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[COLUMN] Maybe Christopher Nolan Shouldn't Direct a James Bond Movie | by Darren Mooney
🕑 Added 2025-03-10 14:00:17 +0000 UTC
With all of the drama swirling around the James Bond franchise lately, one name has come up repeatedly in conversation: Christopher Nolan.
Variety reported that Nolan had been in conversation with the Broccoli family to direct the next film in the franchise, but that negotiations had broken down because Barbara Broccoli refused to allow the director final cut over the film, making it “clear that no director would have final cut while Bond was under her purview.” Nolan went on instead to make Oppenheimer, a film that both outgrossed No Time to Die and went on to win the Best Picture Oscar.
Unsurprisingly, following the purchase of James Bond by Amazon, rumors have begun to circulate that Christopher Nolan is “the top choice and the perfect filmmaker to reinvigorate the James Bond franchise for Amazon MGM”, with The Wrap speaking to “half a dozen industry insiders.” This makes a certain amount of sense. Christopher Nolan is the biggest director in the world, and has spoken openly about how he would “definitely” make a James Bond movie if the opportunity arose.
Purely pragmatically, it seems highly unlikely to actually happen. Nolan is a staunch proponent of theatres, and has expressed a reticence about working with streaming services like Netflix, so it would take a lot to bring him to Amazon, a studio that has a history of being ambivalent when it comes to theatrical distribution – alternatively pulling back and leaning in. It makes sense that streaming services want Nolan’s cachet, but they’re reluctant to do the work to earn it.
Would Amazon surrender the necessary creative control to Nolan? Would the service give Nolan the freedom that he would demand, in terms of the film’s production, marketing and release? Given that Jeff Bezos was soliciting casting suggestions from fans and that one reason the studio moved production of The Rings of Power away from New Zealand was because that country’s COVID protocols stopped executives “from visiting the sets to monitor the high-profile — and hugely expensive — shoot”, would the studio give Nolan carte blanche to do what he wanted to do?
From the studio’s perspective, would it make sense to give Nolan that creative control? One of Nolan’s conditions would likely be sole authorship, and he would likely (and correctly) insist that Amazon resist the urge to flood the market with spin-offs and “content.” Given that it takes Nolan about three years to make a movie, and he’d likely want some breathing room around that, would Amazon be willing to show that restraint with a property entering the public domain in 2035?
However, set all of those practical concerns aside. Assume that Amazon were willing and able to give Nolan everything that he would (quite reasonably) ask for, even it is antithetical to their business model. Even then, it feels like something of a poor choice for Nolan. Nolan is, at this moment in time, the rare studio director who can get an original project (or a project from a non-established brand) greenlit at a major studio at a budget of over $100m. It would be insane to squander that for Bond.
The path for directors like Nolan should be away from intellectual property. One of the bigger issues facing Hollywood today is that the studio system is no longer designed to produce filmmaker who can entice audiences to take chances on original projects, as directors like Steven Spielberg or Alfred Hitchcock could do. These sorts of gigs should be stepping stones for directors, not career goals of themselves. Nolan’s Batman trilogy gave him the freedom to make Inception and Interstellar.
To retreat back into a brand like that would feel like a regression, particularly at this point in his career. There is possibly some abstract point in Nolan’s future where he won’t have the creative clout necessary to make original and ambitious films like TENET, Oppenheimer and The Odyssey, but until that point – as perhaps the only living filmmaker with the power to get movies like that made at that level – Nolan has a responsibility to keep doing it.
Besides, Nolan has arguably already made his James Bond movies. Nolan’s filmography is very obviously and very heavily inspired by the James Bond film franchise. It is reflected in broad aspects of his approach to movie-making, such as his emphasis on practical effects and in-camera stunt work, a trademark of the series. Nolan’s fondness for well-manicured men (often British) wearing tailored suits also evokes the aesthetics of the James Bond franchise.
It is also reflected in the specific choices that Nolan makes within individual films, both at a micro and a macro level. There are individual scenes and narrative choices in Nolan’s work that are lifted directly from the James Bond films. The climax of Inception, in which the characters race to infiltrate a hospital on a snowy mountaintop, obviously evokes On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Batman’s (Christian Bale) excursion to Hong Kong in The Dark Knight feels very James Bond.
More broadly, Nolan’s Batman trilogy owes a lot to the James Bond franchise. Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) is imagined as Q (Desmond Llewellyn) to Bruce Wayne’s Bond, providing all sorts of fantastical gadgets. The decision to introduce both The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises with big action set piece cold opens is lifted directly from the James Bond series. Bruce takes to hanging around with supermodels, driving sports cars and wearing fancy suits.
