Saturday October 18, 2008
Bond appetit
When Daniel Craig was first picked as the new 007, the British press thought it was a bad mistake but nobody doubts him now and everybody’s looking forward to the new Bond movie.
Daniel Craig admits that filming the final scenes of Quantum of Solace after a long and exhausting six-month shoot, was an emotional experience.
He had committed body and soul to his second outing as James Bond and has the physical scars to prove it, but as the production entered its final hours on set at Pinewood Studios near London, Craig found himself reflecting on the experience.
“It was very emotional,” he says. “The last shooting day was a Saturday and we finished about midnight and Michael Lerman (the first assistant director) said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that’s a wrap on the main unit of Bond 22, Quantum of Solace’ and I found myself choking up a bit. It’s been amazing. Just amazing.”
Craig’s return as 007 follows his hugely successful début in the role in Casino Royale, a film which scored a double-whammy - winning both critical acclaim and taking almost US$500mil at the box office.
But the 40-year-old star isn’t about to sit back and bask in the warm glow of high praise. The challenge on Quantum of Solace, he says, was simply to make an even better film.
“It’s certainly not a case of resting on your laurels,” he says. “Everybody was delighted - none more so than me - that Casino Royale did so well. We were all so pleased, and that in it itself was the reward for all the hard work that everyone put in.
“But the thing is, you have to keep improving. You have to want to do better. I think we had the key elements - a fantastic director, great actors, writers and a brilliant crew - in place to do just that. It looks fantastic and the director has done a magnificent job.”
British actor Daniel Craig with the new Bond women Ukrainian actr ess/model Olga Kurylenko. For Craig, recruiting director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, The Kite Runner) - to take charge of Quantum of Solace was a bold, inspirational move.
“When Marc’s name came up, I said immediately, ‘That’s a great idea’. I knew we had to try something different and that we had to be going somewhere different. I think some people were a little nervous of Marc because it was like, ‘Well, what has he done action-wise?’ But I always believed that he was an inspired choice.
“He’s incredibly meticulous - astoundingly meticulous, and, therefore, any doubts about him that anybody could have had were immediately wiped out because you could see how prepared he was. He knows exactly what he is doing and he is a delight to work with.
“He’s a storyteller first and foremost and he loves film.”
Quantum of Solace is the 22nd Bond film and is not based on an Ian Fleming novel, although the title does come from one of the author’s lesser-known short stories.
The story starts immediately after Casino Royale ended and sees a broken-hearted Bond trying to unravel the mystery of the death of the woman he fell in love with, Vesper Lynd (played by Eva Green), who had betrayed him.
“He’s trying to find the guys who killed the woman he loved,” explains Craig. “The woman who he thought loved him and actually doubled-crossed him. So he’s obviously pissed off.
“The story is about how he starts digging into what happened and he discovers this organisation called Quantum, that is influencing the world for its own gains.”
Quantum is led by the mysterious, charming Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), and Bond discovers that it’s trying to control some of the developing world’s precious resources.
“Quantum ties in nicely with the idea of a Spectre (the international terrorist organisation featured in Fleming’s novels), this mythical organisation that might not be that far away from the truth. We have companies aggressively buying up commodities to control them, and I don’t think that is very far away from some things that actually happen.”
As always with a Bond film, the movie features spectacular action sequences filmed in exotic locations - the production visited Italy, Panama, Chile, Mexico, Austria and the UK during its six-month shoot.
Another hallmark of the films are the fabled “Bond girls”. Quantum of Solace features two beautiful, young actresses who Craig believes are destined for international stardom - Olga Kurylenko as Camille and Gemma Arterton as MI6 Agent Fields.
“They’re both terrific, great actresses” says Craig.
“Gemma is a rising star, and we were lucky to get her. With Olga, there’s a real mystery and a real depth to her acting. Both parts are very significant in the movie, and we were very happy to have them both in the film. Olga had to do a lot of her own stunt work and she did remarkably well.”
Craig himself tackled many of his own spectacular stunts. He started training for the role a full three months before filming commenced with daily workouts in the gym.
“I needed to work out for a different reason this time. I needed to get as fit as I possibly could. Although I was big and muscled last time, I was actually not as fit as I am now. In Casino Royale, I wanted to look like the guy who had just taken off the uniform, and this time it’s slightly different.”
He did get injured a couple of times during filming - once suffering a cut under his right eye and on another occasion, slicing the top of his right hand ring finger off.
“I chopped off the end of that finger and I lost the power in the finger but it’s really healed amazingly. There’s a postage stamp scar. I was slamming a door on Mathieu’s face so I probably deserved it,” he laughs. “And I got eight stitches in my face from a kick. That was nothing really. I was back at work immediately. It’s tiny stuff.”
Craig was born in Chester, England, and grew up in Liverpool. He attended the National Youth Theatre at 16 and then Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1996 he starred in the acclaimed BBC drama Our Friends In The North, a corruption-and-crime saga regarded as one of the best television dramas of recent times.
As a result, Craig found himself inundated with offers of more TV drama; instead he opted to work in small independent movies like Hotel Splendide, The Trench and Obsession.
The gamble paid off, and Craig was cast by Sam Mendes to play the psychotic son of Paul Newman’s character in The Road To Perdition and later, poet Ted Hughes opposite Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath in Sylvia.
He also starred in the hit British gangster movie, Layer Cake and Steven Spielberg’s Munich. He played killer Perry Smith in Infamous and starred alongside Nicole Kidman in The Invasion. Later, he will be seen in Edward Zwick’s WWII drama Defiance.
o Quantum of Solace opens on Nov 6.
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