Book Review: No Time To Die - The Making of The Film by Mark Salisbury

There are Making Of books and there are Making Of books. This is the latter.

A good Bond Making Of book has been a long time coming. By ‘good’, I mean a book that is worth returning to over years to come, not one that will gather dust on a shelf or brownish rings on a coffee table having been browsed through just once. A good Making Of book is not just an excuse to show off lots of pretty ‘on set’ photography, like those we’ve had for every Bond film since Die Another Day. I’m talking about a book that actually walks you through the production process. I’m not saying we should dispense with the imagery entirely: The World Is Not Enough had a curious Making Of which was largely unillustrated (bar some photographs in the middle). But I do prefer my Making Of books to have that perfect balance of words and imagery.

I’m talking about a return to the kind of books I grew up reading as a child in the 90s. For all that was less than great in my childhood, a bright spot was that I grew up in the heyday of the Making Of book. I pored over the tomes written about GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies (both by Garth Pearce). Each one deepened my love for Bond and the craft required to bring these films to the screen. 

But it wasn’t Bond that got me into Making Of books: it was Jurassic Park. Age twelve, I have very vivid memories of being dragged along to a family event I didn’t want to go to and escaping into the pages of Don Shay’s and Jody Duncan’s volume. I read the whole thing cover to cover in one sitting. This book has the unique (to my knowledge) accolade of actually appearing in the film which is its subject: it’s among the merchandise shown near the end of the film prior to the scene where Richard Attenborough and Laura Dern talk about flea circuses and ice cream (albeit with a different cover, presumably because the book hadn’t actually been written at this stage).

Hooked on Making Of books from that point onwards, I was fairly indiscriminate in my reading. Many films in the 90s which were widely-considered to be ‘bad’ had great Making Of books (even Batman & Robin: The Making of The Movie was worth a read). Am I merely looking back with rose-tinted lenses? While these books were as much merchandise as the cuddly toys and lunchboxes were (a point made manifest in a meta way in Jurassic Park), they were also a ‘way in’ to the filmmaking process. A good Making Of manages to lift the curtain on the magic trick without ruining the magic. Quite the opposite: knowing how the trick was performed makes you appreciate it all the more.

For me, the magic of filmmaking is the collaboration required to get a film over the finish line. Let alone magic, it’s sometimes a miracle that films even get completed, such are the complexities of production. A good Making Of book represents this struggle, with the ‘just right’ level of detail from the multitude of departments involved. Everyone has their own passions: personally, I could (and have) read whole books just about film editing and music. Cinematography interests me too but visual effects thrill me less. Books like The Making of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace are great for the most part, but (perhaps appropriately) almost drown in the technical aspects of producing CGI near the end. More recent Star Wars Making Of books have largely avoided this trap. Conversely, these sometimes place undue emphasis on the pre-production concepts, many of which are more interesting than those which eventually reached the screen (I’m looking at you Rise of Skywalker). 

There’s something to be savoured about a Making Of book which is written years, even decades later, when the initial flurry of publicity is out of the way and people can talk candidly about their experiences. The 30th anniversary Star Wars books written by J. W. Rinzler (who sadly passed away in July 2021) are the epitome of this. Carrie Fisher provided the pull quote for the back cover of The Empire Strikes Back volume, describing it as an “acid flashback… without the mess and fuss of dropping acid” giving you a flavour of how candid the rest of the book will be (and it IS glorious).

Of course, writing a Making Of years later can lead to writers having to rely on faltering memories and hazy recollections. Matthew Field and Ajay Cowdhury did all Bond fans a great service by excavating Bond’s production stories. Their Some Kind Of Hero has become our Bible, although - like with the Bible - there are contradictions and there is much which will probably have to remain open to interpretation for the rest of recorded history. When a film series is as successful as Bond, competing egos also conspire to obfuscate what really happened and who should be credited for what.

A rare breed of Making Of is one that manages to be both candid AND a definitive record written at the time. Carl Gottlieb’s The Jaws Log is rightly considered a classic for this reason. Written contemporaneously (Gottlieb was the film’s co-writer and one of its actors), it was published less than a fortnight after the film’s US premiere and did not harm the box office, despite the warts and all approach.

There are so many things to get wrong with a Making Of book, then, that it’s little wonder they have withered in popularity in recent years. Who is going to take the time and effort to make sure they’re done right? In the noughties, DVD extras filled the gap where film producers took the time to do more than dump the film’s Electronic Press Kit on the disc. 

But there’s nothing to compare with a good Making Of book, one that is both lavishly illustrated and full of text providing the just right level of insight into all aspects of the filmmaking process without getting bogged down in a particular department. It also needs to be big: as in, uncomfortable-to-read-in-bed BIG. 

Based on these criteria, No Time To Die - The Making of the Film is a triumph. For a start, it’s large enough to wield as a weapon, should the need arise.

It’s chief quality is its immediacy. Mark Salisbury was clearly given carte blanche access to the cast and crew.

Do not read this book if you are avoiding spoilers. Everything is laid bare. The only time you need to read between the lines is the very last page but, even then, it’s pretty obvious what Salisbury is referring to and his description of the ending is as poetic as the scene from the film itself. While Salisbury avoids the common Making Of trap of just re-telling the story in large chunks, where he does need to relate plot points to create his own coherent Making Of narrative he does so succinctly and with style.

