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Daniel Craig Publications in English
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| natta | Дата: Среда, 07 Ноя 2012, 22:45 | Сообщение # 51 |
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| Daniel Craig shows multiple sides
Britannia Awards 2012: British Artist of the Year - Daniel Craig
Depending on whom you ask, Daniel Craig is either the kind of actor whose presence on set provides motivation, or the kind who provides comic relief.
"Everybody wants to live up" to Craig's level of dedication, "Skyfall" producer Barbara Broccoli says. "Everyone wants to do their best for him because he's putting himself on the line."
But Naomie Harris, who acted opposite Craig in "Skyfall," points out the other side of Craig.
"Daniel worked very hard to make people feel completely comfortable, completely relaxed," Harris says. "He lightens the atmosphere."
She adds that when she first met Craig, she was intimidated and tried to slink quietly past a room where he was in a costume fitting. "And he ran after me, hit me over the head and he goes, 'Where are you going, stupid?' and gave me this massive hug," Harris says. "And that to me sums up who Daniel is."
These different versions of Craig may be a part of his success as Bond: Craig's Bond is as vulnerable as he is slick. "Skyfall" deals directly with some of the backstory Harris says Craig has always lent the character.
"It's all there in his eyes," she says. "There's a kind of woundedness about his character which really makes you empathize with him and makes Daniel incredibly believable."
Adds Broccoli: "In the books, it's an internal dialogue, so we needed to find an actor who could portray that conflict and all of the emotional turbulence that defines him. Daniel seemed, to me anyway, the only person who could do that."
With three films in the franchise complete, Craig has thus far avoided typecasting by, as Harris says, "taking risks" with his non-Bond roles: such as a journalist in David Fincher's thriller "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" (2011) and an outlaw abductee in Jon Favreau's "Cowboys & Aliens" (2011).
Broccoli says any concern Craig initially had about playing Bond fell away years ago.
"Everyone knows he's James Bond, but that doesn't prevent them from enjoying him when he's playing another character," Broccoli says. "I think that's a tribute to him as an actor, and also to him as a person."
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118061730/
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| fan | Дата: Четверг, 11 Апр 2013, 08:44 | Сообщение # 52 |
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| Bond 24: 10 Reasons We Can’t Get Enough Of Daniel Craig
Read more at http://whatculture.com/film....5LkF.99
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| natta | Дата: Четверг, 18 Июл 2013, 21:25 | Сообщение # 53 |
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| Статья о грядущем спектакле Betrayal
Former Bond man Daniel Craig pulls in millions on Broadway
It’s only summer, but we can already crown this season’s box- office champ.
Cue the gun barrel and the surf-rock guitar riff: 007’s the man with the golden box office.
Tickets for the upcoming Broadway revival of “Betrayal,” starring Daniel Craig and his wife, Rachel Weisz, have been on sale for just two weeks, and the take is reaching $5 million.
No other new show is even close. Sources say the Harold Pinter play will likely be sold out by the time it plays its first performance Oct. 1.
Directed by Mike Nichols, “Betrayal” opens Nov. 3 at Nichols’ favorite Broadway theater, the Barrymore, and will run just 14 weeks.
This is Craig’s second go-around as a box-office dynamo. When he teamed with Hugh Jackman in “A Steady Rain,” they grossed more than $1 million every week. The cop drama was pretty dreary, but that didn’t dent the profits: It recouped its $2.5 million costs in a little over a month and went on to make another $2 million or so in profits.
“Betrayal” appears to be on track to make even more.
One of Pinter’s best-known — and most accessible — plays, it’s about a couple whose marriage comes apart when she has an affair with her husband’s best friend. The brilliant gimmick is that story is told in reverse chronological order, a sort of “Merrily We Roll Along” for the brainy set.
In this production, the best friend will be played by Rafe Spall, an up-and-coming British actor making his Broadway debut.
“Betrayal” is almost always a hit. The first production, in 1978, opened at the National Theatre and was a sellout for months. It starred Michael Gambon, Daniel Massey and Penelope Wilton.
On Broadway, the play ran nearly 200 performances in 1980 and helped launch Raul Julia’s career. His co-stars were Blythe Danner and Roy Scheider.
There was a fine revival at the Roundabout in 2000 starring Juliette Binoche (gorgeous), Liev Schreiber (intense) and John Slattery (silver-haired and “Mad Man”-ish).
