Credit: Far Out / Alamy
Sat 1 August 2026 7:00, UK
Next month it will have been five years since we last got to enjoy the adventures of James Bond on the big screen, and at the moment we still don’t know who will next be stepping into Daniel Craig’s dress shoes for the 26th 007 movie.
What we do know is who will be directing it, and that will be Dune’s Denis Villeneuve, which is an exciting appointment because he’s probably in the top five directors in Hollywood at the moment and has made some daring and brilliant films, not least Prisoners and Arrival.
The most ambitious pick would probably have been Christopher Nolan, of course, who is a Bond aficionado that has called the influence of the old films on his own work “embarrassingly apparent” and has in the past tantalisingly said he would be open to sitting in the number-one chair for a future movie.
But who else would be high on the list for a dream Bond director? Well, if you’re talking about critical success, then the Coen brothers would have to factor in somewhere, even if it would be something of a thematic departure for Joel, Ethan or both men. There is an existing link between the Coens and the vodka martini-quaffing super spy, of course, that being Javier Bardem, portrayer of the most pants-soilingly terrifying film bad guy of all time in the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, and Bond’s nemesis Raoul Silva in 2012’s Skyfall, the film that sadly saw the demise of Judi Dench’s ‘M’.
But it seems the idea of the Coen brothers, or rather one of them, directing the most famous undercover agent in history is an unlikely one, at least according to a fellow director, the man behind classics like Children of Men, Gravity and Roma, Alfonso Cuarón.
The Mexican director revealed a couple of years back, “Ages ago, I was offered a Bond film. And I said, ‘Yeah, cool. Maybe Bond. I am going to do one’”.
While he didn’t specifically name which film it would have been, Cuarón added that once the process began, he realised that there would be an entirely separate team from his, which would be used to film action scenes, a development he said he found weird.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
In the end, it took a discussion with a fellow filmmaker to sway his decision, Cuarón explaining, “I was troubled about the idea of doing it. I had dinner with Joel Coen, and I said, ‘Joel, what do you think of Bond?’ And he said, ‘Oh cool, I enjoy Bond’. I said, ‘Would you do a Bond film?’”, to which Coen apparently replied, “It probably falls into the category of a film I want to watch but not do”.
With those words in his ears, Cuarón felt he had no future directing the film and decided to quit the project. As for Joel Coen, he has been relatively quiet in the last few years, his last film as a director being 2021’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, for which Denzel Washington was nominated for an Oscar for ‘Best Actor’.
He is now working on a new movie, however, which has wrapped filming, the intriguing Jack of Spades, which is a gothic mystery set in late 1800s Scotland starring Disclosure Day’s Josh O’Connor and Coens’ favourite Frances McDormand. The film has been delayed for some time and is now likely to be released in 2027.
