343 replies to this topic

[TQB]

Do you think there will ever be an American director?
If not i guess i should quit film school now.

[talos7]

Let's see how Mission Impossible IV turns out, but I think Brad Bird will be sucessfull in live action and would be a great choice.

[univex]

Sam Mendes...

...oh wait

[Harmsway]

A list of not-so-reasonable choices:

John Boorman - A director responsible for classic and not-so-classic films, Boorman's films are notable for their general weirdness, something that has been both the root of Boorman's success (see the oddly ethereal, otherworldly POINT BLANK) and his failures (the off-puttingly preposterous, dumb ZARDOZ). But weirdness is a quality that's been missing from the Bond franchise for too long. I want to see a genuinely strange Bond film again. Bring Boorman on board, and it's likely we'll get that quality back. He's perhaps a bit too old for Bond now, but, in the plus column, he does have experience with big, studio pictures (EXCALIBUR), and has turned in a spy thriller (THE TAILOR OF PANAMA).

Luca Guadagnino - I AM LOVE may not be a perfect film, but it's so sumptuous and lavish that it shows up any of the Bond franchise's recent attempts at glamor or sensuality. Guadagnino tends to improvise when he makes a film, so he's perhaps not cut out to helm a studio picture of the scale of the Bond franchise, but I gotta admit, I salivate at the thought of a pared-down, small-budget Bond thriller with Guadagnino at the helm.

Nicolas Winding Refn - A hit-and-miss director, but one who, not unlike Boorman, has something of a taste for weirdness. His newest film, DRIVE, is one of the hits of this year's Cannes film festival, supposedly a lean, mean, driving flick that critics are comparing to BULLITT. Given that he's crossing over into big-budget studio filmmaking with his remake of LOGAN'S RUN, he might not be such an outlandish choice after all.

[Captain Tightpants]

Here's a crazy idea: Ben Affleck.

As anyone who has seen PEARL HARBOUR, DAREDEVIL, GIGLI and ARMAGEDDON knows, he's not a very good actor. But he is a very good director. A lot of people want Bond to escape melodrama and instead concentrate on being tightly-plotted thrillers, and Affleck could be the man to deliver - THE TOWN in particular accomplished just that. Admittedly, I haven't seen GONE BABY GONE, but I've heard good things about it, too. In fact, both films are rated at over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. His track record when it comes to acting might be filled with stinkers, but he certainly appears to have a lot of talent on the other side of the camera. His next film is apparently called ARGO and will revolve around the CIA staging the production of a science fiction film in Iran to save a group of hostages, which sounds like a very good premise. If it's as good as THE TOWN and GONE BABY GONE, I think Affleck will have certainly made a case for himself as a director of thrillers, and would be a good candidate for a Bond film.

[Capsule in Space]

Vic Armstrong.

[Captain Tightpants]

It needs to be said: if TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY lives up to its promise, then Tomas Alfredson should be considered.

[007jamesbond]

Maybe I am crazy but would a female director work for Bond 24? or shold we just stick to male directors....there are some great female directors but would one fit the role of a director for Bond?

[x007AceOfSpades]

Maybe I am crazy but would a female director work for Bond 24? or shold we just stick to male directors....there are some great female directors but would one fit the role of a director for Bond?

A female did direct a war movie and that movie was called The Hurt Locker and her name is Kathryn Bigelowe. She did handle the suspense, action, drama, emotions very well. Her earlier film Point Break was fantastic and so was K-19: The Widowmaker. She's doing a new war movie with Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom, Warrior, The Thing) about the ten year manhunt for Osama Bin Laden. I wouldn't mind her directing a Bond film.

[talos7]

Let's see how Mission Impossible IV turns out, but I think Brad Bird will be sucessfull in live action and would be a great choice.

I posted this in June. Now more than ever I want to see Brad Bird direct a Bond film and his long time composer, Michael Giacchino do the score!

[The Shark]

Let's see how Mission Impossible IV turns out, but I think Brad Bird will be sucessfull in live action and would be a great choice.

I posted this in June. Now more than ever I want to see Brad Bird direct a Bond film and his long time composer, Michael Giacchino do the score!

No thanks. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III and 4 had incredibly dull, lifeless, generic scores. Even worse than David Arnold.

[TGO]

I have only one choice. Christopher Nolan. Give him anything he asks for.

[Kronsteen]

It needs to be said: if TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY lives up to its promise, then Tomas Alfredson should be considered.

I have yet to see it, but I'm thinking in the same way. If "Tinker..." indeed is as good as some reviews point out, then he might be an interesting choice. He is a true filmmaker in every way, and he would be the second director not to have English as mother-tounge... should they try that again?

[TCK]

I have only one choice. Christopher Nolan. Give him anything he asks for.

Yes !

[DominicGreene]

ME. I WILL direct a Bond film. No matter what it takes.

