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I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s FRWL style pacing as Craig described the movie as a “thriller”. Also, we know there’s a sprinkle of YOLT (at least the literary version) in there.
https://variety.com/2020/film/news/no-time-to-die-james-bond-mgm-streaming-sale-1234819582/
Good to hear, but the leftover threads from previous films has me nervous. So I'm still cautiously optimistic
SP and NTTD as a proper, written from the ground up two parter. I believe John Logan originally pitched Bond 24 and 25 as a two parter, that would've been cool.
Yeah. It would have, even if I'm not a fan of continuity in Bond films. I prefer standalone Bond adventures. But if Cary did SP, it would have been cool.
Bringing back directors immediately can be risky, as they tend to repeat themselves. But since someone like Cary did True Detective, he surely knows how continuity works.
Can anyone get past the paywall and get a rip of this?
Also RIP sean connery, just heard the sad news
Feels likely to me that NTTD will have a tribute caption now, to both Sir Roger and Sir Sean.
100% and if they don't, shame on them.
Just checked the archive. I have Lashana in another still, same place but no gun, just standing straight and the image is cropped. So this is a new image and really cool that we get to see the full bunker set. Same with Craig, that we can part of the bunker set with blue screen
Yes, here are all the mentions of NTTD:
Ben Whishaw and I are seated on benches outside a restaurant in east London. Inside is a vast emporium and lots of chandeliers, but its glamour is infected with coronavirus reminders – hand sanitiser on tables and “Don’t go this way, go that way” signs. It feels as if we are seeing the dawn of something much worse that’s going to happen.
Whishaw appears a little thin; even in a chunky bottle-green jumper and jeans, he looks as if he could fall down the crack of a pavement. His facial hair accentuates already well-defined cheekbones.
There is something portentous about the afternoon, as if it’s going to thunder, but it doesn’t. It’s to do with the fact we don’t know what social restrictions are coming; that we’re on the eve of something bad again. “It’s true, but this time we’ve gone through it already. We don’t want to go there again but there seems no stopping it,” Whishaw says. “It seems inevitable, inevitable bleakness.” Right now, he says, he really wants a cheese toastie, but he doesn’t get up to order it.
We are talking a few weeks before what we believe is the November release of the latest Bond film, No Time to Die, in which Whishaw, 40, reprises his role as the fastidious quartermaster, Q. Whishaw is enthusiastic, not knowing that, days later, it will be delayed for the second time.
“It is hard to remember a time before walking around in masks, washing our hands every five minutes and sanitisers, and I think the Bond film is just what we really need right now, I really do,” he says. “We need something that is thrilling and fun and a kind of escapism. Bond is the one film that people might actually want to be persuaded to go out and see. This is something that is diverse and multigenerational; it could unite everybody.”
Despite his enthusiasm, he says, it’s hard to talk about the new film, “Partly because it was long ago. Although it wasn’t that long ago, it does feel like it. But also, we never did get the full script. I did my bits not in chronological order, so I find it hard. I’m not allowed to tell you what happens in the story, and even if I was I couldn’t, because of the way that it happened. But I can say that very late in the day I give him some technology that helps.”
Do they not give you a full script because everything is changing all the time or because they’re so paranoid that things will be leaked? “It’s partly the secrecy that always surrounds it, but on this one, to be honest, it was a difficult journey. Although it was part-intentional, the director works in quite an improvisational way and we had a very tight deadline. But as I say, they don’t tell us anything.”
The plus side of coronavirus is that it has allowed him a pause in a career in which projects have tumbled into each other. He has completed shooting a new series of Fargo, due to be released in Britain in 2021, in which he’s joined the cast for the first time. Filming for his next project, in which he plays Adam Kay in the TV series This Is Going to Hurt – based on Kay’s book about life as a junior doctor in the NHS – has been put back to January. “At the earliest,” he says. He has gone from nonstop working to doing… “Nothing. I’ve been a bit of a hermit. Once we were forced to stop, I didn’t have any inclination to do anything really. I wanted to stop. I’ve seen my family when we were allowed to and I’ve gone for long walks and had loads of naps,” he says, not even trying not to sound bleak.
[...]
