[COLUMN] Maybe Christopher Nolan Shouldn't Direct a James Bond Movie | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

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.