I had a chance to see Quantum of Solace last night, and while I didn’t enjoy it as much as Casino Royale (is Daniel Craig already wearing out his welcome as the new Bond?) it does have some spectacular action sequences. However, if the Blonde Bond wasn’t enough to shake up the franchise for long, what could happen if Bond were re-imagined by some of Hollywood’s top filmmakers? There are a lot of different things that could be done with the character if someone were given free rein to reinterpret Bond as they saw fit.

After the jump, we imagine the five hypothetical films that five wildly different working filmmakers might make if Bond were put in their hands. We’ve taken a bit of license here (although not a license to kill), so use your imagination with the Bonds that could be, no matter how extremely loosely interpreted.

Quentin Tarantino

James “Double Ought” Bond, played by Sam Elliot, is a cantankerous old coot who lives deep in South Texas and is long retired from a life of military service. A band of young upstarts comes looking for him, convinced that a legend they’ve heard is true: at one time Bond worked deep undercover in a Black Ops unit. Seems like this has been spread around as local legend, and after a few drinks too many at a local watering hole, they want to find out if it’s true.

Bond denies everything, but when one of them gets a bit rough he takes him down in seconds, which surprises the others. They turn tail and run, but the next day one of the quietest of the bunch, a young girl about fifteen years old (Megan Fox) tells him she wants to learn how to do what he does. He tells her what she can go do with herself, and slams the door in her face. She sets up camp in front of his old house and refuses to leave. After several days of this, she passes out from lack of food and water and wakes up in a bed in his spare room with a note on the dresser “Up at 6 am.”

He starts training her, somewhat reluctantly, but eventually starts to get into it. As old and grizzled as he is, she’s young and spunky and they compliment each other. After a few months, she’s gotten pretty good at hand to hand combat, firearms, stealth work, and a handful of other skills it would take someone years to learn in the army. She plans to enroll at West Point and has high hopes for a future, and Bond is almost like a proud father…until the next morning, when he finds her dead in his backyard. It seems that Bond’s old nemesis (Powers Boothe) from the Cold War days has found him. Thinking he’s killed his daughter, he lures Bond into a cat and mouse game that leaves the small town full of dead bodies and leads up to one of the bloodiest gunfights this side of Peckinpah.

Wes Anderson

Somewhere in Cairo in the 1930s, a man named Jim Bond (Jason Schwartzman) roams the back alleys and dark backroom bars plying his trade as a confidence man. The trouble is, he’s not very good at it. In fact, he’s so bad that he’s the guy other con men hire on the downlow, so his failed schemes will distract their mark while they clean them out, with Bond never the wiser. He thinks that he’s a popular guy around town, as he plays the jester for everyone else.

Bond decides to start playing out of his league, and works up an elaborate ruse where he pretends to be a spy in the British secret service. He gets so into it that he forgets that he’s supposed to con people with this act, and he starts spending all of his time in the role with a backstory that gets more elaborate every day. He catches the attention of a real spy (Bill Murray) who decides to amuse himself with Bond, and in turn take some of the heat off of himself.

Bond becomes so wrapped up in his story, so convincing in his portrayal, that people he has known for years start wondering if maybe he’s been duping them all along. After all, he’s a con man, right? Soon enough, enemy agents start paying attention to him as well, much to the delight of the actual spy. However, the girl who serves Bond his coffee every day is the only true innocent in this story, and she unwittingly unravels everything by accident. The real spy is exposed as a cheat, a liar, and a coward, the enemy agents don’t get the secrets they were after, and somehow Bond is crowned the hero in the end.

Michel Gondry

Zhames Bhond (Ewan McGregor), a pop star in Britain’s most famous prog-rock band in the late 1970s, has played keyboards for his entire life. However, at the height of his popularity, he decides he never wants to play music again. He abandons his mansion, gives away most of his fortune, parks his many cars in alleyways around the city and leaves the doors open with the keys inside. Without a word to the press or his bandmates, he packs a small backpack and leaves town, forever.

Taking a small steamship to Greece, he meets a man (Mark Ruffalo) who has been a fisherman his entire life. He tells the man that he symbolically wants to trade lives with him. He pulls out a small Casiotone keyboard from his pack and presents it to the man, who in turn hands over his aging fishing rod. Once they reach the island, they go their separate ways. After two days of trying to fish in a remote cove, battered by wind and rain, Zhames tells himself that this is the dumbest idea he’s ever had. What was he thinking?

