New Delhi, June 26 -- LONDON - Denis Villeneuve does not take on projects he cannot control. The French-Canadian director who rebuilt science fiction twice over, first with Arrival and then with the Dune franchise, spent years turning down tent-pole assignments that came with creative strings attached. The next James Bond film, produced by Amazon MGM, is the test of what happens when the world's most commercially constrained franchise meets a filmmaker who has never made anything purely on someone else's terms. This week, that test entered its final stage.

According to Deadline, Villeneuve has begun personally contacting a shortlisted group of actors to inform them they have advanced in the Bond 26 casting process. Formal screen tests ar...