For now, I think the director of Der Untergang (Downfall) Oliver Hirschbiegel would make a great director. He has amazing artistic skills, and a sense of silence, which many directors today can't grasp.

[Jose]

Danny Boyle
Matthew Vaughn

However outlandish it may seem, I would personally love to see Terry Gilliam direct a Bond movie. Of course, we all know that ain't gonna happen.

[Odd Jobbies]

NICOLAS WINDING REFN
Directed Drive, as well as Valhalla Rising and the amazing Bronson starring Tom Hardy (the most exciting, talented actor around - what a villain he'd make...)

JOHN MAYBURY
Directed Craig superbly in Love is The Devil. His time travel drama The Jacket was complex yet thrilling and entertaining and he's worked on HBO's excellent, lavish dramas The Borgias and Rome.

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN
For sure, whatever short comings Inception may have had, it was a thrilling spectacle and Bond is all about spectacle. And The Dark Knight was a modern classic and makes him easily the most exciting, obvious and top choice. If The Dark Knight Rises again delivers the box office along with the critical treasures that it's predecessor bestowed, then Inception's critics will be muted by the mass loving of his final Batman chapter and Nolan will be at the very top of every Producer's 'must hire....' list.
Would be great to see him bring perhaps Gary Oldman or Tom Hardy, both of whom he's work with in a number of films, to Bond.

DANNY BOYLE
His value shot up with Slumdog, but really he's always been an exciting prospect with any material, since Shallow Grave and the modern classic Trainspotting.
However, Boyle's 2007 sci-fi movie Sunshine exposed a tendency to get lost up his own jaxy when given too many toys to play with (much like Inception did for Nolan) Sadly Boyle's sci-fi epic loses focus halfway through when it muddies the tone by hack-handedly introducing 'panto' phylosophical darkness into Sunshine's spiritual journey into the light. The broadly generic slasher-movie strokes employed by Garland's script and its cheesy dialogue encourages Boyle to turn his beautifully atmospheric and tense 21st century ode to 2001 A Space Oddessy into a rip-off of John Carpenters' masked master-work Halloween [However, watch Alien to see how keeping the metaphysical pretensions in the subtext can allow such a genre mash-up to work]. Alas, Sunshine's pace and genre switch, instead of meld giving us action, but no soul in the finale of this spiritual quest.
All of this is probably a moot point since, as Boyle himself suggested some time back, he already turned down the chance to direct Quantum of Solace, so he's most likely still uninterested. But, along with Nicolas Winding Refn, Boyle's Bond would be the most interesting prospect in terms of a new and unique visceral sensibility coming to the franchise.

STEPHEN FREARS
He was up to do the Jinx spin-off, but thankfully that didn't happen! Though i'm sure Frears would've made a cracking job of it, the whole concept was fundamentally floored, and wholly unnecessary. However, what this does illustrate is that Frears has a working-relationship with Eon and a willingness to play a part in the franchise.
Frears has a CV second to none with the likes of The Grifters and Dangerous Liaisons. He's worked with some of greatest actors (very important to the rebooted Bond), including Oldman, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Anjelica Houston, Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Terence Stamp, Jim Broadbent and the best of the best Daniel Day-Lewis. With Alumni like that to possibly call upon Frears would be quite a catch.

MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM
The man can direct anything, he's a cinematic genius. Drama, comedy, documentary. He knows his politics (a useful component in post 9/11 Bond) and he knows how to edit and pace and above all engage his audience.
I won't bore you with yet another list, i'll just let his CV do the talking:
Michael Winterbottom - IMDb

JONATHAN GLAZER (my 'dark horse' entry)
He made one the best movies of all time (IMHO) with Sexy Beast...
It's the joint-best British gangster movie, ever - even better than The Long Good Friday and up there with Get Carter.
Sexy Beast contains probably cinema's most intense, disturbing villain performance by Ben Kingsley. Compare his relentlessly aggressive, paranoid, unpredictable characterization to Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, or DeNiro's Al Capone in The Untouchables, or again DeNiro's Max Cady in Cape Fear, or any other villain for that matter and for my money Kingsley's Don Logan always comes out on top; he's that kind of damaged sociopath that is at once pure cinema and all too real and maybe just around the corner...
Of course the lion's share of the credit must usually go to the actor, but also much must go to the director for knowing how to manage and guide such a performance throughout the long, painful, often delayed and frustrated duration of a movie shoot. Directing a great performance is about knowing when to leave well alone as much as it's about interjecting at the right time with the right words - it's very hard to get it right and very easy to get it wrong!
And as if directing such stunning performances were not enough, Glazer knows better than anyone how to shoot beautiful cinema having made many of the ads and music promos we now consider classics, eg. the b/w Guinness ad involving white stallions joining a line surfers riding a wave to the heavy base sound of the band Leftfield. Aesthetically Glazer has very few equals...in the history of filmmaking...
The reason for him the dark horse of my selection is that he's not made a movie in 8 years! But as i type, Glazer is shooting sic-fi feature Under The Skin starring Scarlett Johansoon, so if that goes well he could be back in contention for the coveted jobs, such as Bond has now become (my fingers are crossed for him).

