Daniel Craig seems pretty damn psyched about how his run on James Bond ended
The actor reflected on the ending of No Time To Die, calling it, "very, very satisfying"
Aux News James Bond
[Note: This piece contains spoilers for the latest Bond film, No Time To Die.]
Daniel Craig has not always been, let’s say, at peace with the decade-plus of obligations that come with playing James Bond. Although the British actor has done his best to play the good soldier for most of his run as the professional people shooter, the mask covering his exhaustion at the whole massive rigmarole of it all has slipped more than once—most famously in a post-Spectre interview in which he declared that he’d “rather break this glass and slash my wrists” than suit back up for another globetrotting spy adventure in that moment.
Which might help explain why Craig sounds so clearly relieved about the ending of his final Bond film, No Time To Die, in some comments he recently made to NME. Craig dubbed the way the film panned out as “really very, very satisfying,” a statement we can’t help but assume is at least partially linked to the fact that it ends in such a way that nobody’s going to be bothering him to play James Bond again unless it’s on a Dante’s Inferno trip through the afterlife.
(Note to self: Please add “James Bond kills his way through hell to murder the devil” to our list of Excellent Screenplay Ideas, right next to that perennial classic John Wick Fights Dracula.)
Bond producers—who usually treat the character like an immortal jug of slowly metabolizing alcohol, hormones, and adrenaline—also note that they were actually pretty receptive to treating his last installment as, well, a last installment. Per producer Michael G. Wilson: “I think all of us discussed that it seemed like a situation that we could tackle for the first time in the Bond series.”
Craig also praised the film—which is one of the top international box office performers of the year—for actually trying to be about something beyond just trying to stop moon lasers or what have you. “ The through line of this is family [and] love,” he noted. And also, of course, the greatest joy of all: “The fact we had an end.”
79 Comments
(Note to self: Please add “James Bond kills his way through hell to
murder the devil” to our list of Excellent Screenplay Ideas, right next
to that perennial classic John Wick Fights Dracula.)It’s like Spielberg said: There are only four plots. Man vs. man, man vs. nature, nature vs. nature, and John Wick vs. Dracula.
Oh yeah like for example The Goonies is definitely a John Wick vs. Dracula film, you can tell because of the skeleton.
I’m fairly sure it’s: man-goes-on-journey, stranger-comes-to-town, and John-Wick-vs-Dracula.
It wasn’t Spielberg, it was Dostoevsky, and the actual quote is “There are only three stories, really – in one a man leaves home, in another a stranger comes, and in the third some plucky kids dance to save a community center. And they all have subplots about tax evasion or jewel thieves.”He was ahead of his time.
I prefer Miller’s categories: man vs. man, man vs. dog, dog vs. zombie, James Bond, stories of kings and lords, women over 50 finding themselves after divorce, and car commercial.
Don’t forget number 8: fat guy talks to idiot.
That movie was an abomination against God, Buddha, Yahweh, Allah, Tom Cruise and the God of Frosted Cinnamon PopTarts.
I have two demands for the next Bond.
1) British
2) Someone who actually fucking looks like he/she/they are having fun.
Nice, I really enjoyed it too. Glad he got some satisfaction from the series after not enjoying it for a long while.
further confirming my assumption that before he ever considered making No Time to Die he told the producers that he (Bond) MUST die (and get a hefty paycheck because you gotta eat). Whatever, I’m glad he’s happy and grateful for some of the best Bonds I’ve ever seen (although I would have been happier if they had stopped at Skyfall and turned it over to Idris Elba).
Forget Bond – I want Carey Mulligan as the younger version of Judi Dench’s M in a prequel series as the MI6 agent growing ever more cynical while discovering how shitty British imperialism really is as decolonization takes hold across the Commonwealth in the 1970s. Maybe she occasionally crosses paths with the contemporary 007 who comes off as a Roger Moore-type preening asshole.
A premise roughly 100x more interesting than “what if James Bond, but woman?”
I don’t think the producers have the balls to make M the centerpiece of a new series of movies (maybe a streaming TV series, though, with some hot young British star), but even if they stick with the hotdogging white male Bond, a period piece really shouldn’t be out of the question. The source material is Cold War era and it doesn’t translate that easily to modern day. They can either make the story lampshade how Bond is a Cold War era relic (which they have tried), or they can keep trucking along like supervillains plotting world domination from island lairs is a modern concern (which they have also tried). It might be a whole lot easier to just set the next Bond series in the 70s, and bathe in the 70s cliches. It’s also an easy way to refresh the formula to avoid unfavourable comparisons between the new Bond and Craig, who is pretty widely beloved.
they can keep trucking along like supervillains plotting world domination from island lairs is a modern concern (which they have also tried).
“Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?”“I think so, Brain — but isn’t Roger Moore a little too dead to play Bond one more time?”
You don’t think insane, misanthropic billionaires trying to build a moon base while Earth crumbles is a concern?
I think they’ve already done that with Live and Let Die.
Only it will be MI4 because its the past
Amazing idea, I would kill to see this.
Wow, I like this a lot. Especially as a small(er) screen series.
Daaammn. This is a mulligan if I ever saw one. I don’t even *have* a Kinja account, but I do now — solely to commend this perfect idea. Please submit this pitch to the relevant authorities, immeejat’ly.
A real life Archer, then.
Given that Nicolas Cage is now playing Dracula and Keanu Reeves was in Dracula, John Wick vs Dracula becomes an even more awesome idea! Do it Hollywood!
The explosion (spoilers?) was satisfying.
Why and how it happened, not so much.
There was a part of my brain was “oh, that explosion was just infront of Bond, he’ll be fine, last second save” and then the carpet bomb extended over the entire island and I accepted, nope, he’s dead.
The whole sequence of him closing the blast doors, the doors opening again and so he then runs toward them instead of to the controls he just used to close them, which leads to him getting shot and the ending playing out as it does. Just. So. Stupid.
Ok, swap the opening and closing I think. I don’t remember and I don’t care. Still. So. Stupid.
Did anyone else feel the way some of the final battle was shot, where Bond is running through the lair shooting people, might have been a little 90s Goldeneye video game easter egg?
And it also came up with the idea of allowing Bond to die. It’s no Easter Egg tis a God damn template.
100%
If they really wanted to showcase how evil Remi Malek’s character was, he’d have portrayed Oddjob.
There were all those rumours that Fukunaga was off playing Playstation for stretches of the shoot, and the crew were annoyed with it. That long take shootout definitely felt like a computer game level (in general I think long takes create that feeling too much, especially when they stick in a third person pov, felt that way in The Revenant too)
I’m sure he’s happy, in the same way that Harrison Ford was happy when they finally killed Han Solo, though that didn’t stop them from dragging him back in front of the camera to do an afterlife cameo.
– “Aaaaand cut! Great job, Harrison. Think we got it.”
– “Alright, I’m finally out of this franchise. AND THIS TIME I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY MEAN IT!” (walks off)
I always felt that was in lieu of a Leah force ghost though, right?
“Dragging” him back.
Or rather, backing up dumptrucks full of money to his house, and telling him to just say “when.”
State of love and trust as I busted down the pretext
Sin still plays and preaches, but to have an empty court, uh huh
And the signs are passin’, grip the wheel, can’t read it
Sacrifice receiving the smell that’s on my hands, hands, yeah
I too am glad Craig will never do another Bond movie. His dour, humourless, miserable Bond was a chore to watch.
It started well enough, but turned into a slog quickly enough.
And the franchise needs to stop trying to make me drool over an ugly man.
Ugh — the leaden Daniel Craig was to Bond what the fascist Donald Trump was to America. Can either institution recover?
geez, take it easy, it’s only a movie.
Family and love, the two things I go to Bond movies for.
“right next to that perennial classic John Wick Fights Dracula.”Make that, John Wick fights Nic Cage’s Dracula, and you’ll have fixed it.
I genuinely thank you for saying “Daniel Craig seems pretty damn psyched” in the headline; because I would not have known it from the picture.
Read: with a big paycheck
“James Bond…on a Dante’s Inferno trip through the afterlife.”Now you’ve done it. There are a dozen screenwriters doing a treatment tonight.
Yes, but I want to be the screenwriter who combines that with John Wick vs. Dracula!
I think it was the right call to end No Time to Die the way it ended. First, Craig has been very, very clear that he is more than ready to move on. Second, whomever they choose to be the new Bond will always be in Craig’s shadow, basically a 21st Century George Lazenby—“This never happened to the other fellow.”This allows for a total reboot that brings the series firmly into today’s world and that allows the new Bond to totally own it. Of course, the big challenge now is to pick the right guy.
So was Sean Connery, but they didn’t kill off Bond…
Good for him. It was a great stretch. Rewatched all of the movies when NTTD was released on digital a few weeks back. Quantum was a directionless mess, but the rest(even Spectre) made a pretty good saga. I got turned around on Craig’s bond, the more he was in the role the more comfortable he got.
I did the same. Though I hadn’t seen Spectre before. And yeah Quantum was unwatchable during some action scenes. So many fast cuts I started having to fast forward parts because it was giving me a headache.
I saw QoS in the theater, and was angry not even five minutes into the film from that spastic, whiplash-inducing car chase. It’s like the editor had watched The Bourne Identity on fast forward while snorting lines of coke just before he started cutting that opening sequence together.