The imagery is of such a high quality that this book easily does double duty as one of those ‘On Set’ Bond books we’ve become very familiar with over the last two decades. The most interesting images are of the production design details which can easily be overlooked in any film, but especially the very busy and densely-packed No Time To Die. The set dresser herself observes that “everything has to have meaning” and this book reinforced for me the impression I had from seeing No Time To Die: this film is a character-driven piece from beginning to end. Everyone involved in the production was aligned with the idea, even those you might assume had no more than a ‘technical role’. The one who stood out for me was Chris Corbould, the special effects coordinator who has been a part of the Bond family since The Spy Who Loved Me. He appears to have contributed significantly to the character moments of several action sequences, although, like most on the production, he magnanimously uses “we” when talking to Salisbury about his creative input.

For all the collaboration, this book confirms that would could legitimately call No Time To Die the work of an auteur: Cary Joji Fukanaga came up with whole sequences, including the whole cold opening in Norway (a very cold opening), the horror elements and the Japanese design aesthetic which infuses the whole film. Even Bond’s Jamaican home was Japanese-inspired. It’s perhaps not to be desired to disentangle who was responsible for particular elements, although there is a confirmation from Fukunaga himself that Phoebe Waller-Bridge contributed to a pivotal scene where I detected her pen(wo)manship.

I don’t want to give anything away but expect to find the many revelations from this book being drip fed to us by the clickbait crowd for months to come. Brace yourself for dozens of articles being spun out of the nuggets from this book. Rubbish along the lines of: 

You’ll never believe who was in the DB5 driving seat in the original script!

How many takes were actually in THAT single take?

Here’s everything you need to know about Q’s living room. (In fairness, I was very interested in this section and it did not disappoint - you even get a close up photo of one of the cats!)

No Making Of book can contain everything. While aspects of the pre-production and post-production phases are referred to throughout, this book is mostly about the film shoot itself. For instance, there’s little more than we have already been told about the “creative differences” with Danny Boyle, although it is fascinating to read the input from the production designer and costume designer Boyle hired and who stayed with the film after the change of director.

As a Making Of veteran, I am accustomed to being disappointed with the lack of insider insight into the music scoring part of the film. This is usually because the film is still being scored at the time these books are written. This was especially the case with No Time To Die, the music for which was being recorded right down to the wire. And even if the score had been included in the book, it’s difficult to see where it would fit in. The book unfolds chronologically, mirroring the action of the film, with character spotlights interleaved at pertinent points.

With good reason, film producers always try to downplay production troubles, especially in the run up to release where a film may acquire a reputation it can struggle to shrug off. Here, Salisbury doesn’t shy away from the common perils of a Bond production (principally weather and injury) and this heightens our admiration for the ingenuity of the craftspeople responsible for getting 007 back on the screen. 

Very apparent from the book is that No Time To Die adhered to Cubby’s dictum of putting the money on screen. For instance, shipping ice from Norway for the shoot in Pinewood might seem like a profligate move but it was worth it for the visual impact - AND it actually ended up saving them money compared with the tried-and-tested alternative. This is especially refreshing after Spectre, which frequently made me think they had taken the most expensive option just because they could (did they really need to make that explosion so big and shoot it with such little sense of scale?). 

And it’s clear how dedicated everyone was to making Craig’s swansong a film to remember, whether it be the actors training extra hard to be able to fight in high heels (you go Ana de Armas!) to the second unit getting up before dawn to shoot in the best possible light (this recalled to me Freddie Young and David Lean’s ‘magic hour’ obsession from the production of Lawrence of Arabia, as well as Malick driving everyone mad in pursuit of the perfect aesthetic for the vastly underrated Days of Heaven).

The book doesn’t insult one’s intelligence. Salisbury expects the reader to be conversant with some filmmaking parlance, such as ‘magic hour’ and ‘oner’ (single-take) but these are usually well explained along the way. An exception is Italian neorealism - but Google exists for anyone who struggles to tell their Rossellini from their Visconti. Not being especially well-versed in art history, I found Google handy for looking up the various art works which were inspirations for the cinematography and production design (from Monet and Hopper to modern art from the last decade). It would have been nice for images of these to be reproduced in the book itself but I imagine this would be a licensing minefield.

You can’t please everyone with a Making Of book. Aside from the music, I would have appreciated even more insights from the writers themselves. Of the four credited writers, it’s only Fukunaga who weighs in. Fortunately, what he has to say is absolute gold. He’s not afraid to shy away from getting psychological when explaining his creative choices. He describes Matera’s “haunted quality” as the reason why he chose that location and why this was crucial for showing what is going through Bond’s head at this point of the story.

Towards the end of the book, Barbara Broccoli discusses the “very Fleming-idea” of characters having a dirty secret. Anyone reading this expecting dirty secrets about the production to surface will be disappointed. Doubtless in years to come we will find out more about those “creative differences”. But that’s not what I read a Making Of book for. I enjoy a Making Of book for its unfolding tale of a group of committed people coming together to overcome apparently insurmountable challenges. Isn’t that what we all enjoy about Bond?

You can find Mark Salisbury on twitter.