'No Time to Die' Director Cary Fukunaga Revealed the Alternate Endings for Daniel Craig's James Bond
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No Time to Die spoilers follow.
James Bond's fate in No Time to Die was decided long before director Cary Joji Fukunaga boarded the project, but the filmmaker had some serious say on how said conclusion would come about.
Now, he's opened up about the alternate ways in which he and fellow screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade had 007... *whisper it* die in earlier versions of the story.
"There was a few things that [producers] Barbara [Broccoli] and Michael [G Wilson], and Daniel had earmarked. This was definitely one of them," Fukunaga explained to Variety recently. "How he meets his end wasn't decided yet. It was just the fact that he would, so the question then became how to do it."
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Marking Craig's final outing as the iconic British spy, the film sees Bond forced out of retirement when old pal Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) asks for his help.
The CIA operative orders Bond to rescue a gifted scientist from the clutches of Safin (Rami Malek), a criminal with a penchant for poison who's hellbent on avenging his murdered family – and the mission subsequently leads Bond to his death.
During a confrontation with Safin on his island, Bond finds himself being injected with the baddie's weapon of choice, a deadly DNA-tagged virus. Safin then reveals that the dose is linked to Bond's lover Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) and their daughter, meaning that if he ever touched them again, they would die.
Having already called in a Royal Navy missile strike, Bond ensures Madeleine and Mathilde's safety by sacrificing himself and succumbing to the blast – but not before he radios them both to tell them that he loves them first.
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Initially, though, Fukunaga toyed with the idea of 007 being shot by an unknown assailant, before deciding that that would have been too run-of-the-mill.
"A bullet, like an anonymous bullet, I remember that one. But it just seemed like a conventional weapons death didn't seem appropriate," he recalled. "Given how much he had been able to escape from everything else, the fact that it would just be a bullet that always had your name on it from the beginning, while realistic, for Bond it had to be something even beyond that – like the impossible, impossible situation."
"I think the important thing was that we all try to create a situation of tragedy. The idea that there's an insurmountable problem, there's a greater force at play, and there's nothing anybody can do about it," Craig interjected.
"The greater force being Safin's weapon. It [kills] the only thing that Bond wants in life, to be with the people he loves and [knowing] that he can't be with them, there's nothing worth living for.
"He would in fact endanger their lives, and that's the last thing on earth he wants to do," he went on. "So that element was incredibly important to sort of thread in there, because it couldn't feel like a random act. It had to have weight – without it, it wasn't gonna work. If we hadn't have got that weight, I don't think we would've done it. We would've found another way of ending it."
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