Quentin Tarantino Shares Details on the James Bond Film He Never Got to Make

After Quentin Tarantino made Pulp Fiction, the director attempted to make a James Bond movie, and his plan was to do an adaptation of the Ian Fleming novel Casino Royal. The director had a vision for this adaptation, and he would’ve set the story in the 1960s.

At the time, the rights to the Casino Royal novel did not belong to EON Productions, who held the right to most of the other stories. The rights were held by the Ian Fleming Estate, and Tarantino teamed with Miramax to attempt to make it happen, but it never worked out. Tarantino explained:

"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. But then it turned out that the Broccolis three years earlier figured out somebody was going to try to do what I did. 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.'"

It’s a shame that never happened as I would have loved to see Tarantino direct a James Bond movie! He goes on to share how he would like to see the franchise handled. He thinks that the producers should actually start adapting the books into films, saying:

"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."

I 100% agree! I love the James Bond books, and it would actually be so cool to see those stories adapted as feature films! It’s pretty crazy that they haven’t really done that because adaptations of these books would be so cool!

Would you have liked to see Tarantino direct a James Bond movie? Who do you think he would have cast as Bond?