'No Time To Die' director's original Bond pitch idea was seriously out there

Danny Boyle exited the Bond movie that eventually became No Time To Die back in August of 2018, after running into creative differences with producers over the film's plot.

Boyle was replaced with Beasts of No Nation and True Detective director Cary Fukunaga, but by the sounds of it, Fukunaga's original idea was also pretty out there.

And it involved the final act of Spectre, the preceding Bond movie, having all taken place inside James Bond's head.

Read more: No Time To Die won’t be re-edited before release

Speaking to Interview, Fukunaga has shared his early concept, which it appears didn't really stick.

“I swear to god, I had an idea that this movie could all be taking place inside the villain's lair from the last film,” the director said.

“There's this scene where a needle goes into James Bond's head, which is supposed to make him forget everything, and then he miraculously escapes by a watch bomb.

“And then he and Léa blow up the place, and go on to save the day. I was like, 'What if everything up until the end of act two is all inside his head?'”

The aforementioned villain, Christoph Waltz's Ernst Stavo Blofeld, does indeed appear in No Time To Die, but it would seem that Bond and Lea Seydoux did end up escaping after all, and it wasn't all a figment of Bond's imagination.

Read more: Bond star Honor Blackman dies at 94

The movie instead finds Bond out of active service and retired in Jamaica, but hauled back into espionage thanks to Jeffrey Wright's Felix Leiter, who asks him to help find a missing scientist.

The 25th movie in the series, it was among the first high profile Hollywood films to postpone its scheduled April release due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Starring Seydoux, Waltz and Daniel Craig alongside Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, Rory Kinnear, Ralph Fiennes, Lashana Lynch, Ana de Armas and Rami Malek is the villain Safin, it lands on 12 November.