Previous Debate: Would You Support a Tarantino Directed Bond?

So we all know that he wanted to direct Brosnan in Casino Royale back in 2004. Would you have supported this? And if so to what extent? Should he be given the liberties to take full control of how it turns out, or should the producers put on restrictions? Personally, I think Tarantino would have given us a better Casino Royale than Eon gave us. I think he would have given us the feeling of the "scent of smoke and sweat" and the overall ambience of the novel, which I think is rather important.

Thoughts?

No.

The man is still a geeky video store clerk, who's yet to make a decent film, or grow up. Martin Campbell for all his faults, is a proficient craftsman, and that's the kind of director Bond needs. Not the trendiest "in" hack, who've taken Baftas, Oscars and won at Cannes.

No.

I dont need Bond and M, or Bond and his villains, or the villains and their cohorts having extended bursts of rapidfire conversation filled with pop-cultrue references. I dont need to see Bond riffing to some B-grade 1960s French spy spoof flick (for example). I want something original, I want a solid adventure/thriller that doesnt rely on the Tarantino hallmarks.

No.

Such a movie would be all Tarantino, precious little Bond. The fragrance would be overpowering, so to speak.

Yes all the way from me. Casino Royale demanded (and delivered to a decent degree) a harder Bond, but Tarantino would have brought this out better, stamping the violence with a distinctive style with little or no hint of Bourne-chasing. People bemoan the lack of a Terence Young, a lack of colour, a lack of style etc in modern Bond, but Tarantino IMO would have delivered the closest we'd ever get to having those halcyon days back; he'd have made Bond cool again, as opposed to the desperate Bourne-follower he's become.

Look at the amount of problems Tarantino would have solved for us; sh**e music? No chance, Tarantino has a bloody good ear for the right piece of music to make a scene work, to make it look and sound cool. The days of Bond just sounding like a crap Barry pastiche or generic filler crap with no good melodies would be banished. Awful romantic dialogue/sh**e attempts at emotional character stuff? Look at Tarantino's handling of the Forster/Grier relationship in Jackie Brown. He'd have nailed the Bond/Vesper relationship a thousand times better than the "do what I'm told even though it's sh**e" Campbell, who tried his best to ruin the existing CR in it's final stretches with that crap. Sh**e Brosnan hangover OTT CGI-reliant boring overlong action sequences? Not a chance of that crap with Tarantino. Lest we forget that this is the man who gave us his own excellent "garden of death" duel at the end of Kill Bill, a film which also had the DNA so many people would have wanted the film versions of DAF or YOLT to have had, as a hero travels the earth to exact a brutal, hard-toiled revenge for a wedding day assassination, the hero taking out one organisation lackey after another to get to the top man and waste him, everything most of us would have loved to have seen George Lazenby do back in 71. And dialogue? Tarantino would have knocked CR out of the park. Does recent Bond have anything to even remotely touch stuff like the Hopper/Walken confrontation in True Romance? No fucking way. Imagine how much better stuff like the torture scene in CR could have been under Tarantino. Would we have had awfully written, misguided and/or stagey crap like the M house break-in, the stagey crap on the train, the awfully transparent product placement, etc? No way, not under Tarantino. And, for those who have complaints about Vesper, look at how well Tarantino handles strong female characters in both Jackie Brown and Kill Bill, making them strong without the lame in-your-face-ness EON always resort to with their "strong, independent women" like fucking Jinx, Wai Lin, etc. So much could have been improved under Tarantino that it will forever piss me off that he was overlooked. Why was he overlooked? Because Babs just wants lackeys who'll do what she wants and nothing more, working from scripts full of awful dialogue from the worst writers in the business.

We could have had a guy here whose contributions to stuff like dialogue, style, colour, photography, music, action, characters, badassery etc could have been utterly invaluable and a real shot in the arm for Bond. Instead, we got the same old modern Bond problems hampering what was otherwise the best Bond film in nearly twenty years. It was decent, but it could have been so much more had it been made by a director with some genuine personal investment. Tarantino was passionate about wanting to make CR. Campbell was once more mostly just Babs' director-for-hire, a "yes man" who, while he brings an admirable patience to his storytelling, is nevertheless still way too much in thrall to the almighty Babs to have ever had the balls to stick his neck on the line and get rid of some of the sh**e which threatened to ruin CR. He just went along with that crap, picked up his paycheck and left. Tarantino being a "film geek" is actually a massive plus in this regard, in that the guy actually gives a really big shit about what he's doing. Like most of us lot, he actually cares. He loves the classic genre films of yesteryear we love, not the company-compromised sh**e we all complain about which plagues the multiplexes week in week out. I'd have even had Brosnan back over Craig if it meant getting Tarantino, that's just how much I'd want Tarantino on board, not to mention that if anybody could have even remotely sold Brosnan's Bond as a man it would have been Tarantino. It was a massive missed opportunity which could have resulted in Bond truly ruling again.

