Next James Bond – Christopher Nolan’s one condition for directing the 007 reboot

Christopher Nolan has joked over the years that he’s as big a James Bond fan as Alan Partridge.

The acclaimed director, who returns to the big screen this week with Oppenheimer, has long been a fan favourite to helm 007 given how much the franchise has influenced his own movies from the Dark Knight trilogy to Tenet.

Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the filmmaker said: “I love those movies. The influence of those movies in my filmography is embarrassingly apparent…there’s no attempt to shy away from that.”

Given that the 52-year-old has a current trend of making a movie every three years, now is the perfect time as he releases his latest to consider Bond 26 next.

After all, he previously told Playboy: “You’d have to be needed, if you know what I mean. It has to need reinvention; it has to need you.” Well now’s the time for a reinvention since the franchise is about to be rebooted with a new star, so is he up for it?

Nolan said: “It would be an amazing privilege to do one. At the same time, when you take on a character like that you’re working with a particular set of constraints and so you have to have to right attitude towards that.

“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. It’s the kind of responsibility I thought very much taking on Batman.”

Asked if he’d want to be involved in the casting of the new Bond, Nolan said he’d want to be involved “in everything”. The director then shared his one condition for helming the 007 reboot.

Nolan said: “You wouldn’t want to take on a film without being fully committed to what you bring to the table creatively. So as a writer, casting, everything — it’s a full package.

“You’d have to be really needed and 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.”

Danny Boyle parted ways with the Bond producers on the last film over creative differences, so is Nolan now similarly too big a filmmaker at this point in his career to take on 007, without being frustrated by the franchise’s “constraints?”