We take a look at five directors who could resurrect Bond and make the character great again…
Since Daniel Craig handed in his PPK and called it a day as James Bond, the big talk has been mostly focused on who will take over the 007 moniker and start a new iteration of the iconic character. Is Bond too outdated to return in a guise that stays true enough to the character? Who knows, but all this talk of who can fill the shoes worn by Craig, Sean Connery, T Dalt and the rest isn’t nearly as important as who takes a seat in the director’s chair.
There’s a big problem with James Bond now, and it’s not just confined to the character’s attitudes set within a 2020’s landscape. Daniel Craig at his best had a very distinct version of the character that had shades of what Timothy Dalton brought to Ian Fleming’s legendary spy, but a little more refined for a post-Bourne landscape. There’s a grit to Casino Royale and Skyfall that merges well with the atypical set pieces and spectacle audiences expect watching the character. However, his time was also marred by films which felt tonally confused, overstuffed or just plain mishandled (Quantum of Solace). Worst of all, even when the films attempted to half-heartedly step back to the more gadget-filled, wise-cracky era of Bond films, it fell flat and if there’s an overriding crime for both No Time To Die and especially Spectre, it’s that they’re both achingly boring.
You might argue that Bond, even at his best was born on expertly delivered functionality over auteur vision. Martin Campbell is not someone with a distinctive directorial style, but he’s someone in the spectacle realm who can pull everything together neatly and tidily and inject enough propulsion to make something excellent as shown with Goldeneye and Casino Royale, arguably two of the strongest in the entire canon (Casino especially). The most visionary director who has ever handled the franchise beyond ahead-of-the-curve set piece specialists like Peter R. Hunt, Terence Young and Guy Hamilton has been Sam Mendes whose career has been eclectic and filled with some stunning high points. With the freedom of the park, Mendes made a great film in Skyfall, even if purists might say it doesn’t feel Bond enough. However, hamstrung by adherence to formula, he also made Spectre which might be one of the worst for me.
Sure, the franchise could go for expert functionality once again, perhaps even handing the reigns back to Bond-reboot specialist, Martin Campbell, but we’re coming to a make-or-break time in the franchise history. Audiences will need convincing that this character is still essential for big screen viewing. It needs a great director who can do something intriguing and maybe great and someone who can easily handle the big spectacle. The hiring in recent times has been slightly haphazard with directors maybe falling way out of their comfort zone or having to go against their strengths to guide a studio vision to completion. Cary Fukunaga didn’t have enough heft in his CV to handle a job that was no doubt also weighted down by a studio that wanted to play it safe (having fired Danny Boyle for perhaps wanting to go too far against the grain).
Now is the time for the producers to hire a special director and let them go unshackled into rebooting Bond, even if just a one-off. It also needs someone with enough reverence for the history of Bond who wouldn’t go too wild subverting everything. Let’s look at five potentials:
Quentin Tarantino
Is Tarantino really about to make his last film? Could he really call it quits? Surely if the fates allowed and everything fell into place, Tarantino would still be open to helming established franchises he’s previously been linked to, such as Star Trek and indeed Bond. Tarantino has previously expressed an interest in doing his version of Casino Royale and has enough appreciation for every generation of James Bond. He’s capable of crafting something which perfectly balances nostalgia and classic Bond tropes with something that feels edgy.
Undoubtedly he’d want a say in the casting of Bond and would do something inherently interesting. He’d previously said in the early days of Craig’s era that he’d have liked to do a version with Brosnan. An older Bond could be great, and even if we saw Roger Moore traipsing around as the spy at 58 years old, it never really explored the ageing process itself as the character was still as infallible and irresistible to women as ever. However, even resetting Bond to his 30-something stage would wield an interesting new casting choice and knowing Tarantino, wholly unexpected.
Best of all you get the usual Tarantino bonuses with his insistence to shoot on film as well as his penchant for practical effects over CGI. Tarantino also has a brilliant eye for period settings, really capturing not only the aesthetics of an era but the styles of the films of the era. He’d very likely take Bond back to the 60s and shoot the film accordingly and utilise a classic approach to the film’s score and soundtrack. We’d get something in the style of Connery’s era, with a refinement you inherently get from Tarantino. The likelihood is sadly low but Tarantino would undoubtedly have the potential to make a franchise best. At the same time, if the film became too indulgent the danger would be it’s too erratic for die-hard fans.
Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan may just be the perfect choice and one who has expressed interest recently and actually conversed with Barbara Broccoli. It’s still a pipe dream but this floating balloon occasionally swirls back down into fingertip reach.