Hear, hear.Quantum of Solace is rightfully the worst of Craig’s Bond era, even if it not exactly the worst in franchise. I don’t particularly enjoy Spectre either for being slow and dour with barely anything interesting to show.Glad that No Time To Die gave Daniel Craig a deserving conclusion to his James Bond’s arc. That film and Casino Royale and Skyfall are among the best in franchise so he went out on the top.Can’t wait to see him again in Knives Out 2.
I didn’t think Quantum was “bad,” exactly, but at its heart it wasn’t a James Bond story. It was a Camille Montes story with James Bond in a large supporting role. It’s possible to do a dual-protagonist story where both characters get a satisfying arc (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a good example), but Quantum was maybe too much of a break from the usual Bond formula, and never found its balance. I give it partial credit for trying something different, but it whiffed the execution.
I didn’t think Quantum was “bad,” exactly, but at its heart it wasn’t a James Bond story. It was a Camille Montes story with James Bond in a large supporting role. It’s possible to do a dual-protagonist story where both characters get a satisfying arc (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a good example), but Quantum was maybe too much of a break from the usual Bond formula, and never found its balance. I give it partial credit for trying something different, but it whiffed the execution.
This may be an unpopular take, but I absolutely hated the decision to kill off Craig’s Bond onscreen. It completely destroys the questionable continuity that had previously accompanied every prior recast — it was never completely clear whether Roger Moore was the same guy with the same memories as Sean Connery, but now that ambiguity is gone forever because Craig’s Bond is dead and so the next Bond is unambiguously a different guy.It was also really awkward when they had a little funeral for Bond, but none of the attendees really knew him that well because they were introduced late in the series run and Craig’s Bond is always retiring.
If this franchise has hinged on nothing else, it’s been its unwavering dedication to realism and strict continuity!
The questionable continuity was already destroyed by Casino Royale when they made the choice to reboot the franchise and start out with Bond as a rookie…and then further reinforced by the introduction of Spectre and Blofeld in the film Spectre. This meant the Craig films couldn’t be seen as modern prequels to the 60s films, they were explicitly in their own continuity.I’m fine with choice to kill off Craig’s Bond because from the outset they established he wasn’t the same Bond as the others, so this was the only time they’ve ever had an option to give a Bond actor an ending without worrying about the impact it will have on the next actors films.And I’d get your point about the ‘funeral’ more if it was an actual funeral…to me it read more like a memorial by his colleagues taking a couple of minutes to pay tribute to his sacrifice. It worked as short professional memorial before they all got back to work.
Not really, I liked the ending. And there’s sort of continuation among all the films.Look at the ending scene with Madeline riding with Mathilde, she was starting her story about James Bond. Any one of these movies in the past and in the future can be from Madeline telling one of several adventures of James Bond.
In both the commercial and creative contexts of the contemporary blockbuster film biz, it’s curious that nobody has yet picked up on certain parallels between Craig’s overall Bond arc and Christopher Nolan’s whole Dark Knight take on Batman. Since the ending of The Dark Knight Rises effectively established Bruce Wayne’s retirement as Batman, Warner Bros. is banking on the audience’s anticipation and acceptance of a new actor as The Batman next year in a renewed Gotham universe ten years after the last incarnation’s conclusion. Not to mention the very title of Batman Begins gave the Bond producers license (to kill) with the reboot of Casino Royale to square one which, of course, happened to be Fleming’s first Bond novel. Burton’s vision of Batman devolved into Schumacher’s rightly ridiculed return to the ’60s TV series campiness that took eight years to clear the way for Nolan’s more gritty grounded approach. One invisible stealth car notwithstanding, Die Another Day was not nearly so awful, while Craig himself obviously proved all the naysayers wrong who’d scorned the announcement of his casting at the time. Meanwhile the last few Bond entries prompted many to question the apparent shoehorning of the whole Craig arc into the self-contained referential premise of SPECTRE connecting all the dots. OK by me since the criminal organization operated through most of Connery’s original features. But as much as Skyfall has been regarded as one of the very best of over 50 years of Bond films, the writers’ outright appropriation of one particular plot point from The Dark Knight has always irked me as much as no doubt many other fans of both series: just as the Joker turned out to have deliberately planned his own capture, Silva likewise set up his MI6 interrogation, ostensibly to face M again. Not that Bond has always had to adhere to some rigorous standard of originality, but that pivotal swipe still seemed remarkably lazy just a few years after Nolan’s biggest box-office hit. The death of Bond in the collective consciousness may well be far more challenging than any one Batman’s retirement and/or replacement. Time will tell, in about four or five or six years. Then again, in 1893 no less than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his most famous character, Sherlock Holmes, in the ultimate battle against criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty, only to be genuinely surprised at the unprecedentedly negative reaction to such a fictional event. By 1901 public demand actually pressured Conan Doyle into resurrecting the great detective. To give the Skyfall writers due credit for one of their better lines, then, remember Bond’s response when Silva asks what his hobby is: “Resurrection”.
