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File another dream project into the “What If?” File: Andor creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy has revealed that he and Ocean’s Eleven director Steven Soderbergh came close to collaborating on a James Bond movie — and their pitch sounds frustratingly perfect for the spy franchise.

“I think Steven tried twice to get into the Bond business,” Gilroy admitted during a June appearance on The Rogue Ones podcast. “And it sounds to me very much like what they’re doing now is very much what [Steven] was suggesting a long time ago… We wanted to go back to the ’60s and do it in black and white and do Carnaby St. and do the whole thing.”

Had the movie happened, it would have been the first collaboration between Gilroy — who, outside of Andor, is also the writer of the Bourne Identity movies (and director of 2012’s The Bourne Identity), as well as the writer and director of 2007’s acclaimed thriller Michael Clayton — and Soderbergh, who helmed the Ocean’s trilogy, as well as Magic Mike, Logan Lucky, Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich, and a host of critical hits throughout his career.

“I thought it was a really swinging idea, like $30 million [budget], but he couldn’t get them to…they just wouldn’t give anybody control,” Gilroy said with no small amount of regret.

That wasn’t the only time Gilroy and Soderbergh attempted to make Bond together. “The problem with the Bond [franchise] is that they can’t get a good villain that works. In my opinion, they haven’t had a villain that worked in a very, very long time. And that’s the whole problem, the rest of it takes care of itself,” Gilroy argued. “I had another villain from another movie that I could have transposed… [we] had a fantasy about doing that together, but no, I don’t think it went anywhere.”

Before February 2025, the Bond movie franchise was controlled by producer Barbara Broccoli, who was famously protective of the property — to the point where she was willing to let the movie series stall if she couldn’t make it work to her specifications. That all changed when Amazon MGM took full creative control in February as Broccoli retired, with Dune director Denis Villeneuve attached to make the first movie in the reborn series — a movie that may be a ‘Year One’ style reboot.

Maybe it’s time for Soderbergh and Gilroy to give Amazon a call, just to see if they’d be interested in a 1960s spy thriller…?

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