He tries to return home to England, only to discover that he doesn’t have enough money to travel. When he wires his accountant for the money, the accountant replies. “Who are you?” He asks several locals if they’ve heard of him, but they shake their heads. Distraught, he sets out in search of the fisherman he met on the boat on the way over, but runs into constant dead ends. Several days later, still turning up nothing, he spends the last of his money on a bowl of soup in a corner cafe. The old black and white television is tuned to MTV… and there’s the fisherman! Only he’s playing keyboards in a fabulously decadent prog-rock video.

Stunned, Zhames tries to find out what’s going on and how the world got turned topsy-turvy. Along the way he starts to question if he was ever a keyboard player at all. Did he imagine it all? Did he make up his entire life? By the end of the film, after Zhames has been spying on the fisherman / keyboard player for a long while, it’s unclear which reality is the real one. Did Zhames make it up to escape his own reality? Or was he actually that person at one point? There’s no clear answer for the audience, who discuss the film for days, weeks, and months after seeing it.

Zack Snyder, Frank Miller, and Robert Rodriguez

Against all odds — and with the aid of a massively overblown budget — Warner Bros. is able to secure the rights to Thunderball, which was already remade as Never Say Never Again, and turn the plot into a third Bond film, Never Say Thunderball Again. Pushing the envelope even further, the studio makes the extremely strange move of naming three directors to the project, Snyder, Miller, and Rodriguez. They plan on offsetting the budget by shooting the movie entirely on a green screen stage, with everyone, even the actors, being created digitally. Sean Connery agrees to lend his voice the likeness of Bond, which resembles an amalgam of himself, Roger Moore, and George Lazenby.

As press begins to steamroll on the project, everyone suddenly wants their names attached to it. Former Bonds Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan sign on to provide the voices of other characters in the movie, but Daniel Craig openly disses the project in public, claiming that his next Bond movie will make this one irrelevant. In the same speech, he also calls a small child a wanker, and his popularity plummets with the public. His upcoming movies evaporate, and he reluctantly signs on to Layer Cake 2: The Frosting in order to make ends meet. Meanwhile, the triumvirate of directors power through their movies, eschewing the press.

At Comic-Con in San Diego, two years after the project was first announced, rabid fans are shown a few teaser images from the movie, and one extremely short scene. The internet goes nuts with illegal bootleg photos and video of the event, and several popular web portals become choked with news about “James Bond Ultra,” as the fans are calling it. Everyone swear that it’ll be the greatest thing since the wheel. Since fire. Since the creation of existence itself. Merchandise partners sign on, prequel graphic novels are written, replica prop weapons that retail for $599.95 are mass produced.

As the world begins to reach a fever pitch, clamoring for this movie more and more, riots happen in public. “More!” cry the crowds, “Please! Just another single image! A teaser poster! A few lines of leaked script! Anything!” But nothing comes out of the silent studio. A popular blog proclaims, “In a marketing movie of pure genius, probably based on an idea I gave them, Warner Bros. has decided not to release any further information about James Bond Ultra, and I couldn’t be happier. This movie will sell itself when it comes out, it doesn’t need to do it now. I’ll certainly be there when the tickets go on sale for what will prove to be the motion picture event of all time!!!!!!!!!! — Harry Knowles, Ain’t It Cool News.”

Release dates approach and are missed, rumors of the film being pushed back start to circulate. “No, that’s not true!” proclaim a press release from Warners. “The directors just need more time to perfect this titanic accomplishment in cinematic history.” Advance tickets are printed, souvenir handbooks are circulated, and a viral marketing campaign cleverly advertises the film using very obscure Cracker Jack prizes and forms of Sanksrit writing hidden inside cans of Ro-Tel Tomatoes. Plush toys, action figures, and video games are shopped around in catalogs, a new clothing line based on the film appears in trendy stores. Everyone on the planet wants this movie, and they want it now.

