Tarantino Says 007 Producers Won’t Meet With Him Because ‘He Could Ruin Our Billion Dollar Thing’
Though virtually all of Quentin Tarantino’s nine films have been original stories — only “Jackie Brown” was adapted from Elmore Leonard’s novel “Rum Punch” — the filmmaker and obsessive cinephile has kicked the tires on some of the biggest franchises of Hollywood over the years. From Marvel projects to an R-rated “Star Trek” film, Tarantino loves to flirt with opportunities to work with his favorite characters. And sometimes, it seems like the only thing he loves more than making movies is talking about the movies he almost made.
In a new interview with Expirationrecalled his failed attempt to give his Tarantino-esque take on the James Bond novel ‘Casino Royale’ years before Daniel Craig’s adaptation came out.
“We reached out to Ian Fleming’s people and they suggested that they still own the rights to ‘Casino Royale,'” Tarantino said. “And that’s what I wanted to do after ‘Pulp Fiction’ was doing my version of ‘Casino Royale,’ and it would have taken place in the 1960s and was not about a series of Bond films. We would have chosen an actor and we would have been one. So I thought we could do it.
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But Tarantino and his deft legal maneuvering were no match for longtime Bond franchise producers Albert and Barbara Broccoli, who had already made moves to ensure that no one could adapt Fleming’s works without their involvement.
“But then it turned out that the Broccoli three years earlier figured out that someone was going to try to do what I did,” she said. “And so what they did was they just made a blanket deal with the Fleming estate and said that, ‘We have the movie rights to everything that he’s written. We’ll just give you a bunch of money. This is for every single thing he wrote. If someone wants to make a film of it, he has to come to us.'”
When asked if he’d ever had a formal meeting with Broccoli, Tarantino said the negotiations never went that far. The writer explained that the producers were fans of his style but weren’t interested in radically altering the Bond formula.
“No, but I had people who knew them and everything,” she said. “They always told me very flattering versions like, ‘Look, we love Quentin, but we make a certain kind of movie and unless we screw up, we make a billion dollars every time we make that kind of movie, okay. ? We don’t want him to. It doesn’t matter that it will still do good. He could ruin our billion dollar thing.’”
While Tarantino definitely won’t be directing a James Bond film anytime soon — he says he’ll retire after his next film “The Movie Critic” — he still has some ideas about where the franchise should go. He explained that he’d like to see the next slate of 007 films remake the original stories but adhere even more closely to the storylines of Ian Fleming’s books.
“I mean, they always start from scratch when it comes to someone new, because that means someone couldn’t have gone through the stuff that happened in ‘Thunderball,’ okay? I’ll tell you, I actually have a thought process on that,” she said. most, a lot of them, never wrote the book. They never did the stories. They took the plot and maybe the Bond girl or maybe the villain and then they went their own way. Tom Mankiewicz goes his own St. He wrote for a lot of them. I think they shouldn’t remake the movies, but really just make the books, but make them the way they were written. And those would all be brand new.