Barbara Broccoli, producer of the James Bond saga, recently returned to the plot of “Dying can wait”, the latest opus carried by Daniel Craig, and the importance of the film.
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Released in theaters last October, Dying Can Wait – fifth and final part of the James Bond saga carried by Daniel Craig – represents the conclusion of a real cycle in the franchise, marked in particular by the death of the character at the end of the film: a first in 007 history.
Passing through the podcast of Deadline, the producer of the saga Barbara Broccoli recently returned to this spectacular outcome, which according to her, perfectly completes the arc that had been initiated in 2006 with Casino Royale. It was also when this feature film was released that Daniel Craig first mentioned his desire to kill the character:
“The conversation started when we released Casino Royale and went to Berlin with Daniel [Craig]“, says Barbara Broccoli.
“Everyone embraced it, it was a big hit, there was a lot of excitement. When we were in the back of the car, him and I, coming back to the hotel after the screening, he brought up the idea. (…) He said, “what if we put him to death?” (…) And I said we would talk about it. That’s where the seed was sown, and then I talked about it with Michael [G. Wilson]. We had talked about it a lot because Ian Fleming himself had tried to kill James Bond in his books, so it was there somewhere. But Daniel seeded this idea.”
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At the microphone of Deadline, Barbara Broccoli then returned in detail to the full course of the character, specifying that in four films, he had gone through very different stages.
Vesper’s mourning and transformation into a ruthless assassin in Casino Royale, the search for revenge in Quantum of Solace, rebuilding a family with Q, M and MoneyPenny in Skyfall, and the final confrontation with his worst enemy in Spectre. The last step in this journey takes place when he decides to spare Blofeld and hand him over to the police instead of killing him, in order to start a new life with Madeleine.
This “end”, however, was not enough in the eyes of Barbara Broccoli, as she tells it in the podcast of Deadline :
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“The moment James Bond throws down his gun was meant to represent the end of that decade with Daniel Craig. But after a few months, Michael G. Wilson and I approached him again, after letting him rest. He had had some time to think”, says the producer.
“We said to him, ‘That’s not really the end of your story. We have one chapter left to write.” That’s where we had this discussion. If we did another movie with him, what were we left to exploit in his portrayal of Bond, and where could we go from from there? That led us to the obvious conclusion. And from then on, the only question was how we could make it work.”
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