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There are what we’ll refer to, as we must, as “reports” – or, more accurately, one report from the film blog World of Reel – that Christopher Nolan is “in very serious contention to direct the next James Bond instalment”. Some particularly giddy kippers have suggested that Nolan is developing a Bond film and its sequel.
Nobody knows anything as yet. This might very well be absolute nonsense. But a Christopher Nolan Bond movie is, for a certain type of film fan, something like nirvana. The only way things could get better is if it were somehow set on a British Navy ship at the height of the Age of Sail. The idea that there are Boy Films and Lady Films is dumb, but if there were such things as Boy Films, a Nolan Bond movie would probably be the most Boy Film of all Boy Films.
Not that I wouldn’t also flip my shit if Nolan did a Bond film. I love the guy. The Nolan era we’re in now is the one which started with Dunkirk, where his longstanding interest in messing with space and time is very much subordinate to his longstanding interest in movies where people in nice suits walk through nice buildings. Tenet leaned especially heavily on the Bond tropes, and a frisson of a very neo-Bond paranoia has started to colour much of Nolan’s stuff.
And not, either, that Nolan doing a Bond film isn’t something Nolan hasn’t thought about before. “I love those movies,” Nolan told the Happy Sad Confused podcast earlier this year, during the promo rounds for Oppenheimer. “The influence of those movies in my filmography is embarrassingly apparent. It would be an amazing privilege to do one. At the same time, when you take on a character like that you’re working with a particular set of constraints. So it’s a kind of responsibility I also felt very much when taking on Batman.”
Nolan has also hinted that he’d want to be in control of far more than most Bond directors tend to get to control, possibly including casting his Bond. “You wouldn’t want to take on a film without being fully committed with what you bring,” he said on that podcast.
It’d be a Bond film which smelled of deep, rich mahogany, and while it wouldn’t be a particularly sexy Bond film – you’ll have seen and been entirely unaroused by the Oppenheimer sauce – it’d more than make up for that with the gadgets. Maybe one would send Bond back in time. And perhaps we’d get a villain with a more inventive take on destroying everything Bond holds dear that .
And so on and so on. The Nolan-Bond equation comes up now and then, and even more often now that the slate has been wiped clean for a hard reboot of the kind which Nolan would presumably be more inclined to get involved in. There’s no more beef to this new round of speculation and misty-eyed dreamcasting than there was last time around, but it’s fun to talk about in the slack time between No Time To Die and the first stirrings of Bond 26. And boy oh boy, is there going to be a lot more slack time to fill.
The other reason Nolan keeps coming up in the Bond conversation is, I think, less to do with what kind of film he might make than what having someone like Nolan – one of the last auteurs, even if he’s a box office-friendly one – attached to the Bond franchise would represent for both parties.
Bond films are a class of their own. You might have compared No Time To Die against, say, A Quiet Place Part 2 or Black Widow when it came out in 2021, but as soon as any time passes you rank it among the other Bond movies instead. A Nolan Bond film, though, would be an opportunity to make something which hasn’t existed for a very long time, if ever: a Bond film that purposefully stands on its own.
We all love Casino Royale as a hard reboot which kicked against some of its flabbier, sillier predecessors (sorry Pierce you’re the best) and Skyfall was an enjoyably throwback kind of Bond movie. All things considered, No Time To Die was a fittingly epic end to Daniel Craig's tenure. But there’s a lingering sense that while making pots and pots of money is all very well, the Bond fandom wants its hero’s films to be taken more seriously come award season. The Craig era movies took somewhere around $3.94 billion at the box office. But after Marvel saw Black Panther nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, it felt like a sea change for pop cinema. For Marvel fans it was the ultimate sign that their thing was legit, whatever Martin Scorsese and Ken Loach thought about it. No Oscar nomination has been forthcoming in the big categories for Bond, though, despite tapping up directors with their own wins (Sir Sam Mendes) or hotly tipped for the future (Cary Fukunaga), and layering in more hefty, serious emotional stakes.
It might sound silly to wish that the most beloved and successful movie franchises of them all could need any more movie establishment respect, but I think Nolan Bond film has become the MI6 white whale for that reason. Nolan is uniquely placed for the job: a British, Bond-positive, studio-friendly director who never compromises, is full of interesting ideas, and wouldn’t do the character dirty. But he’s also a signifier of what some fans want Bond to be. Bringing together Brand Nolan and Brand Bond would create an even more colossal cultural event with the clout, ambition and cineaste respect to make Bond stand on his own two feet.
