I was watching the trailer for No Time To Die (again) and thinking how excited I am that masks are coming off and that by October, when it finally arrives in theaters, I’ll comfortably get to sit in one and enjoy the surround sound and the huge screen and the ooohs and aaahs of fellow Bond fans.
Have you seen the trailer yet? It kicks ass.
The dirty faced Bond. Bond as the relic. The music. The scenery. That sick motorcycle jump. Not to mention Ralph Fiennes and Christoph Waltz and Léa Seydoux and Ana de Armas and Jeffrey Wright and Lashana Lynch?
Sign me up!
But more than any of those ingredients, I’m excited for the writing and directing of Cary Joji Fukunaga. Helming the Bond franchise gives him more toys to work with than he’s ever had before, and I’m giddy to see what he does with them. I’ve been a fan of his since 2009’s Sin Nombre, and my admiration only grew further with 2015’s Beasts of No Nation.
In between the two was a stint where he won an Emmy for HBO’s True Detective. Fukunaga directed all of season one and brought a sense of style and gravitas to what might have otherwise been a run of the mill procedural. There were rumors of friction between he and creator Nic Pizzolatto but it was pretty clear who the classier member of the team was.
Episode 4 of that season featured one of the coolest tracking shots in TV history. Do you remember it? If not, enjoy.
That’s just nuts. What a shot. It’s even better than you think.
How am I so certain that in the Pizzolatto/Fukunaga kerfuffle that Cary was the good guy? Uhhhh, I guess Exhibit A would be True Detective Season Two, when Fukunaga had left the team.
Yeeesh. That’s rough. You almost forget how terrible the writing was in that season until you see it again.
Woooooo weeeee! Hot damn that’s bad!
But Exhibit B would be from an interaction I found when I did a little more digging on Fukunaga. During an interview, early in his career, he promised an interviewer named Chase that he would sneak the man’s website logo into his next movie.
Here’s what it looked like.
That’s a nice gesture.
Except that his next movie was a period piece known as Jane Eyre.
Ruh-roh!
So of course that means that he wouldn’t be able to keep his word, right? Like, obviously, no one would do that. Giving his word was just a thing he did in that interview and he’s a Hollywood type, so it was just a vacuous, in-the-moment promise that no one keeps, right? We can all understand that. People make promises with the best intentions in mind and then things change. Happens every day.
But not Cary Fukunaga.
He wrote this letter to Chase.
And magically, stunningly, he kept his word. Here’s what it looked like in the film.
Amazing.
So in this world where it’s become so easy to flake out on people, take a second to really appreciate someone who didn’t. If you needed any more reason to root for Cary Fukunaga outside of his obvious, remarkable talent, now you have one.
He just seems like a great guy.
No Time to Die premieres October 8, 2021.
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