So yeah, a thousand yes's from me and then some in this poll, seriously.

I'd prefer Tarantino to say...Uwe Boll.

*runs*

Lazenby - I have to say I have loved your passionate post. I haven't seen many Tarantino films (just Kill Bill and IB) but I really did enjoy them, his style etc. He's a good director. The question is of course would he work for Bond?

Well, yes, maybe, no - but I think I would still support it. Giving him the freedom to make his Bond film could turn out to be a bad thing but ultimately i think it would be a refreashing take on it all. It would work. He has a good sense of what works etc so I don't see why not.

Mrs Aural Sects wrote:

I'd prefer Tarantino to say...Uwe Boll.

*runs*

If Uwe Boll ever gets seriously mentioned, I do hope we all jump ship.

I think Tarantino would have been good at preserving the original story and mimicking the style of the earlier Bond films. I doubt we would have been watching Bond laughing and cracking "balls" jokes while getting his genitals mutilated, as well.

EON would have loved his use of pointless violence, too, based on some scenes featured within the past two Bond flicks.

I would have also preferred some Tarantino regulars to the actors picked for Campbell's CR. Michael Madsen would have shown up, most likely, because of his past Bond link. I think he's a better actor than Jeffrey Wright. I'm not sure who he would have chosen for Le Chiffre or Vesper, though.

There's a part of me that wants to say that it's good that he didn't have any part of the franchise. However, there's another part that wonders how it could have been any worse than Campbell's flick.

The problem with the idea of Tarantino as a Bond director is that it means one of the involved parties (EON or him) would have to make concessions. And we all know EON has no interest to yield control of their product placement cow.

No.

I've never been enamoured with Tarantino's work, apart from Jackie Brown and to a lesser extent Reservoir Dogs.

I can imagine a Tarantino Bond film being more in the vein of Death Proof with gratituous violence and one-liners with pop-culture references.

If the Tarantino-directed CR was still to have been a reboot, I'm at a loss to see how Brosnan could've credibly played Bond in it anyway ... some have quibbled about Craig's Bond being a 'newly minted' 00 at the age of 38, but Brozza was 51 (as far as I know) back in '04.

Plus,of course, by then he'd played Bond as the already 'established' veteran agent for 4 movies.

I can't imagine Tarantino directing a PG-13 film. I'm sure he gets a lot of offers to do franchise stuff, but he prefers creating his own projects. If he's so enamored with the genre, then he'll surely get around to doing a spy thriller pastiche/tribute some day.

No.

Tarantino is very much hit or miss with me. When he's good, he's bearable. When he's bad, I want to punch the television. The rapid-fire dialogue delivery is fine for some scripts, but not all, and does get tedious after a while. It's like sitting on a bus and being forced to listen to the mindless drivel spouted by some gossiping couple chatting away without any concern about who else has to suffer it.

Mr. Brown wrote:

However, there's another part that wonders how it could have been any worse than Campbell's flick.

Way to frame that sentiment negatively. =P

Tarantino-directed Bond film? Why not? They might as well try something new at this stage. People have commented that Tarantino's style would have been overpowering, that he would've demanded free rein. Perhaps it would've been better to get him on as a writer - even a writer among the writers they already had - to add a bit more bite to the dialogue, make the romance more subtle. Perhaps he could've fought and won for some of the elements that were ditched (Vesper committing suicide simply and with no ambiguity, Campbell's telling promise early in production that the film would contain 'only one explosion'). The one thing I think the CR script really needed was a quick shave - all the references to Bond being a young, new 00 should've been dropped like a hot sack of shit. He could still be reckless, not looking at the big picture, etc. without that pretense. A quick edit of the script after Craig's casting was utterly essential IMO, and EON made a big mistake when they overlooked the incongruency between their casting and the Bond they'd written.

Not that any of that has to do with Tarantino. But I'm fairly certain he would've written a mature Bond, in a mature(ly crafted) Bond film.

Blunt Instrument wrote:

If the Tarantino-directed CR was still to have been a reboot, I'm at a loss to see how Brosnan could've credibly played Bond in it anyway ... some have quibbled about Craig's Bond being a 'newly minted' 00 at the age of 38, but Brozza was 51 (as far as I know) back in '04.

Plus,of course, by then he'd played Bond as the already 'established' veteran agent for 4 movies.

Tarantino has said his idea for CR was to do a direct sequel to OHMSS, with Brosnan playing Bond in a '70s period piece.

An interesting idea, but hardly my cup of tea. Period piece? Sure. OHMSS sequel? Um... what?

Lazenby. wrote:

I'd have even had Brosnan back over Craig if it meant getting Tarantino, that's just how much I'd want Tarantino on board

That's where I'd draw the line myself, but I agree with most of the rest of your post (especially regarding the music).

