Director Cary Fukunaga talks ‘Bond 25’ the spy genre, remaking TV shows like ‘MASH’ ‘Brady Bunch’ ‘Three’s Company’
Director Cary Fukunaga (Jane Eyre, True Detective) will helm Bond 25 after taking over from Danny Boyle, spoke to IndieWire recently on a wide range of topics, but most interesting was the look ahead to Bond franchise.
This is a new genre for the dramatic filmmaker, which excites Fukunaga: “Over the years, you’ve seen a lot of different iterations not only of Bond, but of films that have mimicked it or copied it,” he said. “So I think the exciting part actually is going to the original source, and being able to play in a sandbox.”
While Fukunaga offered up no “favorite” Bond film, he confessed that he first watched A View to a Kill with Roger Moore as 007:m “I don’t think you can pick one though,” he said, “because every single one of them has brought their thing to it and it is nice to have that difference, it’s nice to have the change of the character over time.”
Who will be the next Bond?
“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,” Fukunage said.
“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.”
There was no word on the cast, keeping Daniel Craig or casting a new Bond.
Beyond Bond, Fukunaga is also on the record showing interest in developing sitcoms, undeniably a bit of a left turn. But it’s also rooted in another source of nostalgia for him: growing up watching shows like “Cheers,” “M.A.S.H,” “The Brady Bunch,” and “Three’s Company.”
“When I was a kid coming home from school, you’d watch cartoons for a couple hours, and then the news came on, and then you were watching sitcoms and you didn’t have to know what happened last week you didn’t have to wait till next week,” he said. “You just got 30 minutes of escapism with this group of people that you come to love over time.”
“Cheers,” he noted, was particularly his favorite. “Even though I was a kid growing up in the Bay Area, I also felt like part of myself grew up in Boston,” he said.
“So far I have only worked in television in the sense that we’re basically telling a longer form of a movie, which is great, because that’s the reason why I did in the first place — [with] ‘Jane Eyre,’ I felt we had to truncate that story so much that it felt so compromising of what the character really was to me.”
