No Time to Die director Cary Joji Fukunaga on the film’s shocking ending

MAJOR SPOILERS for the ending of No Time to Die. Seriously, if you haven’t watched No Time to Die yet and have somehow managed to avoid spoilers all this time, walk away now. Like Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan before him, Daniel Craig has shaken his last martini.

As we know, the ending of No Time do Die provided a definite conclusion for Daniel Craig’s James Bond, much different from those of his predecessors. If you’re still with us, you’ll know that No Time to Die comes to a close with James Bond actually… dying. In order to save the world from Safin (Rami Malek) and unable to see his daughter Mathilde thanks to an infection from a nanobot virus, Bond bids farewell to his family as missiles completely obliterate Safin’s island compound, with Bond right in the line of fire. While speaking with Empire, No Time to Die director Cary Joji Fukunaga said that Bond’s death was the ending they wanted to go with from day one.

In my first meeting with Daniel and the producers, they said that’s how they wanted the story. They felt that was an ending. I was like, ‘Well, it’s a result of an ending, but we don’t know what happens. It has to be earned.’

Cary Joji Fukunaga said that he initially struggled with coming up with a worthwhile death, and it wasn’t until shooting was already underway that they finally cracked it. “I was really struggling, because it couldn’t be conventional action,” Fukunaga explained. “It couldn’t just be a demonic device, it had to be tied into the central theme of the story.“

Although we don’t see Bond blown apart or anything, Fukunaga confirmed that the secret agent did die, he just didn’t want to get graphic with the scene. “I wasn’t trying to be obtuse with it,” Fukunaga said. “I wanted to be clear with it. But I wanted it to be tasteful. We didn’t want that shot in Terminator 2 where you see Sarah Connor turning into bones. But we wanted to show that he wasn’t going to jump down a sewer at the last second. So that wider shot of the island being pummelled was a mixture of macro and micro. The full effect is, ‘Yes, he’s gone, but he succeeded in making sure none of that weapons would go on into the future.’” Although this is clearly the end of Daniel Craig’s James Bond, the character will be returning for a new incarnation, but that search won’t begin until next year.

No Time to Die is set to be released on 4K Ultra HD/Blu-ray on December 21st.