Soderbergh On His Failed James Bond Pitch

Nearly twenty years ago, talk swirled that Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh had conversations with Bond franchise chief Barbara Broccoli about potentially doing a James Bond movie.

It was 2008, Bond had been successfully rebooted with Daniel Craig’s “Casino Royale” in 2006, and the follow-up “Quantum of Solace” was arriving in cinemas that Fall.

From what has been garnered over the years, it was little more than pitch on Soderbergh’s part – nothing remotely close to negotiations – and nothing ever came of it.

Now, in a recent The Playlist interview while out promoting “The Christophers,” Soderbergh has spoken more about it and confirmed he pitched Broccoli two separate times and both were fairly ambitious and in both circumstances, it involved him trying to do “a hardcore auteur, low-budget period Bond”. He says:

“I had pitched in 2008 the idea to Barbara Broccoli of a parallel franchise. Set in the 1960s, R-rated, violent, sexy. Fictional backstory to real historical events, different actor, different universe.

[It would be] cheaply made, where you get people like me, who are interested in that approach, to do one of these things. It’s just another lane that exists totally separate from the normal Bond movies. They were intrigued. But didn’t move forward.”

That project matches one that was spoken about by “Andor” creator and “Michael Clayton” filmmaker Tony Gilroy, who revealed he had been pegged to write a Bond pitch after he and Soderbergh came up with it.

A few years later, after “Skyfall” was released in 2012, Sodebergh’s second pitch came around:

“So, when I got back into the conversation [a few years] later, then I was pitching a twofer. Which was, ‘Yeah, I’ll do the contemporary extravaganza. But I also want to do the other one, after. Like, I want to do both.’ To be fair to them, it really was a twofer. I was like, I want to do both, I have ideas for both. But it’s all or nothing. You’ve either got to do both of them, you can’t have just one or the other, and I think that was just – that was a little aggressive.”

Of course, last year Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson ceded creative control of the franchise to Amazon MGM Studios, with Denis Villeneuve directing and Amy Pascal and David Heyman producing the next film.

Would Soderbergh be interested in revisiting the idea? He’s very much a believer in things having a time and a place: “Because these are zeitgeist-y things, movies, you know? And so, it’s just impossible for me not to feel like that was the time to do it. Now is the time to do something else.”