But then, something strange happens. Zack Snyder is seen leaving the studio early one day, shielded from photographers by a man holding a jacket up. Was that a glimpse of a black eye? What’s going on? Reports of a fight breaking out during filming are whispered around the internet. Warner Bros. announces that they are shutting down the film temporarily to “regroup.” What’s going on? Days turn into weeks, and weeks into months. Soon, two years have passed, and the movie that was going to shatter history at the speed of light never materializes. Film cans are stored, hard drives archived, and offices cleaned out and locked up. People start calling it “Warners’ Folly,” and it soon replaces Heaven’s Gate as a debacle in common vernacular.

Many years later, during an informal interview for Rodriguez’ new feature film Bedhead II: Cowlick From Hell, a reporter asks Rodriguez whatever happened to the James Bond project. Rodriguez looks at him for a long while, and then removes his lapel microphone. “This interview is over,” he says, just before walking out. This is more or less the same reaction anyone encounters when they ask one of The Three about the movie. Executives will turn to doublespeak when someone asks them about it, or try to lighten the mood by saying something like, “Wow, we sure know how to spend money, don’t we?”

Eventually, memories grow dim, and people forget about it. It becomes the answer to obscure trivia questions in board games, and “Whatever Happened To?” posts in the blogosphere. An older Pierce Brosnan eventually reprises his role as Bond in a fairly straightforward action film, and no one mentions James Bond Ultra ever again.

Diablo Cody (because it’s inevitable that she’ll direct at some point.)

Jimmie Bond (Olivia Thirlby) is having an extremely hard time adjusting to life in a new high school after her mother has remarried and they’ve moved to Cleveland. Distrusting everyone, Jimmie starts jotting down every thought, idea, observation, and whim in a massive journal she carries with her at all times. It’s not long before she’s labeled pretentious and annoying by just about every clique in school, including the jocks, nerds, dweebs, debutantes, and academics. Even the drama club doesn’t want to associate with her.

Soon she starts skipping school and exploring the city, only finding solace deep inside the hull of the USS Cod, a decommissioned WWII submarine docked at the Cleveland Wharf as a museum. She sneaks off of a tour one day, and crawls through hatches and crawlspaces to the very back of the ship, and scribbles all day in her notebook until the lights go out. She’s able to sneak off of the ship, but starts returning daily and eventually has built herself a nice little fort, unbeknownst to the guards stationed there.

She begins to establish a daily routine of leaving home, exploring the city, and returning to the sub until early evening and writing up until sunset when she heads home after “band practice” (as she tells her parents). They become suspicious since they never see her practice or bring home sheet music, so in a panic she visits the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to try and pick out which instrument she’ll fake playing. There she runs into another malcontent, Felix (Michael Cera), who is trying to become the world’s best air guitarist, and frequently visits the museum to watch videos of the greats and find his inspiration.

Jimmie and Felix strike up a clumsy friendship, and eventually she takes him to her secret submarine hideout. During a tender moment, she loses her virginity to him while guards and tour groups pass mere feet from them. As they stumble out of the sub after a postcoital nap, bleary-eyed and wild-haired, they head home, where Jimmie realizes her notebook isn’t in her bag. She sneaks out after her parents to go bed and she sneaks back onto the submarine only to find it isn’t there either. She falls asleep on Felix’s jacket by accident, still deep inside the boat. She wakes up startled and returns home the next day, only to find out that Felix did have her notebook by accident, and he’d left it in the mailbox at her house… where her mother found it.

Mom freaks out and tries to have Jimmie checked into therapy after reading everything she’s written about her classmates, lying about being in school, her stepfather, and even herself. She’s worried that she’s suicidal and unhinged. Locking herself in her room, Jimmie sneaks out the window and finds Felix. She wants to run away with him, which terrifies him. He can’t support either of them, and has no idea where they’d go or what they’d do. Disheartened and disillusioned, Jimmie realizes that she can’t rely on someone else to save her… she has to do it herself.

She returns home and has a heart to heart with her mother, and she agrees to at least talk to a therapist once. Maybe. She starts going back to school, for real this time, and writes in her notebook, “Maybe it’s time I tried turning the page and reading instead of skipping straight to the end.” She puts a rubber band around the notebook and shoves it deep into her bag. She feels naked without it, but decides to try life without it. No more spying on everyone and writing everything down, for once.

(I might have gotten a bit carried away with this one. Apologies to Diablo Cody and everyone else mentioned above. For the most part.)