An important, often overlooked criteria for a Bond Director is the acting talent He or She can attract and might draw upon - just look at the phenominal cast list Sam Mendes has built for Skyfall. In the past Bond has been strictlly an action/adventure prospect and so only ever lent towards a big name in the villain role and a director who could manage a complex action shooting schedule. But now with a critically acclaimed and dedicated thesp in the lead role we suddenly have a long cue of names wishing to be apart of it and a short list of directors who can not only handle the action, but must now be able to direct strong dialogue, paint complex realistic characters within equally complex stories. The list we may have drawn up 10 years ago is obsolete and that's a cause to celebrate.

So as long-of-a-shot as it may seem, if Glazer can attract the likes of Johansson and Kingsley for the Bondgirl & villain roles, having shown that he can get truly awe inspiring performances out of them, then Glazer and all of the Directors i've named, are worthy contenders. In the past the problem has been enticing them to take on such a heavily formatted project - no one worth their salt will willingly don a straightjacket - but now thanks to Craig and a better class of writer and Broccoli/Wilson being apparently more focused on the critical qualities and more open to auteurs, any of these guys might sign up!



EDIT: Sorry, almost forgot....

MATTHEW VAUGHAN
He goes from strength to strength - X-men: First Class was better than Bryan Singer's 2 entries and that's a huge compliment. His name is often circulated with Bond and i'm certain that at some point he will most definitely direct one.

Edited by Odd Jobbies, 27 December 2011 - 06:32 PM.

[Melack]

Christopher Nolan would be a dream come true for me. My favorite contemporary writer/director for Bond? Hell yeah! And he obviously loves Bond, you can see it in his movies and he has said it himself. OHMSS is one of his favorite films ever.

No thanks to Danny Boyle or Matt Vaughn. Both very overrated directors in my opinion.

I wouldn't mind seeing Martin Campbell again. Other directors I would love to see direct Bond would be Thomas Alfredsson, Nicolas Winding-Refn and Michael Mann

[Odd Jobbies]

Michael Mann

Now there's an interesting, off-the-wall suggestion.

I think he's the most consistently great director still working. Through Manhunter, The Insider, Heat and Collateral he's shown unparalleled consistency. His movies are at once mainstream and art house, which can only be said the true greats such as Kubrick and Leone.

I can think of fewer exciting cinematic prospects than a Bond movie directed by Mann. However, even his 'poppier' movies, such as Miami Vice (2006), were super-serious, sombre affairs and i have a feeling the franchise will now slowly move away from their gritty rebooting, from thriller to action-adventure. Personally i'll find this a sad, cheapening process, if indeed it happens and think Mann could bring a lot, but it just won't happen IMHO.

But we can dream of a Bond/villain portrayal such as Pacino/DeNiro in Heat, can't we ?

[SecretAgentFan]

I must admit: I think Mann is very overrated. He also seems to love sombre and moody, without having fun at any time - which is not what a Bond film IMO should be like. I think Mann is a kind of one-trick pony.

If you want existential dread I would rather prefer David Fincher who HAS a dark, sinister sense of humor and is a much more versatile visual artist.

[Odd Jobbies]

...I think Mann is a kind of one-trick pony.

You mean like Picasso, Bach, Fleming? Same old stuff over and over...

...I would rather prefer David Fincher

He'd be superb, so long as Eon let him do whatever he wanted, if not you only see Alien 3 to see the mess.

[The Shark]

...I think Mann is a kind of one-trick pony.

You mean like Picasso, Bach, Fleming? Same old stuff over and over...

You're comparing a peddler of glossy, soulless, nihilistic, crime capers like Michael Mann, to those gentlemen?

[Odd Jobbies]

You're comparing a peddler of glossy, soulless, nihilistic, crime capers like Michael Mann, to those gentlemen?

I'm simply suggesting that being a 'one-trick pony' is no bad thing. In fact finding consistent modes or styles to communicate themes and ideas within one's medium is often, as in the examples i gave, a pretty good thing.

Mann is no glossy-hack, he researches his material vigorously, casts bravely and always tells his stories from the POV of his characters, rather than his vanity, as is too often the case when the characters play second-fiddle to the plot, or even just a string of contrived set-pieces).

