True Detective and Beasts of No Nation director Cary Fukunaga has a reputation for being tough to work with, having abruptly departed from both the period drama The Alienist and last year’s It, and while the filmmaker himself insists that this reputation is misleading, it’s clear that he’s a helmsman who likes a degree of creative freedom in whatever projects he chooses to take on. So when it was announced that Fukunaga had been hired to replace Boyle for Bond 25, it became clear that Daniel Craig’s final big screen outing in the role of 007 is not going to be more of the same.
With the sequel to 2015’s Spectre not due to come out for well over a year, details remain thin about what to expect from the last entry in this current James Bond era. Fukunaga, however, did offer a few hints of how he’s approaching the project in a recent interview with IndieWire. For one thing, the filmmaker seemed unable to choose a favorite Bond movie because he feels that each flick has brought something fresh to the franchise:
“I don’t think you can pick one though because every single one of them has brought their thing to it and it’s nice to have that difference, it’s nice to have the change of the character over time.”
From this, you can probably gather that Fukunaga himself wants to offer a unique take on the property, and sure enough, the director implied that he’s keen to play with and subvert the conventions of the spy genre:
“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.”
And while taking the reigns on a hugely popular, decades-old franchise certainly comes with its creative constrictions, it sounds like the filmmaker also sees this legacy as an opportunity to build on what came before in unexpected ways, without straying too drastically from the spirit of the series.
“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.”
We’ll see what finale Fukunaga has planned for Craig when Bond 25 hits theaters on February 14th, 2020.