There are two things you should do when you meet the actor who currently plays James Bond at a bar: You order them a martini, you order yourself a martini, and then you pitch them on your dream 007 movie. Granted, most of us would get dragged off by security before we even got to the first step, but Quentin Tarantino isn’t like most of us, and according to Pierce Brosnan, he actually managed to pull this off many years ago when Brosnan was still Bond. As Brosnan explained during a GoldenEye commentary video for Esquire (via Indie Wire), at some point after he made what ended up being his final Bond movie (2002's Die Another Day), he was informed that Quentin Tarantino (who had just released Kill Bill Volume 2) wanted to meet with him.
So, Brosnan “went up to Hollywood one day from the beach” (being a celebrity sounds so exhausting) to meet with Tarantino at the Four Seasons where he was doing press. Brosnan waited for him at the bar, but Tarantino was busy and had to push the meeting back. Naturally, “someone sent over a martini,” because that’s what you do when you see James Bond waiting at a bar, but when Tarantino still hadn’t arrived after a half hour, Brosnan had another martini. Then possibly more. Either way, he says he was “fairly smokered” by the time Tarantino showed up, so the director also decided to get “fairly smokered.”
From there, Brosnan says Tarantino was “pounding the table,” talking about how great Brosnan was as Bond and saying he wanted to do a Bond movie. It’s unclear if he actually had a specific pitch (like the Star Trek movie he’s totally definitely absolutely going to make some day), but Brosnan says he went “back to the shop” and told them what Tarantino had told him, but in the end it “wasn’t meant to be.” The timing of this is probably a key factor, since it came after Brosnan’s last movie but before the series was rebooted with Daniel Craig as Bond, so maybe it just wasn’t the time for some kind of weird Tarantino movie with Brosnan’s Bond