Amazon MGM announced Wednesday that Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve will direct the next James Bond movie.VALERIE MACON/AFP/Getty Images
Denis Villeneuve has already made his James Bond movie. In fact, he’s made several.
While Hollywood was rocked late Wednesday by the news that the Québécois filmmaker will direct the next 007 film – making Villeneuve easily the highest-profile auteur to take on a Bond film in, arguably, forever – the announcement makes a perfect sense, too. After all, Villeneuve’s masterful filmography feels, in more ways than one, thoroughly Bond-coded.
What is Sicario if not a movie about secret government forces facing impossible odds in a foreign land? The director’s psychodrama Enemy focuses on a man battling duelling, dangerous sides of his persona, a predicament familiar to every 007. Villeneuve’s Prisoners dug deep into the nature of good and evil, and what happens when men convince themselves that the pain they’re inflicting upon others is justified for some kind of greater cause (a mentality not dissimilar to the motives of, say, SPECTRE chief Blofeld.) And Villeneuve’s Dune films? They can be viewed as palace-intrigue thrillers writ large, with the halls of MI6 substituted for the sands of Arrakis.
Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, known for acclaimed titles such as Dune and Blade Runner 2049, has been confirmed by Amazon MGM Studios as the director of the next James Bond film, the studio announced Wednesday.
Reuters
Okay, some of these comparisons are admittedly stretches wider and longer than Bond’s multigenerational lifespan. But what is undeniable is that across his remarkable career – his latter works produced by his wife Tanya Lapointe, who is joining the new Bond venture as an executive producer – Villeneuve has displayed an intense fascination with the motives of those who believe they are on the right side of history, only to have their mettle tested and assumptions challenged. Add in a few gadgets and some smouldering love scenes, and that’s the template of essentially every Bond movie ever made.
Just as importantly, Villeneuve has proven himself to be a true student of action cinema. He finds the spine of a set piece – a slash of flesh, a blast of fire – and stretches it into something new. The filmmaker is as skilled at staging gigantic battles as he is in intimate brawls, his attention to detail – to the pure and brute physicality and motion of violence – is raw and enrapturing. It is a grand-yet-grounded sensibility that will be essential to bringing Bond into a bold new big-screen era.
Since the Broccoli family, the property’s long-time stewards, sold the franchise’s rights to Amazon MGM earlier this year, there have been whispers in the press that the house that Jeff Bezos built will surely sully the Ian Fleming brand. Yet the hiring of Villeneuve signals that Amazon is trying something new and energizing – while also trying to break free of the notoriously tight creative controls placed upon Bond by the Broccolis, the kind of rules and regulations (Bond must always be British, white and get the girl) that kept more independent-minded filmmakers away from the franchise for decades.
This is why the Bond series has been largely a home for journeymen filmmakers – guns-for-hire who sometimes got away with blazing their pistols a little more wildly (Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale, Sam Mendes’s Skyfall) than others.
While the past few months have been filled with rumours of just who might step into the director’s chair next – including Christopher Nolan (who has already made his Bond film with Tenet) and Edgar Wright (whose British bona fides helped offset the fact that he’s never handled such a large-scale production) – there was skepticism that any name-brand director would want the headache of such a tricky property as Bond. Especially Villeneuve, who alongside Nolan and James Cameron just might be the most respected and sought-after big-studio filmmaker of today.
But that argument ignores the fact that, ever since entering the Hollywood game following his French-language era, Villeneuve has excelled at resuscitating storied properties that were deemed either too complicated or too monumental to touch. Dune and Blade Runner weren’t exactly easy assignments, and yet the filmmaker aced both.
Once Villeneuve finishes the third Dune film – which isn’t exactly around the corner – attention will surely turn to who the director might cast as his very own Bond. Parsing his most frequent collaborators reveals few candidates: Timothée Chalamet isn’t old or muscular enough, nor is he British (the one Broccoli-era mandate that MGM wouldn’t dare try to alter). Also failing the nationalist test is fellow Villeneuve regular Jake Gyllenhaal.
While Dave Bautista (three Villeneuve movies and counting) could play a decent Oddjob, there doesn’t seem to be all that many immediate bad-guy candidates in the mix, either. (Although I’d be curious to see Villeneuve buddy Josh Brolin play a world-weary Felix Leiter, Bond’s long-time CIA ally.)
One suggestion, before MGM and Villeneuve start to head down their own creative paths: Add a little Québécois flair to everyone’s favourite spy series. It wouldn’t have to be much, either. Maybe Q could be from Montreal, on loan to MI6 from the Sûreté du Québec, the R&D guru every so often offering James a cold and frosty pint of La fin du monde. Théodore Pellerin, get your agent on the phone, s’il vous plaît.