The Bond movie became the first big film to postpone release, although when we meet in London he doesn’t know why that decision had been taken so early. “I honestly have no idea,” he says. “I just got a text message from Barbara... They never explained.” Perhaps because it’s called No Time to Die. We laugh. Perhaps a little too manically, because we know scary times may follow.
I love Cary but he couldn't have done anything right with Spectre script.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-time-to-die-star-lea-seydoux-i-dont-think-a-bond-woman-is-any-more-an-object-of-desire-than-bond-is-zw3r9dlhx
Can we get the article without paywall?
I think there's even a video interview embedded. At least he did the interview via Zoom.
No Time to Die star Léa Seydoux: ‘I don’t think a Bond woman is any more an object of desire than Bond is’
Léa Seydoux is the arthouse star who made the rare leap to global fame — as a Bond girl. As she (and the world) patiently awaits 007’s next outing, she talks sexism and stereotypes with Louis Wise
I am trying hard to not bring lazy French stereotypes into my interview with Léa Seydoux, but she is hardly helping me. It’s bad enough that the 35-year-old Parisian actress has a fine line in moody and mysterious; that she won a Palme d’Or at Cannes for the graphic Sapphic bonkbuster Blue Is the Warmest Colour; that she shot to global fame in the James Bond movie Spectre playing ze sexy French doctor-lady Madeleine Swann. Also, that she has been the face of Louis Vuitton for the past five years. Here she is summing up her lockdown, from her apartment in Paris, via Zoom.
“Oh God, I sound like the cliché of the Frenchwoman,” she says, groaning, plonked on her sofa in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, and boasting a crop of short, mussed-up hair. “But we were in the countryside, and I used to sit and watch the river there and read Flaubert and drink red wine.” We fall apart laughing. Did you have a beret on too? “Oui! And a little baguette under my arm!”
The surprise here isn’t that Seydoux is so French, but that she is having such a good laugh about it. After all, on screen she specialises in scowls, huffs and pent-up desire; earlier interviews with her have suggested she’s like this off screen too. The Flaubert she was reading was Madame Bovary, about the bored housewife who essentially kills herself out of ennui, and this seems very Seydoux. She even admits it herself: “She’s a character I think I could play on screen. I’d like that.”
And yet today, sitting in the apartment she shares with her partner, André Meyer (a “banking scion”, according to reports), and their three-year-old son, Georges, she’s in a jolly, almost silly mood. If she is a stereotyped Parisienne, it’s not the ones being shown in Emily in Paris (I know — shame), but that more realistic version: ultra low-key, but super well maintained, always clad in easy classics like, well, jeans and a white T-shirt. You might be surprised to hear that she is a big fan of Fleabag. “I found it really funny,” she says, beaming. “I love English humour — and I think I have it too.”
Phoebe Waller-Bridge is involved in her next film outing — or what was due to be her next film, anyway. No Time to Die, the follow-up to Spectre, has been delayed for a second time, and now won’t come out until next spring. If details are scarce, Seydoux confirms that Waller-Bridge has added “some very funny bits”. Still, it seems light years away from her usual thing, where she works with the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos or Wes Anderson (she is in his next film, The French Dispatch). Is she doing Bond to pay the bills? She frowns.
“I hear people around me say, ‘Oh James Bond is rubbish,’ but I have no cynicism about Bond at all. I’m really profoundly pleased to have made this film. Honestly, the stunts, the chases … it’s a laugh!” How does she feel about being called a Bond girl? “The roles have evolved a bit — the title is a bit old-fashioned now,” she says. She thinks “Bond woman” could be better, but the thing is, she says, it really goes both ways. “I don’t think that a Bond woman is any more an object of desire than Bond is. With him, I think there is a female gaze — you look at him in a sexy way. When he gets out of the water in his trunks, he’s eroticised. It’s obvious!”
Whether she likes it or not, Seydoux and her work have often contributed to the big sexual politics hoo-has of the day. In 2013 the exceptional Blue Is the Warmest Colour won both her and her co-star, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Palme d’Ors for best film alongside the director Abdellatif Kechiche (who would normally receive the award alone). But both actresses complained about the gruelling atmosphere on set, specifically when filming the graphic sex scenes, which, as Seydoux repeats today, “are very, very super long”. In the ensuing war of words via the press, Kechiche called her a “spoilt child”. And yet “I don’t regret having done it at all,” she says today. “Quite the contrary. I’m really very proud, and maybe I didn’t say it enough.”
