“If we hadn’t found the right story in which to do it, we would have had him walk off into the sunset,” Craig continues. “But as the films progressed, we just kind of found a way to make it work. The idea of him making the ultimate sacrifice because he couldn’t live in the world without the people he loved just seemed right.”
A scene originally written as tragic and poignant took on a new resonance, however, during Bond’s year and a half of enforced self-isolation, when loss became a constant drumbeat in the lives of cinemagoers around the world. After Covid reared its head in the west in early 2020, Eon acted fast, postponing the film’s release three times in order to dodge various lockdowns and pandemic waves. Then there was Safin’s evil scheme, which relied on close-contact transference of a highly infectious bioweapon. Did any of them worry this would prove too close to the bone?
“During the initial part of the pandemic, I did wonder whether there might be an issue over the nanobots being a transmissible person-to-person threat,” Fukunaga says. “Although it didn’t feel like there was anything offensive about the way we handled it, so there was no need to adjust it. But it did cross my mind.”
“The other thing,” Broccoli quickly interjects, impressively on-message, “is that one of the big themes in the film is personal sacrifice. And I feel there’s a parallel between Bond’s work and the work so many people did during the pandemic – everyone on the front line putting themselves in danger; the nurses and NHS staff, the people who provide food and transportation.”
It’s a honed producer line, of course. But the film’s extraordinary commercial success (it all but single-handedly revived cinemagoing last autumn) proves it did strike a resonant chord.
Why does Craig think it connected? “If I knew, I would be sitting on a private island in the South Seas right now, with a fleet of yachts,” he shrugs. “I think it was beautiful and emotional and had all the right things, but when you give it to an audience, you just have to cross your fingers. Maybe because of the pandemic it did resonate in an unexpected way. But maybe people were just happy to have a reason to go out.”
He also pays tribute to distributor MGM, who fended off substantial offers from streaming platforms to put the film online during lockdown. (It’s believed that in mid-2020, Netflix and Apple TV each offered MGM somewhere in the region of £300 million to take the film off the studio’s then-tied hands.)
“The money was dangled in front of us by the streaming services,” he says, “and it would have been a way to recoup losses. But they held their nerve and it worked, and thank goodness it did.”
Were they dreading that audiences would stay away? “Obviously, we felt a weight of responsibility, because the theatrical experience was in peril,” Broccoli says. “And it was very important to all of the people on this Zoom that we fought to keep the cinema experience alive. So that’s why we didn’t even agree to going out on a streaming platform day-and-date” – an industry term meaning a simultaneous release in cinemas and online. “It was really important to us. We make our movies to go on the big screen.”