Even the romantic triangle between Bruce and Selena (Anne Hathway) and Talia (Marion Cotillard) in The Dark Knight Rises is also very James Bond. Of course, Batman lends itself to James Bond homage. In his comic book runs on the character around the same time, writer Grant Morrison also took their cues from the James Bond franchise. Nolan’s Batman movies were so obviously James Bond coded that they would go on to provide an obvious source of inspiration for Skyfall.
Even outside of the Dark Knight films, Nolan’s filmography lifts heavily from the James Bond films. Movies like Inception and TENET feel of a piece with those classic spy films, movies about men in expensive suits moving through spaces reserved for the ultrarich. Indeed, the evil Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) from TENET feels like an especially nasty James Bond villain, a Russian oligarch who lives on a yacht, abuses his wife and plans to use cutting edge technology to destroy the world.
However, Inception and TENET were also far more ambitious than any James Bond movie. This is not to diminish or belittle the James Bond franchise, which was taking some pretty big swings during this era with movies like Casino Royale, Skyfall and No Time to Die. Still, there are formal constraints imposed on these movies. There are limits to what a director — even a director given complete creative freedom — can do.
Nolan’s movies are able to take a lot of the individual strengths of the James Bond franchise, and then elaborate upon or extrapolate from them. When Nolan does an action sequence involving men in suits fighting over a gun, he can literally make the hallway spin as in Inception or have one of the characters move through the set piece backwards (but not in heels) as in TENET. It is an evolutionary leap forward, using James Bond as a template to expand the vocabulary of action cinema.
Within the James Bond franchise itself, there is little room for that sort of innovation or expansion. While it seems like public opinion has (quite rightly) come back around from the somewhat sniffy initial reception of TENET, it seems unlikely that James Bond fans would accept a take on the franchise that found the title character moving backwards and forwards through time in a temporal pincer movement. Franchises are, by their nature, not designed to support such approaches.
Indeed, there’s an argument – demonstrated by Skyfall – that Nolan would arguably have a much bigger impact shaping and remolding the James Bond franchise from the outside, by pushing it to compete with him. This puts the burden on Nolan as a filmmaker to break new ground, which then makes it easier for the James Bond franchises to follow in his footsteps. Skyfall is very obviously indebted to Christopher Nolan. It is also, not coincidentally, one of the best James Bond movies.
It honestly seems like hiring Christopher Nolan to make a James Bond movie would do a disservice to both parties. It would distract Nolan from the more interesting work he is doing outside of franchises and it would also impose limitations on what he could do within this one. It would also make it harder for the James Bond franchise to justify its continued evolution by taking inspiration from Nolan’s movies that are extrapolations from its own familiar framework.
To borrow a catchphrase from another iconic spy franchise, this is one mission that Nolan should choose not to accept.
Comments
Jeroen Delcour
Fair enough. I am in the minority that does not like Oppenheimer. I was a Nolan fanboy until that movie, actually. It's not bad, but like his other original works, it feels... pretentious? I'm not sure how to describe it. I never figured out why some scenes are in black and white, or what purpose non-linear timeline serves. I also absolutely hate the soundtrack, its droning felt really out of place and ruined otherwise great scenes for me. I guess it's supposed to evoke Oppenheimer's pressure and anxiety, but it felt really disconnected from the acting, especially in early scenes. Dunkirk's ticking clock did it better. Barbie is the better movie and I will die on this hill!
Grey1
I appear to have missed some controversy around Tenet - I only know about sound design issues (although I think that was a wider topic around Dunkirk), and that some of us didn't feel the need to return to theatres just yet (but there were two, three invitations by friends and family that I had to turn down, so interest seemed to be okay for the times).
Grey1
(replied in the wrong thread)
Grey1
Incidentally, my strongest memory of anything Oppenheimer will always be seeing an ad with gloomy larger-than-life hat-wearing Cillian Murphy on a bus near the Eiffel Tower, surrounded by tourists and souvenir trinkets on a great summer day. It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it.
Darren Mooney
Ha. Not unfair. But "Oppenheimer" did pretty well for a three-hour partially black-and-white non-linear biopic released at the height of summer.
Darren Mooney
Sure, but I guess we'll see if his "passions" include giving up the biggest blank cheque in modern Hollywood to make an Amazon film. And I don't use the word "responsibility" to impose anything on him. From the way he talks about film and cinema and the industry, it's clearly something that he thinks about and values. (Which, to be clear, is a good thing.)
Darren Mooney
Cool.
