Empire have the quotes from Pierce Brosnan as he leaves the franchise for good, and it looks like he wasn’t happy about it. I’ve read rumours which claimed that he wanted to do the fifth and that he was told no. They were going to make it with another actor, someone they hadn’t even begun to look for.
“Bond is gone,” the 51 year old actor tells us in the new issue of Empire. “Over. Done. Dusted. My contract was for four movies, they [EON Productions] invited me back for a fifth and I said yes, then somewhere in the middle of negotiations they changed their minds.”
To me this makes no sense at all. I mean Brosnan is the archetypal Bond, I would even go so far to say he’s in the top three Bonds of all time, although I’m not going to name my top three, I’ll wait and see what you all come back with. Now if one of the best Bond’s ever comes to you as his contract is running out and says he’d like to do another movie, and you have no other actor lined up and the franchise is running well enough to produce another movie quite quickly, what would you do?
I know what I would do and that would be to sign him up for at least another movie, or keep him on option for more than one. Use the filming time to search for the next Bond, and if there isn’t, use him for another. It makes good sense to me, there’s nothing wrong with Brosnan doing another, he hardly looks his age does he?
I can’t fathom this decision at all. However, with Quentin Tarantino openly speaking about his desire to remake Casino Royale (returning to the original text) wouldn’t this be a perfect opening? Brosnan himself has even said that he would be interested in bringing this to the screen as it goes back to the roots of the Bond character, Check out the story at Empire, but the key quotes are below.
“Tarantino said that he would ditch the high-action antics of the past few Bond movies in favour of a return to the more character-driven spy plots of the first few 007 films”
“Pierce Brosnan, speaking a couple of weeks ago to Chud.com, also expressed a strong desire to get back to character, and professed an admiration for Casino Royale as “somewhat the blueprint for the Bond character. If you go to that book, you find out more about James Bond than in any of the other books.””
““The producers now seem to be in a malaise of confusion as to how to go forward.” He [Brosnan] said that he still wants to be the next Bond, and finished by saying of the Bond producers, “They know where to find me if they want me for the next one.”“
Still makes no sense to me. What would be the hunger for the next Bond movie to be a return to the origins of the book character, with Tarantino as screenplay writer and director and Brosnan as Bond? To me that sounds fantastic! Do it!
I know Bond is cheesy, but the movies are some cracking entertainment, and this would just bump up the level a notch higher. Perhaps that is what they are afraid of, the formula right now is quite easy, and bettering that will mean that future movies will be gauged against this one. I don’t know. Still sounds like they are missing a golden opportunity.
