don’t entirely trust the emotions that the director [Cary Joji Fukunaga] and the screenwriting committee [Fukunaga, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Phoebe Waller-Bridge] put into play, or the weighty themes they reach for.
As the knots in the plot are straightened out, the intricacies of spycraft recede in favor of a ponderous, familiar drama of sacrifice and revenge. The gloomy alpha villain [an ultra-gothy Rami Malek], who wants to wipe out much of humanity and is a mixture of curdled idealism and unhealed trauma, may remind you of Thanos in the final “Avengers” movies. And the overall vibe — a look that is both opulent and generic; a tone that mixes brisk professionalism with maundering self-pity; an aggressive, exhausting fusion of grandiosity and fun — is more superhero saga than espionage caper.
Still, you can’t quite hate the player, even if you suspect he may be in the wrong kind of game. Bond, now officially retired from MI6, refers to himself tongue-in-cheekily as “an old wreck,” and unlike some of his predecessors, Craig makes no attempt to seem more youthful than he is. [Craig is 53. The character, conceived by Ian Fleming as a man who had seen action in World War II, must be somewhere around 100 by now.] Which is not to say that Craig’s magnetism has dimmed or that his gym membership has lapsed.
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Did Billie Eilish meet Daniel Craig?
Eilish revealed that she got to meet the 53-year-old actor while making the No Time To Die theme song with her brother/producer Finneas, and shared that she was nervous to meet the star.
Who won the best original song Oscar for No Time to Die?
Billie Eilish and Finneas win Best Original Song Oscar for No Time to Die.
Who sang the song at the end of No Time to Die?
For No Time To Die, Billie Eilish delivers the eerily stirring title track... but that's not what plays when the final credits roll. Instead, the audience is treated to a 1969 Louis Armstrong classic - "We Have All The Time In The World."
What song did Billie Eilish do for James Bond?
"No Time to Die" is the theme song for the James Bond film of the same name. Performed by American singer-songwriter Billie Eilish and written by Eilish and her brother and collaborator, Finneas O'Connell, the song features orchestration by Hans Zimmer and was produced by Finneas O'Connell and Stephen Lipson.