Darren Mooney
The thing is that "TENET" kinda was his "fail and come back" moment. And there was just - like Spielberg with "1941" - a sizable floor on his failure. (Spielberg makes the point that "1941" still turned a profit, just not a big one.)
Darren Mooney
Yeah, it's not something anybody is going to look at. But it does communicate that "making the nerds feel like stakeholders" is a big part of how Bezos seems the brand. Whether or not they actually are - they never are - maintaining the illusion never leads anywhere pleasant.
Darren Mooney
I don't know, I think "Oppenheimer" is a masterpiece. And I think that his one "divisive" movie is "TENET", which I'd credit to at least partially being it coming out at a time when the world was... in the state that it was in. (And, worth stressing: at the latest point Warner Bros. would release it. Nolan did not pick the release date.)
Darren Mooney
Yep. Absolutely not intentional. Apologies. May have carried over pronouns from the (outdated) article.
Jeroen Delcour
Great article. I hadn't realized the influences between Bond and Nolan movies, and I can see why you'd want Nolan to continue doing original work. But I'd argue that some oversight and push-back is exactly what Nolan needs. He excels at action scenes and big set pieces, but really needs a collaborator for the writing. I think his films, while still great, have gone downhill since he's gotten more creative control. Inception and Tenet are bombastic and impressive the first time, but don't hold up on second viewing. I'd argue his best work since The Dark Knight is Dunkirk, which is essentially a series of great action set pieces connected loosely by the bare minimum of writing - Nolan working to his strengths. If Nolan ends up making a Bond film, my hope is that Amazon's desire for executive control and Nolan's auteur prestige kind of cancel out; a tug-of-war that brings out the best in both of them.
Grey1
"Given that Jeff Bezos was soliciting casting suggestions from fans" By the way, has there been any indication that this was anything more than just a little PR stunt attempting to establish Bezos (and Amazon's takeover) as "we're nerds like you"? Giving a welcoming platform to those with strong opinions without any obligation to do anything more than have the appearance of listening? I mean, if a strong creative like Nolan gets to do this, and gets to choose his lead actor, nobody serious would go "but I replied to Bezos two years ago, that's a binding contract". And even if the director only gets to choose from a pre-approved list, that list probably wouldn't be deduced from nerd tweets. But the nerds would be happy because that one time, someone spoke to them.
Grey1
I'm not sure if failure and a comeback would add much value to an ouevre. With audiences, if you do not become the punchline of the failure, you'll just shrug it off with the next "universal appeal" project. So as long as someone like Nolan can surf on universal appeal anyway, there's not much to gain. Pointing to Tarantino again, I remember Death Proof being a bit of a hiccup in his career, but did he consciously look for other exploitation genres and historical settings to put his revenge films into? Because Death Proof was just as much a "remember that genre" exercise as the following films were. If anything, the comeback works better if the corresponding movie is more of a prestige (= higher budget) object and thus holds more universal appeal, more FOMO. I guess Shyamalan would be the "crashed hard, came back with less money" example, and I'm not sold on his newer movies necessarily being the better for it. And even then his crash occured mostly when he wasn't happy with widening his auteur lane, but wanted to create straightforward fantasy and sci-fi epics even though his takes had always been "Horror, but..." "Superhero, but...", "Independence Day, but...". He only returned to what he already did (with a bit less "but" and less budget, if I'm not mistaken) after acknowledging that he couldn't make Spielberg-level blockbusters work.
Grey1
I wouldn't even say that that's a trolling question. Obviously it isn't -really- an Intellectual Property, but it's both a brand and kind of an Intellectual Frame, for lack of a better word (suggestions welcome). I guess Tarantino was the biggest case of this in the last 30 years, especially when they started numbering the movies and building up the myth of the tenth movie being his final one. Shyamalan tried to make this work and ended up achieving the opposite. Marketing knows how to play up someone having directed movies that audiences love. And with the classics, Hitchcock and Truffaut and all appear to have turned into a single idea of what to expect, even over very different movies. With Nolan, I guess he became a movie-selling name because he appeals both to critics who enjoy aspects of the artistry, and vocal audiences, who probably most enjoy the mix of nerd appeal and masculinity (and yes, there's also important mass audiences who then find out that you shouldn't miss his new film). Which makes him a perfect fit for serious silly franchises like Bond, or even Trek or Star Wars, if he were interested. Franchises that make money when they center around a great man of action, as you call it.
Michael McCarthy
Also I think Nolan a stone cold failure to punctuate his career. Perhaps you'd disagree but it feels like his career has been on the same trajectory since The Dark Knight with Tenet being the closest to be an upset but had Coivid / Project Popcorn as an excuse. Failure is good, allows you to see yourself and the world in a different light.
