By One of the few upsides to the global pandemic and attendant shutdown of normal life for four months is that some of your deadlines might have been kicked into the long grass. Where's that report you asked for? How can you ask that question! At a time like this! In These Unprecedented Times!
But Cary Joji Fukunaga, the director of the next James Bond film, No Time To Die, has explained why he hasn't taken advantage of the seven-month delay to the film's release by fine-tuning it.
"You could just fiddle and tweak and it doesn’t necessarily get better," Fukunaga told Empire. "For all intents and purposes, we had finished the film. I had mentally finished the film. Mentally and emotionally."
For all the talk of these times being unprecedented, Fukunaga recalled a very recent precedent which prepared him pretty well for the unfolding weirdness, and which led him to press the Bond bosses for a coronavirus response.
"My first movie, Sin Nombre, came out during swine flu [pandemic in 2009], and it came out in cinemas in Mexico right when the President of Mexico said, ‘Do not go to cinemas,'" Fukunaga said.
"So I had trauma from that experience, and as I was following the news of this, almost every day I was asking [the producers], 'What’s the plan, guys? Because this isn’t stopping.'"
"I don’t think anyone could have foreseen how the world came to a complete standstill, but I did think audiences would not be going to cinemas."
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