The James Bond movie Alfred Hitchcock refused to direct: “He would take complete creative control”
Since its inception, the James Bond franchise has shied away from hiring top-tier directors and A-list auteurs, which probably had a lot to do with the level of control the Broccoli family held over the property for over 60 years.
It may not be a coincidence that Denis Villeneuve, a four-time Academy Award-nominated filmmaker lauded as one of modern cinema’s marquee talents, was hired to direct the first 007 adventure that will be made outside of the clan’s purview, even if he still won’t have final cut.
If Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, and Christopher Nolan, to name but three, all wanted to helm a Bond flick at one time or another and weren’t granted their wish, it’s reasonable to assume that Eon Productions didn’t want to hire anyone who wanted to assume complete creative freedom and control at the helm.
With that in mind, there was little chance that Alfred Hitchcock would agree to take the reins on not just any James Bond film, but the first one ever. Before Dr No was chosen as the launchpad, Ian Fleming planned on making Thunderball, the first big-screen outing for his literary creation, which ended up opening a legal can of worms that would drag on for decades and culminate in an unofficial picture.
According to Hitchcock historian James Chapman, he “was certainly sounded out about the possibility of directing James Bond of the Secret Service“, which was the working title for the ultimately abandoned first version of Thunderball. Fleming wrote the ‘Master of Suspense’ a telegram to gauge his interest and try and set up a meeting, which he contemplated for a hot minute, but it never came to fruition.
In the book, Nobody Does It Better: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorised Oral History of James Bond, Robert Sellers shared that “Hitchcock was actually interested for quite a few months”, even ripe with ideas about who he wanted to cast as the suave secret agent, and most people would agree it was an ill-advised choice at best.
“There’s one amazing letter where they’re saying, ‘If Hitch does it, he wants James Stewart to play Bond’,” Sellers revealed, “And Fleming saying, ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if he loses the accent’. Ivar Bryce writes back to Fleming and castigates him, and says, ‘What are you even thinking that James Stewart is the perfect choice for Bond? He’s so wrong’. The other fear was that if Hitchcock did it, he would take complete control, which he did on his films.”
In the end, the director decided that since he’d recently wrapped North by Northwest, a spy thriller that ironically starred Fleming’s dream candidate for 007, Cary Grant, he wasn’t interested in making two consecutive movies set in the same genre. That, and he was already preparing for his next effort, a little film called Psycho.
