No Time To Die’s opening sequence will flout James Bond tradition, reveals director

Historically, the pre-title scenes of a Bond film sees the agent in an action-packed sequence

No Time to Die’s director Cary Fukunaga has revealed that his opening scene will go against James Bond tradition.

As has been the case with previous Bond films, fans will be expecting Daniel Craig’s last outing as 007 to kick off with an action-packed pre-title sequence featuring the famous agent himself.

However, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Fukunaga said that his opening pulls more from horror movies than action films, and does not feature Craig at all.

The paper reports that the scene is “slow-paced, visually arresting, subtitled with dialogue in French, and entirely Bond-free”.

Instead of a high-speed chase around a glamorous city, Fukunaga’s opening will see Léa Seydoux’s Madeline recall a tragic childhood memory in which “Safin (Rami Malek), wearing a Japanese Noh mask, kills her mother, pursues Madeline through the home and hunts her down on a frozen lake”.

Lea Seydoux and Daniel Craig in ‘No Time To Die' (Universal)

The acclaimed director joked that the scene is similar to “Some clown chasing a child around the house”. He said: “It’s like I brought It [Stephen King’s horror] in the first five minutes of Bond.”  

Fukunaga originally developed Warner Bros’s two-movie It franchise but left the film over creative differences.

The director has previously opened up about his exit, stating that he left because the studio would not let him make a more character-centric horror movie as opposed to the conventional “archetypes and scares”.

No Time To Die was originally scheduled for release on 1 April this year, before it was pushed back due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Earlier this month, it was announced that the film would be delayed further until 2 April 2021.