In 2017 she caused a stir by writing an article detailing her experiences with Harvey Weinstein. After sizing her up like “a piece of meat”, the disgraced mogul tried to kiss her in a hotel room, she wrote, but she got away. She also detailed various other personal experiences of sexism and harassment in the industry. Yet at the same time she was pretty clear that the whole system knew about Weinstein — and was, to some extent, complicit (“That’s the most disgusting thing. Everyone knew what Harvey was up to and no one did anything”). But today she confirms something she said more recently — that she dislikes the excessive demonisation that #MeToo has also seemed to encourage.
“I’m always for nuance, because I think things are always more complicated than they seem,” she says. “I mean, it’s crazy how late it has been, and it’s good that women want to speak up, that they want to take power. I felt it. But I think it can be done in perhaps too radical a way. It’s something which can stop dialogue and which ultimately isolates people.”
Seydoux says that she loves Daniel Craig’s Bond because he shows both a masculine and feminine side, and she feels the same. “I never say to myself, ‘Oh! I’m a woman!’ I know I’m a woman, but I also feel like a man.” In fact, “I always identified with actors, never actresses. I wanted to do cinema because I watched actors — I saw Marlon Brando and I wanted to be like him.” She feels so strongly on it that she interrupts me five minutes later when I refer to her being an actress — “I really don’t feel like an actress, I feel like an actor.” But why?
“I found that male actors had more freedom,” she says with a sigh. “It’s true that I saw that women [in film] were in more passive positions, because women do have a tendency to receive. I mean, in sex, the woman gets penetrated.” OK, go on. “Whereas what I like with men is … well, I mean, obviously, they have a penis!” She smiles. “They give! And I like giving!” Soon she is giggling madly. “I often feel like I’m a gay man, to be honest. I like men a bit like a gay man does.” Umm. There are so many ways to take this: are you saying it’s nice to be able to express your desire frankly? She goes a bit coy. “Mmmm-hmm. Of course.”
If it took Seydoux a minute to realise she wanted to act, it’s not as though the clues weren’t there. Born Léa Hélène Seydoux-Fornier de Clausonne into a family stuffed with aristocrats and industrialists — her grandfather is the chairman of the French film company Pathé, while her great-uncle is chairman of the film studio Gaumont — she is the younger daughter of a businessman father and a mother who is a philanthropist living in Senegal, who split up when she was three. She has described her childhood in the past as bohemian, if not downright chaotic. Is Georges getting the same kind of education she had?
“Non,” she says firmly. “Non! Happily for him.” A rueful laugh, then silence — Seydoux’s forthrightness only shutters down when it comes to Meyer and her child. Right, because it was all so messy before? “Mmmm-hmm.” Has she made peace with her own upbringing? “Well, yes. I don’t think I’d have liked anything else … And I can see it brought me lots of stuff.” Most of all, her parents were “pretty free”, she says, and “I was always told I was free — to do whatever you want, to love whoever you want. That’s amazing.” So do you say that to your son too? “Oh, of course. My son is completely free.” A naughty pause. “But I’d like it if he worked hard at school, though!”
She herself didn’t do so well at school, she admits — another system she struggled fully to get on board with, just like the movies now. But she says she quite likes that tension. Genial as she is today, it’s clear that Seydoux isn’t into the easy things in life. “Maybe it’s really French to think it, but I’ve always had the impression that beauty comes out of suffering,” she says. “When you’re acting there is always a moment when you’re uncomfortable … when you have to put your balls on the table, as we say in French.” She starts to laugh again. “I mean, not just your balls, but your heart too.” She groans. “Oh God, ‘your balls and your heart’. This is the daftest interview I’ve ever done!” I don’t think she sounds daft at all, though, just a bit Fleabag à la française.
Seydoux is a global ambassador for Louis Vuitton; louisvuitton.com. No Time to Die and The French Dispatch will be released in 2021
https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/2/21546136/apple-event-date-time-november-10th-one-more-thing-arm-mac-silicon
What a shame there was no massive Halloween theme in that film they could have used.
It's November 2nd today and Mexico city is celebrating Day of the Dead with an annual parade since 2016, all inspired by the staged one in Spectre
Date: Stephanie Sigman
If you mean the politican: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Old, but cool photo.