Barbie’s been killing it at the box office this weekend, even breaking records, but don’t write off the second-place winner. Oppenheimer also made bank. It made about half of what the Mattel movie made, but an $80.5 million opening for any movie, let alone a three-hour, R-rated downer about the inventor of the world’s most dangerous weapon, is nothing to sneeze at. It proves again that Nolan can get audiences excited about anything. Not that he wouldn’t mind going back to the franchise farm.
As per The Hollywood Reporter, the filmmaker went on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, where he said he’d love to make a Bond movie. After all, he has along history with them.
“The influence of those movies on my filmography is embarrassingly apparent. And so there’s no attempt to shy away from that. I love the films,” Nolan confessed. “You know, it would be an amazing privilege to do one.”
Nolan’s career famously went next level after he radically reinvented the Batman franchise, doubling down on the dourness of the Tim Burton entries while upping the seriousness into the stratosphere. If he ever did a 007 entry, however, he might tone that down a bit. He said that with that series, “you’re working within a particular set of constraints” and he’d have to approach it with the “right attitude.” (Besides, we’ve already had a dour, serious James Bond.)
Not that Nolan is going to follow up the epic panic attack that is Oppenheimer with a spy movie touting plenty of martinis. He can wait.
“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,” Nolan explained.
That said, he’d want artistic freedom should this dream project ever materialize.
“You wouldn’t want to take on a film not fully committed to what you bring to the table creatively. So as a writer, casting, everything, it’s a full package,” Nolan said. “You’d have to be really needed, you’d have to be really 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.”
Should Nolan ever make a Bond movie, there’s a chance it would reunite him with Tenet player Aaron Taylor-Johnson, one of the names floated to succeed Daniel Craig. But again, all this as hypothetical, so you’ll just have to imagine a non-linear 007 adventure that tackles the big issues.
(Via THR)