I’ve always been a little annoyed by how much the Craig-Bond series borrowed from the Dark Knight trilogy, although one difference there is that Nolan used the conceit to give Bruce Wayne a proper retirement from the Batman persona, rather than killing off Batman. In the comics, Bruce Wayne can never have a happy ending — without the burden of the Batman mantle, it’s not a Batman story, and so Bruce Wayne must always be tormented by it in some way. Similarly, if Bond permanently exits the spy game, it’s not a Bond story (even if Craig sure seems to temporarily retire a lot).I wouldn’t have had an issue with Craig-Bond receiving a similarly final transformation, like being promoted to M after suffering a career-ending injury, or faking his death to raise a family in seclusion. But actually killing Bond was a bridge too far for me, I feel like he’s a character who can never definitively die.
Point taken. But entirely aside from the relative risk of such fictional finality precluding audience acceptance of the next iteration, from a purely conceptual stand the unique sacrifice demonstrated in this ending seriously redefines the Bond character’s ultimate heroism: not to die for country in the line of duty, or even for mere shock value dramatically, but in terms of this particular story’s outcome wholeheartedly for the sake of his own loved ones that he himself would otherwise doom to painful death should he possibly escape and be in their presence again. Since an agent assassin has lived a life of danger risking his life to save countless lives at every turn, saving their lives at least stays true to the character and this story once he recognized he also would not want to live without them either. All the more effective for being so unexpected and disconcerting, but still a well executed denouement I think. How “self-contained” this stretch of the Bond series is accepted remains to be seen, as I emphasized the obvious difference between Bond’s death and the retirement of Nolan’s Batman. But as far as long-term commercial bets go, far more than any past suspensions of disbelief on the audience’s part, I suspect the Bond producers may just as well be counting on their ever-shrinking attention spans and shortened media memories a sufficient number of years down the line. The only question now is just how the character may be reintroduced after the reboot of Casino Royale already started with Craig’s Bond viscerally earning his license to kill before the opening credits. Prior to that, and probably from here on, each new actor could embark on a series of adventures with little or no continuity between episodes other than, say, Judi Dench’s long run as M. Though the next Bond may also need a new set of supporting players as well.
We never see Bond die on screen. We see the explosion on the island. Not that he is coming back but technically, it is possible.
All the Craig-Bond movies have strong death related themes, but in Spectre where it starts with Bond dressed as a skeleton and the theme song ends with the line “The writing’s on the wall” I have to say, if you didn’t know how these movies were going to end you’re a few olives short of a martini.
I hope they go the route of it being a cover identity for a succession of different agents. No I haven’t seen No Time to Die yet, I watch 3 hour movies at home where I can pause them…..
Skyfall and For Your Eyes Only put that idea to lie.
The cover identity idea would require some rather deliberate retconning of Skyfall, as his parents’ gravestone is shown in the film.
I could live with that 😉
Nah.
Hot take: in 2021, Moonraker is the most realistic and relevant Bond movie.
Steaming pile of crap describes it best.
I still wished we got Danny Boyle’s take on Bond. wasn’t the reason he departed from the film was because he wanted to kill bond in the first place?
hopefully Daniel Craig gets brought into the Marvel films. Not sure who he’d play, but they should sign him up on principle.
I’m glad they killed him. It’s fucking bold and it leaves things wide open for where it goes next.I love the possibility that every new Bond is a fresh start and you don’t know where their journey will end.Hell, you want something crazy? Cast an older Brit to play a retired Bond. How do they deal with getting sucked back in.Do a far younger Bond who’s following in his dad’s footsteps.Kick any semblance of continuity to the curb with each new star.
What I hope happens it that the brand name becomes 007, not Bond, and every few movies we can meet an entirely new person to take up that mantle.That also solves the inclusion issue as it can literally be anyone with a British accent, regardless of gender, sex, gender identity, skin color, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Technically even the accent is optional.James Bond may no longer live forever but he can have a lasting legacy. He’s now someone double-ohs will strive to live up to.
I for one am absolutely chuffed that that bullshit is over. Now can they turf out the rest of the creative team behind the whole Craig era and wind back for a partial reboot from, say, just after License to Kill?(Fact fans: License to Kill is the last one written by Richard Maibaum *or* produced by Cubby Broccoli, who between them wrote and produced every good Bond film.)
Hell, Timothy Dalton’s still around, bring him back too!
“James Bond kills his way through hell to murder the devil” to our list of Excellent Screenplay Ideas Only if Bruce Lee and Popeye join up to fight The Godfather: