Hear Me Out: Christopher Nolan would be the perfect man to direct the new James Bond movie
As of 2023, two years after the release of No Time to Die, James Bond is dead. Of course, don’t worry, patriots; he’s only dead in the sense that any concept can be, with Daniel Craig’s iteration of the character being blown to smithereens on a super secret evil lair (despite probably being able to get away if he’d tried a little harder) in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s admittedly groundbreaking action flick.
This puts the Bond franchise in a genuinely novel position, with the suave British spy having always been able to ‘just get away’ in the past, with 007’s best friend being the franchise’s consistent deus ex machinas. Still, with Craig’s Bond being the most fallible of the series so far, perhaps it was fitting for his emotional fragilities and ever-ageing physical incapabilities leading to a mortal close.
Crucially, this also wipes the franchise’s slate clean, providing a filmmaker with almost a totally blank canvas on which to craft their creative magic. Of course, we still expect Bond to don a sleek black tuxedo, swagger into a warehouse of goons and drift his Aston Martin around the streets of an innocent European town, but the forthcoming 007 flick has a unique opportunity to change the game and give the franchise a much-needed shake-up.
The celebrated cinematic innovator Christopher Nolan would be the perfect individual to take up such a challenge, with his 21st-century filmography demonstrating that he is capable of both technical wizardry and proficient action storytelling.
Although his Dark Knight trilogy, 2010’s Inception and 2017’s Dunkirk show shades of why he would be the man for the 007 job, with his eccentric Batman villains demonstrating he can certainly handle the likes of Jaws and Blofeld, no better film demonstrates his expertise for narrative jiggery-pokery better than 2020’s Tenet. Dividing the critics upon its release, Tenet was a spy movie with a central conceit of time travel, which just about came together, but was triumphed for its sheer cinematic ambition.
Handling a number of baffling plot lines with relative ease, although Nolan tried a little too hard to confuse even himself, there were certainly shades of the film that suggested he was ready to take on Bond. Too quick to recall the uneven complexity of the film’s narrative, fans of Nolan were too quick to forget just how masterfully he conducted the action sequences, with the car chase, whereupon two versions of the same characters are simultaneously hurtling down the highway in different timelines, is masterful filmmaking.
Indeed, just like Sam Mendes, who was a fan of the series before he helmed Skyfall in 2012, Nolan has long admired the Bond franchise, recently telling journalists: “The influence of those movies in my filmography is embarrassingly apparent…It would be an amazing privilege to do one”.
Not only would this clearly be a strong career move for Nolan, but the franchise in general, which is in need of a crucial revamp following the controversial finale of No Time to Die, desperately needs a big name attached to its release. Nolan, alongside Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Denis Villeneuve, is one of the few filmmakers to be able to offer this cinematic grandeur, with every one of his releases being an urgent ‘event’.
By giving Nolan the keys to Bond’s Aston Martin, the series will be sure to return with a commercial explosion of feverish excitement, where, just like his Dark Knight trilogy, he is given a trio of films to explore the mythos, allure and style of 007.
