Tony Gilroy and Steven Soderbergh once pitched a 1960s black-and-white Bond film

The low-budget Bond film that could have been was set in the ’60s and shot in black and white.

Once upon a time in Hollywood—or perhaps more accurately, somewhere between Carnaby Street and Vauxhall Cross—Tony Gilroy and Steven Soderbergh had a vision for James Bond that never left the briefing room.

Gilroy, the writer behind Michael Clayton and the architect of Andor, recently revealed on The Rogue Ones podcast that he and Soderbergh cooked up a “swinging” Bond pitch: a 1960s-set film in black and white, complete with the era’s style, grit, and swagger. It was to be low-budget by Bond standards—$30 million—and helmed by Soderbergh, with Gilroy writing. The villain, Gilroy insists, was a strong one, possibly transposed from another script. But as ever with Bond, the real challenge was control.

Barbara Broccoli, the long-time steward of the Bond franchise, ultimately passed. Soderbergh, who reportedly tried twice to pitch a Bond film, couldn’t persuade the Broccolis to relax their famously tight grip on creative direction. “They just wouldn’t give anybody control,” Gilroy said, a sentiment that echoes past frustrations from filmmakers like Danny Boyle and Christopher Nolan.

The pitch wasn’t just a one-off film. According to sources, Soderbergh floated the idea of a completely separate Bond continuity—a parallel franchise with different actors, a more brutal tone, and a 1960s setting. He even reached out to David Fincher and Quentin Tarantino to bolster the pitch. The Broccolis were said to have been both eager and terrified.

Soderbergh has long flirted with the spy genre. His aborted attempt to adapt The Man From UNCLE with George Clooney shares more than a passing resemblance to the Bond project he and Gilroy envisioned. It’s no surprise then that he wanted Bond stripped of 21st-century polish and dropped into the monochrome shadows of a Cold War London.

With Amazon now holding the keys to Bond’s Aston Martin and a new creative regime in place, the studio is reportedly hearing fresh pitches from directors like Denis Villeneuve, Jonathan Nolan and Edgar Wright. The door that once closed on Gilroy and Soderbergh’s radical reimagining might not remain locked forever.

Would black and white have worked for Bond? It’s a tempting idea—a stark aesthetic for a character born of the Cold War and tailor-made for shadows. But  strip away the colour and you risk losing some of that surface luxury that defines 007’s world. It might have been moody and stylish, but perhaps a Bond film needs more than monochrome to make it sing.

Source: The