Quentin Tarantino was at the Cannes Film Festival this week to present a screening of John Flynn‘s 1977 film “Rolling Thunder,” which features prevalently in his book “Cinema Speculations.” And with QT on la Croisette, Deadline sat the director down to talk about his next (and final) film, “The Movie Critic,” his thoughts on the streaming zeitgeist, and other details about his career. What other details? Well, how he tried to direct a James Bond film once upon a time, how the Broccoli family ensured that didn’t happen.
Tarantino told Baz Bamigboye in the sit-down interview that while he wanted to direct a version of “Casino Royale” once upon a time, he didn’t even get as far as discussing it with Barbara Broccoli. “No, we never actually had a sit-down. What happened was I tried to do something, and it didn’t work out. All right?” said QT. Tarantino thought he had a way in to making the film because Eon didn’t own the rights to the “Casino Royale” book. “Because Howard Hawks’ partner, Harry Saltzman, owned it,” the director explained. “That was why that was not one of the ones that they could do when Sean Connery was doing them. And that’s why they did that ridiculous “Casino Royale” movie in 1967 with Woody Allen, Peter Sellers, and David Niven and everything.” Tarantino even hinted that Hawks had his eye on “Casino Royale” before him, too, with Cary Grant playing Bond; but it didn’t happen.
Flash-forward to when Tarantino was working with Miramax, and QT had the idea to make his rendition of the Ian Fleming novel. “We reached out to the Ian Fleming people, and they had suggested that they still own the rights to “Casino Royale,” the director continued. “And that’s what I wanted to do after “Pulp Fiction” was do my version of “Casino Royale,” and 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.”
A standalone Bond movie directed by Quentin Tarantino in the ‘mid-90s? On paper that sounds pretty good. But Barbara Broccoli didn’t feel that way. “But then it turned out that the Broccolis three years earlier figured out somebody was going to try to do what I did,” Tarantino went on. “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.’” QT explained that the deal covered all of Fleming’s work, even if his non-Bond pieces like travel books. “That’s for everything he wrote,” added Tarantino. “To stop somebody from being a wise guy and trying to do what I did.”
After the Broccolis finalized the deal with the Fleming estate, Tarantino couldn’t develop his take on Bond. But didn’t QT try and reach out to the Broccolis and meet with them personally? “No, but I had people who knew them and everything,” Tarantino said. “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*ck 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*ck up our billion-dollar thing.'” That’s the same logic Barbara Broccoli uses even today, as she navigates both rebooting the Bond movie franchise with a new lead actor and managing MGM‘s new ownership under Amazon.
Speaking of which, does Tarantino have any ideas for the future of the Bond franchise? ”I mean, they always start from scratch when it comes to somebody new, because that’s saying somebody couldn’t have been going through the stuff that happened in “Thunderball,” all right? I’ll tell you, I actually have a thought process about this,” continued the director. “What I think they should do, and I’ve been thinking they should do this for a long time, is so many of the books have these really classic names and really classic adventures. And for the most part, a lot of them, they never did the book. They never did the stories. They took the plot line and maybe the Bond girl or maybe the villain and then just went their own way. Tom Mankiewicz just goes his own way. He did the writing for a lot of them. 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.”
So in QT’s mind, the next Bond should stick closer to Fleming’s original source material, which is by all accounts an ever gruffer Bond than Daniel Craig‘s initial rendition of the character. “[Fleming’s novels], They’re very, very tough,” Tarantino went on. “No, no, there’s definitely a Mickey Spillane aspect of Bond, all right, in those first five or six books.” And as for if Tarantino would ever consider making a James Bond film again? “No, because “The Movie Critic” is my last motion picture, OK?!” exclaimed Tarantino. Whatever you say, QT, whatever you say.
