Christopher Nolan has said it would be “an amazing privilege” to direct a James Bond film.
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While appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Oppenheimer director was asked by host Josh Horowitz if he’d like to try his hand at the iconic spy franchise.
“The influence of those movies in my filmography is embarrassingly apparent. It would be an amazing privilege to do one,” Nolan said. “At the same time, when you take on a character like that you’re working with a particular set of constraints.”
The five-time Oscar nominee went on to stress, however, that any filmmaker attempting to take on the Bond legacy must approach it with the “right attitude”.
“It has to be the right moment in your creative life where you can express what you want to express and really burrow into something within the appropriate constraints because you would never want to take on something like that and do it wrong,” he said.
Nolan added that he felt a similar responsibility when directing his trilogy of Batman films. However, he stressed that if he were to be involved in any potential Bond project, he must be afforded an appropriate level of creative freedom.
“You wouldn’t want to take on a film without being fully committed to what you bring to the table creatively. So as a writer, casting, everything — it’s a full package,” he said. “You’d have to be really needed and wanted in terms of bringing the totality of what you bring to a character. Otherwise, I’m very happy to be first in line to see whatever they do.”
This isn’t the first time Nolan has addressed the possibility of directing a 007 movie. In 2017, the filmmaker told Playboy he would “definitely” make a Bond film and that he keeps an open dialogue with the producers.
“I’ve spoken to the producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson over the years. I deeply love the character, and I’m always excited to see what they do with it,” he said. “Maybe one day that would work out. You’d have to be needed, if you know what I mean. It has to need reinvention; it has to need you. And they’re getting along very well.”
Nolan’s Oppenheimer, charting the creation of the atomic bomb, has now arrived in cinemas. In a five-star review, NME wrote: “Not just the definitive account of the man behind the atom bomb, Oppenheimer is a monumental achievement in grown-up filmmaking.
“For years, Nolan has been perfecting the art of the serious blockbuster – crafting smart, finely-tuned multiplex epics that demand attention; that can’t be watched anywhere other than in a cinema, uninterrupted, without distractions. But this, somehow, feels bigger.”