Quentin Tarantino on his James Bond movie and why it didn’t work out

It’s hard to imagine Quentin Tarantino directing a franchise movie, but he has come close several times. After Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino considered directing a James Bond movie based on Casino Royale, but it didn’t work out.

While speaking with Deadline, Quentin Tarantino explained why his James Bond movie didn’t happen. “We reached out to the Ian Fleming people, and they had suggested that they still own the rights to Casino Royale,” Tarantino said. “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.“

Unfortunately for Quentin Tarantino, the James Bond producers had scooped up the remaining rights for Ian Fleming’s library. “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. “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.’”

As for whether Quentin Tarantino ever met with anyone at Eon Productions, he said, “No, but I had people who knew them and everything. 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.’” As fun as Tarantino’s take on James Bond might have been, it doesn’t exactly jive with the decades-long franchise, so I can understand why the producers didn’t pursue it.

As the next James Bond film takes shape, Quentin Tarantino suggests that they should adapt Ian Fleming’s actual novels.

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.

But what if Eon finally came calling with an offer to direct James Bond? “No, because The Movie Critic is my last motion picture, OK?!” Tarantino said. Speaking of The Movie Critic, the director spilled some new details on his final movie earlier today, which you can check out right here.