Years ago, Oscar-winning director Quentin Tarantino was said to be in the mix to potentially direct a James Bond movie, but it never worked out. Tarantino discussed this in an interview with Deadline, saying he was specifically trying to make a Casino Royale movie.
Tarantino said he was told that Eon, the company that owns the rights to James Bond movies, didn’t have the rights to Casino Royale specifically. This is the reason why 1967’s spy parody movie Casino Royale movie starring Woody Allen and Peter Sellers was able to exist outside the main series.
Tarantino and his team reached out to James Bond author Ian Fleming’s people and inquired about making a Casino Royale film after 1994’s Pulp Fiction.
“It would’ve taken place in the ’60s and wasn’t about a series of Bond movies. We would have cast an actor and be one and done. So I thought we could do this,” Tarantino said.
Unfortunately for Tarantino, 007 producer Barbara Broccoli was preparing for someone to try this and locked down a deal for all of Fleming’s works, the filmmaker said.
“And so what they did is they just made a blanket deal with the Fleming estate and said that: ‘We have the movie rights to everything he’s ever written. We’re going to just give you a bunch of money. This is for every single thing he’s ever written. If anybody wants to make a movie out of it, they got to come to us,'” Tarantino said.
Tarantino could have pitched his idea to Broccoli, but he never had an actual meeting. That said, Tarantino said he was told by friends in the know that the studio did not want to risk it and sign him to direct.
“I was always told very flattering versions of like, ‘Look, we love Quentin, but we make a certain kind of movies, and unless we f**k it up, we make a billion dollars every time we make that type of movie, OK? We don’t want him to do it. Doesn’t matter that it will still do good. It could f**k up our billion-dollar thing,'” he said.
Tarantino is making one more movie, The Movie Critic, and then he plans to retire. But he does have some thoughts on what the James Bond movie series should do next when it returns. He said the Ian Fleming James Bond books have “really classic adventures,” and instead of coming up with brand-new stories, the filmmakers should adapt one of the novels.
“I think they should not remake the movies but actually just do the books, but do them the way they were written. And those would all be brand-new,” he said.
Although considered classics, issues with sexism and racism, among other things, have led to changes being made in more recent editions of Fleming’s novels.
Tarantino also flirted with the possibility of making a Star Trek movie, but that never happened.
Daniel Craig played James Bond in five films, ending with 2021’s No Time To Die. The question of who will play Bond next is something movie fans want the answer to, but we still don’t know.
Broccoli said the next James Bond movie will be a “reinvention” of the character, and it could take some time to find the right person. “It’s about a reinvention, and, ‘Where are we taking it? What do we want to do with the character?'” she said. “And then, once we figure that out, who’s the right person for that particular reinvention?”
Whoever gets the role will need to sign on for numerous films over a decade, Broccoli said.
“The thing is, it’s going to be a couple of years off,” she said. “And when we cast Bond, it’s a 10-, 12-year commitment. So he’s probably thinking, ‘Do I really want that thing?’ Not everybody wants to do that. It was hard enough getting [Daniel Craig to do it].”
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