Today’s new trailer –called “Think On Your Sins”– is pretty much the same domestic trailer we’ve been seeing, except with the montagey bits freshened up with some new (all great looking) shots. 
There’s even a guy getting the business end of machine gun blast, which you don’t often seen in a trailer. I’m now officially holyshit excited to see the movie, so really the overwhelmingly positive buzz has done all the work any trailer would ever need to (it currently stands at 97% positive on RT with nearly three dozen reviews, for what that’s worth).
We’re less than two weeks out from the film hitting the states, so director Sam Mendes is starting to open up his yap about his Bond flick to some US outlets. I have a feeling many might find his recent comments to Indiewire about Christopher Nolan and his The Dark Knight franchise (specifically the middle entry) interesting, as he largely lays his own ability to have made a more globally and politically relevant action film at Nolan’s feet.
In terms of what he achieved, specifically The Dark Knight, the second movie, what it achieved, which is something exceptional. It was a game changer for everybody. We’re now in an industry where movies are very small or very big and there’s almost nothing in the middle. And it would be a tragedy if all the serious movies were very small and all the popcorn movies were very big and have nothing to say. And what Nolan proved was that you can make a huge movie that is thrilling and entertaining and has a lot to say about the world we live in, even if, in the case with ‘The Dark Knight,’ it’s not even set in our world. If felt like a movie that was about our world post-9/11 and played on our fears and discussed our fears and why they existed and I thought that was incredibly brave and interesting.
Mendes doesn’t only credit Nolan creatively for pushing filmmakers working in big arenas to more interesting places but –arguably most importantly– for actually doing so in a way that captured audiences and gave other filmmakers a specific, unarguable precedent to cite when they try and break their own new ground.
That did help give me the confidence to take this movie in directions that, without ‘The Dark Knight,’ might not have been possible. Because also, people go, ‘Wow, that’s pretty dark,’ but then you can point to ‘Dark Knight’ and go ‘Look at that – that’s a darker movie, and it took in a gazillion dollars!’ That’s very helpful. There’s also that thing – it’s clearly possible to make a dark movie that people want to see.
I expect you’ll see many filmmakers express simliar sentiments as time goes on. I’ve examined this very part of the Nolan Mythos before (in my most well-“liked” piece ever, actually) and happen to agree with him quite strongly about The Dark Knight (which I actually spotlighted pretty specifically in my Dark Knight Rises review), and I hope it remains true that while studio heads may only see “grim and gritty,” other filmmakers understand what is actually going on in Nolan’s work that makes it important.
The rest of their chat is pretty interesting as well, and includes a discussion of how little Mendes apparently gave a shit about Bond before signing on and that he also thought Daniel Craig was a bad choice at first! Read the whole thing here.