Michael McCarthy
Also, a couple of critic reviews does not make a turning tide of public opinion in favour of Tenet. Not a terrible movie but firmly in the lower half of his ouvre.
Michael McCarthy
Trolling question but are auteur directors their own IP? I'm going to put this out there but most of Nolan's movies post Prestige have felt samey for me, I'd say Oppenheimer is the first movie in a while where he's trying to break out of the mold his style has cast him in. My biggest problem with Nolan is that he's been operating without limits for so long that in effect his movies have a similar tone and construction which includes effect highlight the limits of his own abilities/focus. If not franchise creating limits, then I would like to see a few movies where he's only given $50 million to work it with and for the love of God, not have the protagonist be a great man of action and for once have a female character who is not defined by their relationship to a man.
LifeIsStrange
I hope Nolan never directs a Bond film myself because i fucking DESPISE his half-assed approached to sound design where subtitles are pretty much mandatory to understand what the fuck characters actually saying because of them having a tendency to mumble their words quietly for no good reason. I fucking HATE that trend soooo much and Nolan is quite possibly the biggest offender. I remember seeing Dark Knight Rises in theaters and begging for subtitles every single time Bane spoke because with his stupid incoherent voice I could barely understand a fucking word he was saying, I can only imagine how bad he would fuck up a Bond film with that shit. Also TENET is overrated(as is Inception IMO), sorry but i'm with Moviebob on that one, Nolan isn't nearly as clever as he thinks he is.
LifeIsStrange
really? damn had no idea.
LifeIsStrange
I never got the dislike for SPectre myself.
Grey1
Oooh, get Greta Gerwig and give Bond the Barbie treatment! "Bond, just Bond..."
Davsau
I never saw No Time To Die because Spectre left a bad taste in my mouth. Daniel Craig very clearly wanted to stop and it kinda radiated off the film. Now I’m wondering what would happen if that kind of resentment was behind the camera instead of I front of it.
Jack Philipson
Aside from anything else I think it's time for Bond to go back into the hands of a filmmaker with much campier sensibilities and Nolan isn't that.
Antiphar
That's a great comparison. I liked Abrams Trek back in 09 but I'm afraid to revisit it in case I realize it was actually bad all along, or worse that it's now tainted by his more recent sins.
Grey1
I guess they'd want both as long as they get everything else that they want along with it. Nolan is more of a prestige sell than Wright ever could have been, and Marvel was out for more teamplay while a Bond movie might well still be sold as a huge one-time event.
Grey1
The setup reminds me of Abrams doing Star Wars via [Insert available sci-fi franchise here] when it didn't seem plausible that anyone would ever again have the opportunity to make a Star Wars film, and then also making a Star Wars film first chance he got. If Nolan sees Bond as his personal heaven, and maybe also wants to forever attach himself to such a cultural touchstone, I guess he'll gladly negotiate with Amazon to do this the way he wants to do it.
Grey1
Well, it's an opinion piece. "Responsibility" does sound harsh if you take it at face value, but it does get the idea across.
Tim Wilson
As with many things when people are talking Bond, the time has passed. Part of what was interesting about Bond actors and films (to a degree) is how comparatively unknown the actors were and how interesting and creative new films and ideas could be (not that they always were). Much like how Danny Boyle was apparently approached about doing Casino Royale, Nolan needs his space to make his films shine. To paraphrase Edgar Wright regarding Ant Man: they’d want a Bond movie, not a Nolan movie.
Marshall Halleck
I find it very strange that, simply because Nolan is the only person able to do a thing, that you think he also has a responsibility to do that thing. Just because a musician is making music I like doesnt mean they have a responsibility to continue catering to me, as opposed to doing what they would enjoy more. It is clear Nolan wants to make a Bond movie. There needs to be room for Nolan to follow his passions, as well, not simply the passions of a critic.
Antiphar
I wholeheartedly agree. Nolan would have been the perfect Bond director in 2007. Now he has become so much more than he was then, and post-Beezquisition the Bond franchise is poised to become so much less than it was then. Or... Nolan is the director we need, but not the one we deserve.
Grey1
I just wondered how crazy the box office would have turned out if Barbie had been packaged with Bond instead of Oppenheimer. And going from there, I mean, if somebody had established a "Bond, Barbie Bond" challenge where you had to watch Bond twice around Barbie to be egligble for a social media post...
Marty Sliva
Fixed! Appreciate the correction.
Alisdair Macpherson
Very good article. Though one correction, you use he/him pronouns when your referring to Grant Morrison but they go by they/them now. An honest mistake I'm sure but I'm hoping you can correct this.