What can be mistaken for nihilism in Mann's work, if you're not paying attention, is in fact a more truthful rendition of dramatic events. Because he has such a strong eye for tone and architecture it's easy to be blinded by that, but this is just a first impression, there's always a lot more going on beneath the surface; not in terms of plot contrivances, but in terms of the inner lives going on within his nuanced characters. He's often more interested in the effects of dramatic events upon this inner-world, rather than the emotional show-boating other filmmakers lean towards in the larger than life performances they draw, which frankly owe more to the oscars than to real life. But this kind of realism has to be soaked up over the course of the film in intangible ways via tone and pacing.

Without wishing to labour the point i must stress : A nihilist he most certainly ain't !

There's is always a powerful moral core to his films, which would be inexplicable if Mann were a nihilist. They are often laden with themes of good vs. evil and the true weight of the choices we make, particularly in Heat & The Insider. On the contrary, he gives his material far more humanity than is usually seen in such films.

With deft understanding of how a film should sound, as well as look, together with the career high performances he draws/allows from his cast (Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe and Robert DeNiro (who'd not given a decent performance in many years until Heat), he is certainly atop the wish list of many a producer in per session of a new script with greatness sketched between the lines.

Edited by Odd Jobbies, 03 January 2012 - 11:57 PM.

[SecretAgentFan]

He is not a hack, of course, but by saying "one trick pony" I wanted to express my opinion: that he is always doing the same mood, the same style. I like his movies but they always seem to be "work". Also, I always get the feeling that they appear to be deeper and more intelligent than they really are. Just because the PR machine states that Mann is digging deep into details and preparation, it doesn´t mean that this actually makes the film better.

And to return to this topic´s theme: I still think that Mann would be absolutely unsuitable for Bond because he seems to be totally uninterested in a lighter touch.

He could do a good BOURNE film, however...

[Captain Tightpants]

I must admit: I think Mann is very overrated.

I agree. COLLATERAL was decent, but he didn't write and direct it - just the latter. The last decent film that he made was HEAT. THE INSIDER and ALI were fairly anonymous, while MIAMI VICE tried waaaay too hard to be bad (and was symptomatic of the ROBIN HOOD disease where the director takes all the fun out of the original work, thinking that "gritty" and "realistic" is what - read all - audiences want). And I found PUBLIC ENEMIES to be an indecipherable mess since I had no idea who most of the main characters were, given that I'm not American.

[LoveVolpe]

My choices are all people who have either worn Bond influences openly on their sleeves or handled spy stories well in recent projects. Lots of people that have already been said, but still.

DAVID FINCHER: an incredible visual director, can tone things down for PG-13 mass appeal ... and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is a slow-burn detective movie that really works.

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: I love Nolan's movies, and was sold on him as a Bond option in INCEPTION when Leo sneaks around and actually catches the shells spat out by his gun to remain truly silent. We need that kind of attention-to-detail.

MATTHEW VAUGHN: Magneto's following of a paper trail in X-MEN: FIRST CLASS shows the kind of story I loved in early Bond movies, plus tons of people want Fassbender in the role so it's like a preview of things to come.

BRAD BIRD: I was excited for M:I 4 anyway, but when I saw it, I was blown away. The word "fun" cannot be said enough. That movie contains some of the most fun, interesting, ORIGINAL action sequences I have ever seen. Plus, he encourages REAL STUNTS, which is something we need Bond to return to and show off. The Dubai climbing seqeuence in M:I 4 is on par with the car jump in TMWTGG, the ski jump in TSWLM, the tense mountain climb in FYEO, etc.

TOMAS ALFREDSSON: Now, I was hesitant to mention him, because TINKER TAILOR is in many ways an anti-Bond. If I counted correctly, there are three bullets fired in the entire movie, and it is the definition of slooooow. However, the cinematography, art direction, and casting are among the best I have EVER SEEN. I honestly don't think he'd ever do Bond, but I can dream of a world where we see a FRWL-esque spy thriller with his visual style.

[BourneAgainBond]

CHRISTOPER NOLAN: I think a lot of us would agree would be great and a safe bet.
KATHRYN BIGLOW: The 1st female Academy Award winner for Best Director with Hurt Locker. I would like to see the Bond series finally have their first film director.
JON FAVREAU: I could see filming one because now with the introduction of Q, the films may become more tech-based.

[DamnCoffee]

My top picks.

• David Fincher
• The Coen Brothers
• Darren Aronofsky
• Danny Boyle
• Christopher Nolan
• Matthew Vaughn

Edited by Mharkin, 24 February 2012 - 08:24 PM.

[Pussfeller]

I can't even imagine what a Coen Brothers Bond film would be like, but I would pay handsomely to see it. Realistically, I think EON will continue to employ non-American directors. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with American directors, or that they fail to grasp some ineffable British sensibility. It's just that any decent American director will be too expensive, and any cheap one will be inferior to non-American directors who cost the same.

[havok_007]

Gotta be Nolan, aaaaaand with Tom Hardy as the new Bond, aaaaand then I guess Gary Oldman as the villian... ahaha.... ahhhh.