Quentin Tarantino names his favourite James Bond movie
Since the early 1990s, celebrated auteur Quentin Tarantino has shaped a cinematic career like no other. His distinctive script-writing style and directional command make for a familiar yet separately extraordinary experience in each movie. His nine films to date have followed a distinct lineage of dark comedy, sensationalised violence and a reel of recurring A-listers who bring top-flight entertainment to any story, from 1800s vengeance stories to satirical studies of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Though Tarantino’s approach to filmmaking is unique – or at least it was before he inspired a new generation of filmmakers – he learned his core talents from a wide variety of eminent directors on whose shoulders he proudly stands. Born in 1963, Tarantino was lucky enough to grow up through the milestone zeniths of all-time greats such as Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.
The year before Tarantino was born, Sean Connery starred in the first James Bond movie, Dr. No. Throughout Tarantino’s lifetime, a further 26 Bond movies have been released, with seven actors taking on the titular role and 12 directors at the helm. Naturally, the central character and the cinematographic style have changed over time with societal progression, technological advancement and the shuffle of artistic perspective.
For now, one can only imagine what a Tarantino-directed Bond movie would look like, but with AI on the rise, we might not have to wait long before getting a reasonable simulation. That said, we were once extremely close to getting the real thing.
In an interview on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 2004, Tarantino revealed his affection for the James Bond franchise, especially its earlier movies. After revealing his favourite Bond movie was 1963’s From Russia With Love, Tarantino revealed his plans for a Bond movie that sadly never materialised.
Following 2002’s Die Another Day, Tarantino proposed a plan for Casino Royale starring Pierce Brosnan. Speaking to Leno, the Pulp Fiction filmmaker revealed that he had “bumped into” Brosnan “and we talked about it”.
“I don’t know if they’re going to go for it or not, but I’m letting them know I’m interested,” Tarantino said of his bid to helm the next movie in the franchise. Part of his impetus to take the reins came from his dissatisfaction with the previous three movies. While they were “great,” he saw them as “spoofs” of the original James Bond character.
Continuing, Tarantino praised the longtime James Bond producers and owners of Eon Productions, Barbara Broccoli and her step-brother Michael G Wilson. “They’ve got this gigantic franchise; they can’t do anything wrong with it,” he said, almost vying for the job.
As if addressing the financiers, Tarantino said if Brosnan was happy to do one last movie, “let’s just this one year go my way and do it a little differently. I won’t do anything to ruin the series.”
Despite Tarantino’s enthusiasm, Brosnan would be replaced by Daniel Craig for 2006’s Casino Royale, with the producers commissioning Martin Campbell as director. As it turns out, the Fleming Estate had already acquired the rights a few years before.
“We reached out to the Ian Fleming people, and they had suggested that they still own the rights to Casino Royale,” Tarantino later told Deadline. “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.
“But then it turned out that the Broccolis, three years earlier, figured out somebody was going to try to do what I did. 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.'”
In a 2019 conversation with Empire, Tarantino once again discussed his long-lived partiality for Agent 007. When asked to rank the different James Bond actors, Tarantino placed Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan in first and second place, respectively.
“Connery’s at the top, but I really, really like Pierce Brosnan,” he said. “I didn’t care for the movies that they put him in, which I always thought was a bit of a tragedy because I thought he was a very legitimate Bond.”
Watch the trailer for Casino Royale below.
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