Quentin Tarantino reveals why ‘James Bond’ producers refused to meet with him
It’s well documented that Quentin Tarantino wanted to provide his own take on the James Bond film franchise by directing Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale novel, even before the well-admired film version with Daniel Craig starring as 007 came out in the mid-2000s.
Tarantino has now explained why his attempt to take on Bond fell by the wayside. He recently told Deadline, “We reached out to the Ian Fleming people, and they had suggested that they still own the rights to Casino Royale. 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 1960s 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.”
However, producers Albert and Barbara Broccoli had already set up a prevention of anyone taking on Bond without them being involved. “But then it turned out that the Broccolis three years earlier figured out somebody was going to try to do what I did,” Tarantino said.
He continued, “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 fact, the Broccolis refused to even meet with Tarantino even though their co-peers had told the director that they indeed liked his work. “I had people who knew them and everything,” Tarantino noted.
He continued: “I was always told very flattering versions of like, ‘Look, we love Quentin, but we make a certain kind of movies, and unless we fuck it up, we make a billion dollars every time we make that type of movie, OK? We don’t want him to do it. Doesn’t matter that it will still do good. It could fuck up our billion-dollar thing.'”
In the same interview with Deadline, Tarantino discussed his forthcoming film The Movie Critic and explained why he won’t cast a British actor in the lead role. He remarked: “I think when people look back on this era of cinema, and it’s just all these British actors pretending to be Americans and all these Australian actors pretending to be Americans, it’s like phantoms. Nobody is acting in their own voice. We just happen to be in an era of really, really good British actors who, for the most part, can pull it off.”
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