How Cary Joji Fukunaga and “No Time to Die” production designer Mark Tildesley brought classic James Bond elements to the film sets.
“No Time to Die” doesn’t stint on one of the Bond trademarks: shooting in stunning locations across the globe. Daniel Craig’s latest and last outing as 007 moves from Matera, Italy, to Norway, Denmark and Jamaica and London. A stunning sequence takes place in Cuba, but of course that was one location that wasn’t available. So the production team shot a few exteriors dressed as Cuba in Jamaica, then transformed the U. K’s Pinewood Studios into Havana for the rest of the scene. Production designer Mark Tildesley travelled to Cuba to research the architecture and details, taking note of intricately detailed building facades, the look of streets, neon signs and propaganda art. Here he shares his journey — from coming on board back when director Danny Boyle was attached to paying homage to classic Bond films. I was attached to the version Danny Boyle was doing. (Boyle was attached to direct the film in March 2018). I was sitting with a set of ideas and a different script and took everything off the walls. But I described the ideas to Cary when I met him and what I had done so far in case anything was useful in his journey. And he loved it. We deconstructed a few things and recycled them, and that’s where it began. The thing is, it’s very big, but it’s also intimate. It’s family-run. I could knock on Barbara’s [Broccoli] door and get into in-depth meetings about things. It’s very precious to everyone. Also, there’s that sense that you leap back to your feelings about those films as a child, coming on at Christmas time being allowed to stay up and watch them. There was also that idea of restaurants, cars and secret code. It was really a part of my heritage growing up. There’s that feeling and expectation of taking people on a journey – that extraordinary opening. The mission is to make up these spaces that are going to be believable, but that they just float around in the Bond world. [In this case], it’s some magic Japanese island owned by the Russians and the testing center is now home to this. We went back and in the story, Bond is starting his retirement. So, we tried to think about where ex-pats live and what they do. We thought about it being somewhere in Europe or the mountains.
