Quentin Tarantino’s favourite James Bond actor: “I wanna do James Bond with you”
It’s taken many delayed years to reach its conclusion, but the final film in the Daniel Craig era of James Bond has finally ended. No Time to Die signalled the ending of the modern era of the franchise with a surprising flourish. Having delivered an altogether grittier take on the iconic spy hero, Craig’s Bond was a fallible hero, marked with scars and cuts that exposed a fragile underbelly.
This vision of Bond is one that more modern audiences have gravitated towards with glee. While the old James Bond felt like a caricature, something untouchable, unfunny, and unnervingly gross, this one felt raw, vulnerable, and ultimately more connected to the world. However, for director Quentin Tarantino, it would be the ultimate turnoff. For him, Bond needed to be garish and, ultimately, played by Pierce Brosnan.
Just four years earlier than the release of Craig’s first film, Casino Royale, Pierce Brosnan had surfed his way into his final outing in Die Another Day, which seems now as a puerile act, particularly from Great Britain’s ‘very best secret agent’.
As it is, Die Another Day is a strange iced sculpture of the James Bond of old, fit with a diamond-encrusted villain and a scene in which 007 and Bond-girl Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike) have sex on a bed of ice carved to look like a swan. In an interview with Total Film, Brosnan even said: “You can really give yourself a massive headache and a great amount of stress trying to wangle some sense of believability into it”.
Perhaps it was this same heightened realism that attracted the unlikely fan Tarantino, who was once close to working with Pierce Brosnan on a brand new James Bond film, as the actor revealed on a live-streaming of Goldeneye for Esquire. Asked on the stream if he’d like to work with Tarantino on a spy movie, Brosnan replied that the director had previously reached out to him and shared countless Martinis.
As Pierce Brosnan remembers: “It was after Kill Bill: Vol. 2. He wanted to meet me, so I went up into Hollywood one day. I met him at the Four Seasons…I got there at seven o’clock. I like to be punctual; I’m always punctual. 7.15 came round, no Quentin. He was upstairs doing press on Kill Bill“.
As he waited, Brosnan was sent a rather appropriate cocktail: “Someone sent over a Martini, so I had a Martini. And I waited till 7.30. And I thought, well, where the heck is he? Word came down — apologies. So, I thought ‘Well, I’ll have another Martini’”.
Continuing in his recollection, Brosnan states: “Eventually he came down, and he started ordering apple martinis. Well, we were fairly stonkered. I was fairly stonkered”.
Becoming increasingly inebriated, Quentin Tarantino became considerably animated at the idea of working with Brosnan: “He was pounding the table saying ‘you are the best James Bond, I wanna do James Bond with you.’ It was very close quarters in the restaurant. I said, ‘Quentin, please calm down, calm down.’ But you don’t tell Quentin Tarantino to calm down”.
Unfortunately, although Quentin Tarantino very much “wanted to do James Bond”, Brosnan’s team and the James Bond crew decided against it. What a shame. “That would be a good one to watch,” Brosnan finally concludes.
The thought of a director as hyper-stylised as Tarantino in charge of a beloved franchise may leave the owners of said franchise feeling a little bit nervous, but the devoted artistry Tarantino would have brought should have surely been enough to confirm a deal was there to be done. As rumours abound that Christopher Nolan is set to take on the stories of 007 next, one wonders if the gatekeepers of James Bond’s story have finally seen the light and will finally let an auteur take their turn with Bond.
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