After No Time To Die brought Daniel Craig's run as James Bond to a definite end, audiences were left wondering with two big questions: why that decision, and what next for the Bond franchise as a whole? Who better to ask about this than the guardians of Bond's past, present and future – EON bosses and producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson… And that's just what Empire did, with Chris Hewitt grilling the pair for a recent special Podcast interview. And it goes without saying, spoilers for the most recent Bond film.
Talking at EON HQ, Broccoli and Wilson brought up Daniel Craig suggesting the idea of killing his Bond while they were in the limo on the way back from a Berlin premiere of Casino Royale. Obviously that didn't happen, but they did start to consider it some time after Spectre.
"When Daniel had had some rest, I said to him, 'that's not the end of the story. You can't go out like that,'" Broccoli says of him driving off into the sunset at the end of Sam Mendes' second outing. "'It's a great starting place to see Bond in retirement and how would he deal with it? Let's think about that.' He agreed, and Michael and I started with the writers, coming up with where we would go. We were in that headspace."
Which is when the spectre — pun intended — of death reared its head again. "We had to convince the studio, of course," laughs Wilson. "You can imagine their reaction!"
No Time to Die, of course, finds Bond not only with a woman to care about (Léa Seydoux's Madeleine Swann) but also a daughter.
"We thought, 'well, Bond now has what he's always been wanting, but afraid of, which is a family.' Because once you have a family, you're not just risking your own life, you're affecting the life of other people," says Broccoli. "That was always Bond's big nightmare to be across from a villain and for them to say, 'if you don't do what I want then I'm going to kill your loved ones.'"
Which meant that of course the EON duo wanted to put him in that position, and embraced the poignancy of celebrating his years of service as a reflection of those who serve in real life, especially during the height of the pandemic. And Broccoli is still impressed that the secret was kept. "It was incredible at the No Time To Die premiere with 4,000 people and you could hear all the people, their breath and their heartbeats and they're going, 'this isn't happening…' And it happens."
But with Craig's Bond exploderised, what of the future? Broccoli and Wilson are clear about how they approach the next iteration each time.
"When you change the actor you have to reimagine the direction the film's gonna go in. When you hire an actor, you're hoping you're going to spend a decade at least with them and make four or five or six films with them. So you have to think through, 'what is the trajectory? What is that actor going to bring? How are you going to move the series into another direction?'" Broccoli says. "It's not just flicking through Spotlight and saying, 'Oh, there's a guy who's 6'1"' We're going to take our time. We want to get a sense of where we want to go with the series and we want to do that before we bring anybody else on. We'll start the process probably with [writers] Rob [Wade] and Neil [Purvis] and we'll see where we go!"
So yes, James Bond will return. But not until Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson are ready for it to happen.
Find the full pod interview below.
Listen to the episode on the pod app of your choice — or via the PlanetRadio player above.
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