Quentin Tarantino wanted to direct the James Bond movie ‘Casino Royale’
Quentin Tarantino has created some of the best films of the past 30 years. From the interlinked stories of Pulp Fiction to a look behind the scenes of filmmaking in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the cinematic auteur has consistently delivered at an astonishingly high level. Incredibly, in what would have been a severe detachment to his filmography, Tarantino was almost been attached to direct a version of Casino Royale, the beloved James Bond story.
“After Pulp Fiction, I wanted to do Casino Royale, but the producers stopped me,” he explained to Deadline. “They were all on record of having said that Casino Royale was unfilmable. I thought the right situation existed the way it had, I think, ten years earlier, where Casino Royale was the only thing the Broccoli family didn’t control. So I was going to try to get it through the back door.”
The Broccoli family was headed by the notorious – and brilliantly named Albert Romolo Broccoli – who produced more than 40 major motion films during his career, including several James Bond movies. Since his death, the production company has been fronted by his daughter Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G Wilson, who produced the 2006 adaptation of Casino Royale.
Despite the initial interest in Tarantino taking the reigns on the project, “it turned out that that wasn’t the case anymore.” Tarantino noted: “They anticipated somebody like me coming at them from a backdoor situation. So they did a thing with Ian Fleming’s estate, and they go, ‘Look, we’re buying the rights to everything that Ian Fleming has his name on. So nobody can do what this Tarantino character is trying to do or what this Tarantino character is going to try to do a couple of years from now.'”
Tarantino then admitted that his take on Bond “might have been fun”. However, he acknowledged: “It was so long ago that I can’t say that I wish I had done that rather than Jackie Brown. I don’t think I wish I had done any of these movies, more than the movies that I ultimately chose doing.”
It would be difficult to remove just one of Tarantino’s movies from his filmography given each of their iconic statuses’ – although if we were to pick, it would probably be The Hateful Eight. Still, it would have been fascinating to see how the legendary director would have approached directing a film about the world’s most famous spy.
As for a project that passed him by that he has minor regrets about, Tarantino said: “The one that was making me kind of wistful was, I did think of doing another adaptation of The Outfit, after Jackie Brown, with Robert De Niro as Parker and Harvey Keitel as Cody and Pam Grier as Bett. Since I didn’t make a movie for six years during that time, that’s the one that kind of bites a little bit because that could have fallen right in that time period.”
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