Quentin Tarantino was once interested in making his own James Bond movie. Although he’d never join the roster of Bond filmmakers due to creative reasons, Tarantino also had his sights set on another MI6 spy series.
Quentin Tarantino would’ve made a much cheaper James Bond movie
Tarantino was very vocal about his desire to direct a James Bond film. His Bond would’ve maintained Pierce Brosnan as the lead, and would’ve lifted direct inspiration from Ian Flemming’s first Bond novel Casino Royale.
Of course in order to make his vision a reality, Tarantino would’ve had to go through the original Bond producers first. He felt it should’ve taken little convincing since he was positive the 007 agent would be in good hands under his guidance.
“I don`t see that they have anything to lose at all,” Tarantino once told Sci Fi Wire (via MI6-hq). “They’ve got this gigantic franchise, they can’t do anything wrong with it. Pierce Brosnan’s only going to do one more movie for them, if that, so if he stayed on to do one more with me, let’s just this one year go my way and do it a little differently. I won’t do anything that will ruin the series.”
Tarantino asserted that one of the perks to his Bond series was that it would’ve cost significantly less than other contemporary Bond films.
“Wouldn’t it be great to have a James Bond movie that didn’t cost $115 million and only cost $40 million or something like that? You know it’s going to make its money back, and we [would] all do good. Maybe we win the critics this time, then you’re back in business the way you were before,” Tarantino said.
For reference, The Numbers reported that Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale had a production budget of $102,000,000.
Quentin Tarantino’s unmade spy film could’ve been his answer to the James Bond series
Tarantino never got to direct his version of Casino Royale. The producers would move on to do their own reimagining of Fleming’s first Bond novel. The way they went out developing the movie without discussing it with Tarantino bothered the filmmaker.
“I wasn’t mad because they didn’t give me the movie to do, because I’m sure I wouldn’t have wanted to do it the way they wanted me to do it and they were never going to give me final cut… But you know they should have talked to me about it, for the simple reason they said publicly Casino Royale was unfilmable, but the minute I said I would do Casino Royale all of a sudden it’s on the websites that that’s the film people want to see. So they should have just said, ‘Thank you,’” Tarantino once told Total Film.
But Tarantino also had another spy series he was considering adapting to the big screen. The Bernard Samson books were written by Len Deighton and, similarly to Bond, focused on a MI6 agent rooted in the era of the Cold War. It was a potential franchise that Tarantino was interested in tackling.
“I would see if I could boil it down to the fat of the characters, and ignore all this Maquis double agent stuff,” Tarantino once said in an interview with Dark Horizons. “It would be interesting if I could reduce the three novels to an hour each and make a three hour movie that would have a big kind of impact, just by responding to the characters, and the wonderful chance of casting actors in it, and the nice environment of the drawing room and the cottages in this part of East Berlin, with the Wall still there and everything.”
The James Bond actor who didn’t quite live up to Quentin Tarantino’s expectations
Tarantino had high praise for Brosnan’s take on the Bond character. But he also found Timothy Dalton as a commendable Bond . Still, the filmmaker felt Dalton’s portrayal of the agent fell short of what Tarantino thought he should be.
“I actually thought Timothy Dalton did a good job – he’s what I always thought I wanted in James Bond, but in the end it wasn`t quite my vision of the character,” Tarantino once told New York Daily News (via MI6-HQ).
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