Bond 25 questions: Waiting for principal photography

Daniel Craig and Lea Seydoux await the start of Bond 25 principal photography.

While the 007 fan base awaits the start of principal photography, the blog has more questions.

When will principal photography begin?

Presumably sooner than later, but not imminently.

This week, Bond 25 director Cary Fukunaga was spotted in Matera, Italy, and he was photographed there. On April 10, a story in an Italian newspaper showed up via a photograph on Instagram.

Two readers of the blog, @CorneelVF and @EiriniMakr, discussed it (the latter knows Italian) on Twitter. According to that story, Fukunaga will be in Matera until Sunday and travel elsewhere in Italy after that.

In any case, you can’t have have the first unit of a film start work without a director. And the first unit isn’t filming yet.

Could other Bond 25 work be going on?

Sure. The second unit might be laboring. A miniatures or special effects unit may be at work. There is, of course, no way of knowing right now.

Could another writer have been hired or about to be hired?

Certainly possible. It would make sense to have a scribe around to make last-minute adjustments.

A story line has taken hold that Daniel Craig and director Marc Forster “wrote” Quantum of Solace on the set. However, once a Writer’s Guild strike was over, Joshua Zetumer was hired for the final rewriting. Zetumer didn’t get a credit.

Who will be the credited writers for Bond 25?

Strictly a guess: Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (writing as a team) and Scott Z. Burns (an expensive script doctor).

John Hodge was on board when Danny Boyle was hired to direct. But even if any of his ideas make the final script, (and we have no idea at this point) he may not get a credit.

A wild card: Director Fukunaga also is a writer. Perhaps he did enough work to merit a screen credit for writing.

Bond 25 questions: The Instagram edition

Cary Fukunaga, director for Bond 25

A picture is worth a thousand words, the old saying goes. So it was when Bond 25 Cary Fukunaga was photographed in Matera, Italy, on April 9.

The photo appeared on Instagram the same day. It was posted by Matera Guided Tours, aka “theprofessormiza.”

Naturally with a fan base starved for news about the next 007 film, the photo made the rounds on social media. So naturally, the blog has questions.

Wasn’t principal photography supposed to have been underway by now?

The MI6 James Bond website said Feb. 29 on Twitter that Bond 25 was scheduled to begin filming on April 5 at Pinewood Studios unless another delay occurred. This would have been after several days of filming in Norway in late March.

In the Instagram photo, Fukunaga has no crew with him. It certainly doesn’t look like any filming was underway. Also, according to local Italian press, Bond 25 won’t be filming in Matera until late summer.

So what was Fukunaga doing?

MI6 James Bond said today on Twitter that the director was “in Matera finalizing location details ahead of the planned late summer shoot.” (The tweet also had a detail some might consider a spoiler. I left it out of this post.)

Does the photo really confirm Italy is a location?

It’s reasonable to conclude that’s the case. But it should be noted that no one associated with the film has explicitly said this.

UPDATE (April 10): Matera Guided Tours posted another Instagram photograph — a copy of a local newspaper article (in Italian, of course) about Fukunaga’s visit to the area. It apparently is some kind of scouting/preparation trip.