To make No Time to Die — the 25th Bond movie and the last one starring Daniel Craig as 007 — two seasoned editors who were both new to (and also longtime fans of) the franchise joined the project: Tom Cross, an Oscar winner for Whiplash, and Elliot Graham, an Academy Award nominee for Milk.
The pair knew they would need to deliver the thrilling action and suspense that Bond fans expect while also balancing the action with an emotional story — a “character-driven drama that has action,” in Graham’s words. Cross recalls producer Barbara Broccoli stressing “how important it was to make it emotional, above all else.”
As the story gets underway, Bond and Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), his love interest from Spectre, arrive in Italy for a romantic getaway. “They start having a deep conversation about whether James can forgive Vesper [Lynd, his love from Casino Royale, who betrayed him] and forget the past so he can move ahead with Madeleine,” Cross says. “And that’s how you jump-start the action … because what follows is what Bond perceives as a betrayal: a thread of Bond’s emotional arc.”
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The first action sequence “isn’t merely an action scene, because you have this thread of betrayal braided with the action,” Cross says. When Madeleine gets a mysterious phone call from villain Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), the editors focused on how Bond responds. They arrive in the center of a square where their car is pummeled by ammunition and, Cross relates, “Bond just sits there. He’s detaching himself and almost punishing her, until finally, he looks at her and he relents. What we see happening next is something that in some ways is different from what you have in previous Bond movies, which is that he weaponizes his emotions. He weaponizes his anger.”
Cross and Graham carefully considered exactly how long Bond’s inactivity should last once the gunfire had started. “It had to be long enough for his inactivity to resonate,” Cross says, but also not “too long, where it actually felt like Bond was being cruel. That’s a line that the producers were wary of crossing.”
The editors say the great performances helped shape the story, including (spoiler alert) throughout the final struggle between Bond and villain Safin (Rami Malek), and the moment when Bond realizes he’s made contact with a biological weapon, for which they held on Craig’s face as he displays a range of emotions. “[We stay] on that shot long enough to see Daniel go through all those different emotional movements,” says Cross, “first of confusion and then of shock.” He then dispatches Safin “with no vengeance in a way, really just matter-of-fact, because he’s not even thinking about revenge. He’s thinking about much deeper things.”
For both editors, the performance encapsulates Craig’s Bond and closes the saga with the emotional elements with which it began. Says Cross, “He wanted to create this character that was vulnerable, a real person [with] all of those vulnerabilities and that emotion and that pain — all that stuff is threaded from Casino Royale to No Time to Die.”
This story first appeared in the Nov. 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
