There’s not a lot that the writer, director, producer and cinematographer Mr Cary Joji Fukunaga doesn’t do well. As a young man growing up in Northern California, he nearly became a professional snowboarder, until an injury laid him up and gave him time to pursue a secondary (or perhaps tertiary, after snowboarding) passion: filmmaking and the theatre.

His first feature, the wildly ambitious Spanish-language thriller Sin Nombre (Mr Fukunaga is of Japanese and Swedish heritage, by the way), won him the directing award at Sundance in 2009, proving that he was pretty good behind a camera, too. His first adventure in television, with the first season of True Detective, is certainly among the greatest television shows ever made; and his hallucinogenic Maniac, from 2018, starring Mr Jonah Hill and Ms Emma Stone as pharmaceutical drug guinea pigs, is one of the hardest to classify. In between, he went to the Congo with Mr Idris Elba to make Beasts Of No Nation, a scalding story about child soldiers, during which he contracted malaria.

But it isn’t as if he is exactly averse to risk: he took on one of the most fraught productions in history, the forthcoming James Bond movie No Time To Die, and, after navigating a challenging production schedule, is now reckoning with a delayed film release date due to a certain global pandemic.

That, however, is what a great director does: navigate the whack-a-mole, everything-that-can-go-wrong timeline of a production, while making decisions based on a particular point of view or taste. And Mr Fukunaga has terrific taste (in sushi, in clothes, paintings and wine). So, in between trips out to Pinewood Studios, where he is cutting the 25th 007 film, he met us in London to throw a few outfits together, and help us with our personal mood boards for the spring along the way. (Unsurprisingly, the modelling thing is something else that he does well.) Here are a few bits of wisdom from a real-life man of mystery.