I agree with what you say about getting rid of the "rookie Bond" angle. It really doesn't add that much to the story, and what's the problem with Bond being a mature agent, and just using the story of Casino Royale? Bond can still thwart Le Chiffre at the tables and get Vesper, and the last act could be them at the beach where we see her psychological decline.

And that's the first I've heard about the OHMSS sequel.... :scratch:

Yes and no. Having it star Pierce Brosnan set in the 1970s and being a direct sequel to OHMSS just seems a far fetched.

My ideal CR is basically the first 40 minutes of what we got in the film version, sans Bond breaking into M's penthouse. I like that Bond actually foils Le Chiffre's scheme and its that that sets up the casino job, so at the card table it's Bond vs Le Chiffre round 2. After the briefing with M at the Bahamas I would prefer the rest of the film remain pretty close to the book. Why this way? Because the book is slim as it is. A slavish adaption of the novel would have been 90 mins tops, pretty short for a Bond film.

I can almost picture an ageing Brosnan donning some sideburns for a 70's period piece.

Dodged a bullet there.

Fae wrote:

Lazenby - I have to say I have loved your passionate post. I haven't seen many Tarantino films (just Kill Bill and IB) but I really did enjoy them, his style etc. He's a good director. The question is of course would he work for Bond?

Well, yes, maybe, no - but I think I would still support it. Giving him the freedom to make his Bond film could turn out to be a bad thing but ultimately i think it would be a refreashing take on it all. It would work. He has a good sense of what works etc so I don't see why not.

the producers wouldn't be interested in an "R" rated Bond movie?

I'm sure he'd tone down the action and explicitness. Look at David Fincher. Benjamin Button is his only PG 13+ film, and it's fantastic. So, I don't think the lower classification would be detrimental at all.

FieldsMan wrote:

I'm sure he'd tone down the action and explicitness. Look at David Fincher. Benjamin Button is his only PG 13+ film, and it's fantastic. So, I don't think the lower classification would be detrimental at all.

he never has before...

no scalping? no ear slicing? no hypodermics being plunged into Umma's chest? no rivers of blood?

James Bond engaging in witless conversations about Amercan pop culture...

I can't see it myself
:suspect:

FieldsMan wrote:

And that's the first I've heard about the OHMSS sequel.... :scratch:

Here's some info: http://www.everythingtarantino.com/2003/10/tarantino-wants-a-shot-at-james-bond-film/

Blunt Instrument wrote:

If the Tarantino-directed CR was still to have been a reboot, I'm at a loss to see how Brosnan could've credibly played Bond in it anyway ... some have quibbled about Craig's Bond being a 'newly minted' 00 at the age of 38, but Brozza was 51 (as far as I know) back in '04.

Plus,of course, by then he'd played Bond as the already 'established' veteran agent for 4 movies.

The basic plot of the existing CR isn't really dependent on Bond being newly minted or young IMO, thus I found the whole "reboot" aspect utterly pointless and merely a jump on a current trend. A Tarantino CR with either Brosnan or Craig would ideally just ditch any reboot angle and would still work fine; The whole "reckless" thing Bond has going on in CR has nothing to do with age IMO (and besides, the guy's pushing 40 FFS), it's to me just Bond being Bond. Brosnan could have easily made CR had they simply ditched the reboot/promotion aspects, which TBH amount to nothing anyway, with the basic plot playing out the same if those elements are removed.

I'd actually take the basic script of the existing CR and just have Tarantino put right everything they got wrong: OTT/overlong action sequences, the M break-in, stagey dialogue in parts, the whole romance and suicide section, the comedic u-turn of the torture sequence and the reboot/promotion aspects. There's the framework of a great film there, if only it had someone with Tarantino's input, involvement and passion at the helm. The film needed a director willing to force his own input into crucial areas of the film in order to improve it IMO, something I'm sure Tarantino could have done.

And, having not stated it earlier, I've never been in favour of a Tarantino 70s-set Bond film, a sequel to OHMSS starring Brosnan. That's not a good idea IMO. What I'd have welcomed was simply Tarantino being chosen as director of the modern CR, in the confidence that he'd improve several areas of the script and give us an overall better film.

Laz, you're whole argument in defense of Tarantino, seems to rest on the notion that he'd automatically set everything right. IMO, you'd just be going from one kettle of fish to another.

No David Arnold? Check, but he'd be replaced by Tarantino's collection of vinyl records.

No lovey dovey romance? Check, but instead you'd get self-consciously hip and smartarse flirting and quarreling. No genuine warmth or sentiment.

and etc...

For each of CR's flaws, there's one of Tarantino's own.

Could be worse? For sure, but it could be a whole lot better.

And wouldnt Tarantino's trend for riffing on his favourite films create a sort of "greatest hits" Bond Film in the mould of GE?