For many of the reasons Tarantino would make a great choice, Nolan would too. Firstly his love of shooting on film always results in films which rank among the best looking of any given year. The more that digital drives cinema and stylistic trends take all the nuance and enigma of grain out of a picture in place of over-clarified perfection, the more it just feels like we’re heading deeper into an era where content is King and cinema is an afterthought. Most films look production line now and so clean they feel aggressively TV-like and lose a certain cinematic je ne sais quoi. There’s also an overreliance on shooting flat and crafting your look predominantly in grading, whereas Nolan and Tarantino still prefer to let a cinematographer craft the visual landscape to maybe 80-90% of the film’s final look on set, rather than maybe 30%. Essentially they’d ensure that the grain, lighting and framing combine to create a picture with personality and a timeless aesthetic.
Nolan may also prefer to take Bond back to a period setting where the character probably feels most at home during the Cold War era, at least cinematically. He may even opt to take Bond back to the 50s where the character first hit print in a tense, post-war landscape. We’d undoubtedly see homage to classic spy films of the 50s and 60s, not least something like Hitchcock’s, North by Northwest.
Nolan has already had his Bond audition with the sprawling, Bondesque set pieces in Inception, with a finale set piece at a remote snowy compound, lifted directly from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Nolan may well fall into an overreliance on complicated exposition in his high-concept films, but Bond doesn’t carry the complexity of dreams within dreams or the dynamics of Tenet. Nolan would certainly revel in some of the tropes of Bond and, at least for him, have some fun with it.
If Nolan has a potential weakness it could be that his films can feel very dry. Even with Craig at his gritty, brooding best, the films still had a wry sense of humour but Nolan’s reverence for the lore would undoubtedly see him loosen up and more importantly, let cast members raise the occasional eyebrow.
Danny Boyle
Unfinished business right here. I can’t be the only one curious as to what Danny Boyle envisioned for the character and just why it resulted in him getting canned. Studios take far fewer risks these days and he’s not the first director to have seen himself binned from a project and replaced by someone tasked with steering the ship to shore in as functional a way as possible.
Boyle’s career of late has been an indifferent mix and he’s not quite recaptured some of the edgy high points of his early career or the brilliance of something like Slumdog Millionaire. What he does have going for him, much like Nolan, is being British and like most of several generations, growing up on Bond. Bond only really became a major international tentpole in more recent times where previously there’d been a smaller audience stateside watching the exploits of the British spy. That’s despite the long-standing American heritage of Broccoli/Wilson powering the movies from the beginning of course. You might even argue now, that the US audience is also the key demographic to aim for. The spy always felt quintessentially British, which naturally attracted the domestic audience, but it was also that suave exaggerated Britishness that appealed to US audiences.
Quite whether Boyle’s vision was too far away from Bond, or sought to drag him too far into the 21st century isn’t clear. It may have been that he wanted to revert back to a very classic Bond but all that was ever confirmed was that the film was to be set in Russia, evoking classic Cold War espionage tension, set within a topical modern era. Interesting if potentially dangerous of course. Could Boyle conjure a new idea? Ultimately the relationship between him and the producers might be beyond repair sadly, but with the right settings, he’d have made a great Bond film.
Edgar Wright
Edgar Wright has already been on the receiving end of the unruly axe of studio politics having been binned as director of the original Ant-Man. Only a few of his touches remained but it showed that faith in Wright as a tentpole director only stretches so far. Still, as a Brit with a strong grip on cinema’s visual language and a deep-rooted love of cinema, he’d certainly be able to craft an interesting Bond.
Wright would probably feel most at home at something that fell between Connery and Roger Moore’s iterations of Bond as far as the humour and quirkiness although his thunderous editing and musically driven approach may need to be pulled back slightly to a more old-school approach to blocking and cutting (although perhaps that’s a fanciful notion that I want more than a modern audience member who might like a little more mania in their cinema).
What is clear through Wright’s growth from British cult filmmaker to an internationally appealing cult filmmaker of star-driven movies, is that he’s increasingly assured in delivering set pieces, best displayed with the vehicular carnage in Baby Driver.
Steve McQueen
Steve McQueen makes great films and he’s shown a degree of range, breaking away from intense indie dramas like Shame to make a hard-hitting historical epic in 12 Years a Slave, to making something a little more escapist with Widows. He’s handled big studio films but never perhaps the gigantic tentpole level, but undoubtedly it’d be something he’d ably adapt to if allowed complete control.
McQueen would certainly retain a certain grit and intensity seen with Craig at his best but would also need to delve into something lighter than what he’s done of late. Does Bond carry enough depth and meaning for a filmmaker like McQueen? Regardless, he’s got everything in his arsenal to craft an interesting and unique version of the character.
Some decent set pieces in Widows, which by his standards probably felt a little too simple thematically, prove he could do something spectacle-driven and sometimes maybe you just want to entertain rather than inform. Whether he’d want to make that jump to becoming a Bond director is another matter. Though the emphasis on casting appears to be a younger Bond, as a one-off, it’d be great to see Michael Fassbender reteaming with McQueen to create more magic.
Who should direct the next Bond film? Let us know on our social channels @flickeringmyth…
Tom Jolliffe – @JolliffeProductions
