Quentin Tarantino was on the Cannes Film Festival this week to current a screening of John Flynn‘s 1977 film “Rolling Thunder,” which features prevalently in his book “Cinema Speculations.” And with QT on la Croisette, Deadline sat the director down to talk about his next (and final) film, “The Movie Critic,” his thoughts on the streaming zeitgeist, and other details about his career. What other details? Well, how he tried to direct a James Bond film once upon a time, how the Broccoli family ensured that didn’t occur.
Tarantino informed Baz Bamigboye within the sit-down interview that whereas he wished to direct a model of “Casino Royale” as soon as upon a time, he didn’t even get so far as discussing it with Barbara Broccoli. “No, we never actually had a sit-down. What happened was I tried to do something, and it didn’t work out. All right?” stated QT. Tarantino thought he had a manner in to creating the movie as a result of Eon didn’t personal the rights to the “Casino Royale” e book. “Because Howard Hawks’ partner, Harry Saltzman, owned it,” the director defined. “That was why that was not one of the ones that they could do when Sean Connery was doing them. And that’s why they did that ridiculous “Casino Royale” film in 1967 with Woody Allen, Peter Sellers, and David Niven and every little thing.” Tarantino even hinted that Hawks had his eye on “Casino Royale” earlier than him, too, with Cary Grant taking part in Bond; but it surely didn’t occur.
Flash-forward to when Tarantino was working with Miramax, and QT had the concept to make his rendition of the Ian Fleming novel. “We reached out to the Ian Fleming people, and they had suggested that they still own the rights to “Casino Royale,” the director continued. “And that’s what I wanted to do after “Pulp Fiction” was do my model of “Casino Royale,” and it might’ve taken place within the ’60s and wasn’t a few sequence of Bond motion pictures. We would have solid an actor and be one and finished. So I believed we may do that.”
A standalone Bond film directed by Quentin Tarantino within the ‘mid-90s? On paper that sounds pretty good. But Barbara Broccoli didn’t really feel that manner. “But then it turned out that the Broccolis three years earlier figured out somebody was going to try to do what I did,” Tarantino went on. “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.’” QT defined that the deal lined all of Fleming’s work, even when his non-Bond items like journey books. “That’s for everything he wrote,” added Tarantino. “To stop somebody from being a wise guy and trying to do what I did.”
After the Broccolis finalized the cope with the Fleming property, Tarantino couldn’t develop his tackle Bond. But didn’t QT attempt to attain out to the Broccolis and meet with them personally? “No, but I had people who knew them and everything,” Tarantino stated. “I was always told very flattering versions of like, ‘Look, we love Quentin, but we make a certain kind of movies, and unless we f*ck 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 f*ck up our billion-dollar thing.’” That’s the identical logic Barbara Broccoli makes use of even at present, as she navigates each rebooting the Bond film franchise with a brand new lead actor and managing MGM‘s new possession below Amazon.
Speaking of which, does Tarantino have any concepts for the way forward for the Bond franchise? ”I imply, they all the time begin from scratch in terms of any person new, as a result of that’s saying any person couldn’t have been going via the stuff that occurred in “Thunderball,” all proper? I’ll inform you, I even have a thought course of about this,” continued the director. “What I think they should do, and I’ve been thinking they should do this for a long time, is so many of the books have these really classic names and really classic adventures. And for the most part, a lot of them, they never did the book. They never did the stories. They took the plot line and maybe the Bond girl or maybe the villain and then just went their own way. Tom Mankiewicz just goes his own way. He did the writing for a lot of them. I think they should not remake the movies but actually just do the books, but do them the way they were written. And those would all be brand new.”
So in QT’s thoughts, the subsequent Bond ought to stick nearer to Fleming’s unique supply materials, which is by all accounts an ever gruffer Bond than Daniel Craig‘s initial rendition of the character. “[Fleming’s novels], They’re very, very powerful,” Tarantino went on. “No, no, there’s definitely a Mickey Spillane aspect of Bond, all right, in those first five or six books.” And as for if Tarantino would ever take into account making a James Bond movie once more? “No, because “The Movie Critic” is my final movement image, OK?!” exclaimed Tarantino. Whatever you say, QT, no matter you say.