“Betrayal” is autobiographical. As Pinter admitted to critic Michael Billington, he based it on his seven-year affair with Joan Bakewell, a popular TV personality in England. She was married, at the time, to Pinter’s friend, producer Michael Bakewell.
Pinter was married to actress Vivien Merchant. She, too, was having an affair. What a randy set of Brits!
Nichols, who won a Tony last year for his revival of “Death of a Salesman,” led the actors in a workshop earlier this summer. He likes to go through the play and analyze the scenes with the actors, so that everybody’s on the same page when actual rehearsals begin.
I heard the workshop went extremely well, and Nichols may be on track to pick up yet another Tony — his 10th.
“Betrayal,” by the way, will go head-to-head with another Pinter play this fall — “No Man’s Land,” starring Patrick Stewart and Ian McKel len. It’s a lot murkier than “Betrayal,” but it casts a creepy spell.
A Pinter feast in the fall: Serious-minded theatergoers have a lot to look forward to.
My show-queen credentials have been revoked.
As several readers pointed out in e-mails, I misplaced the song “I Will Never Leave You” in last week’s column about a revival of “Side Show.”
It does not end the first act. It is, in fact, the 11 o’clock number at the end of the show.
Now that I’ve cleared that up, I’m going to try and reclaim my credentials by listening to the original recording of “Gypsy” over and over again.
I love the way Jack Klugman sings “Rose’s Turn.”
http://www.nypost.com/p....FxiCNMN
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| natta | Дата: Вторник, 01 Сен 2015, 15:09 | Сообщение # 54 |
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| Daniel Craig Is Esquire's October Cover Star
His last James Bond movie, Skyfall, is the most successful British film ever. (No pressure, then.) As he prepares for the release of the follow-up, Spectre, Daniel Craig reflects on a decade in which he has redefined the once cartoonish secret agent as a symbol of masculinity for the modern age: embattled, conflicted, but still standing, still ready to take on the world
Daniel Craig would like a beer.
A cigarette, too. Not, he says, that he’s back on the fags full-time, but a man can cut himself some slack now and then. It’s a Wednesday afternoon in July. Craig filmed his last scene for Spectre, the new James Bond film, the previous Saturday, on a lake in Bray, in Berkshire. (“A bit of an anti-climax,” he concedes.)
Since then he’s been knuckling down to his publicity duties. He went straight from the wrap party into three days of PR: posing for the movie poster, mugging for promotional photos that will be packaged and sent out to the global media, divvied up between rival broadcasters and papers and websites and magazines less fortunate than our own. Tomorrow he sits for an all-day junket at a central London hotel: round-table interviews and brief one-on-ones (some as long as 10 whole minutes) with reporters from around the world.
No one who has worked with Craig before – me included – would mistake him for someone who revels in the marketing of movies. He does it with good grace but it remains a necessary evil, something to be endured rather than embraced. So now, unwinding from a day of it, he figures he’s earned a lager and a smoke.
We are sitting, he and I, on plastic chairs at a wooden table on an otherwise empty roof terrace in East London. Beneath us, the trendy loft apartment hired for the afternoon as the location for the Esquire shoot. As luck – by which I really mean cunning, my own cunning – would have it, there are cold beers in the fridge, and Craig’s publicist has a pack of Marlboro Lights she’s happy for us to pilfer.
So I flip the lids from two bottles of Peroni, he offers me his lighter – encased in a spent bullet shell from the set of a 007 gunfight – and we ash in a bucket. It’s warm out but the sky is glowering, threatening rain. When it comes, almost as light as air, we sit through it, neither of us acknowledging it’s falling. Soon we call down for more beers and more beers are brought, fags are lit, and Craig leans back in his chair and talks.
I don’t think I’ve known him this relaxed before. Not in an interview, certainly.
I’ve met Craig on a number of previous occasions. And this is the third time he’s talked to me for an Esquire cover story, in four years. (Beat that, The Economist.) He’s always courteous and cooperative and professional. He’s always thoughtful and considered and drily funny. But he has a stern countenance and there is a steeliness to him that discourages flippancy. Though not, happily, caustic wit: my favourite Craig line from an interview I did with him came in 2011, when he was promoting a film called Cowboys & Aliens and I’d had the temerity to ask him what it was about: “It’s about cowboys and fucking aliens, what do you think it’s about?” OK, fair enough; stupid fucking question. But did I mention that he’s drily funny?
t’s 10 years since Daniel Craig was announced as the sixth official screen incarnation of Britain’s least secret agent, following, as every schoolboy knows, Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton and Brosnan. It’s fair to say the news of his casting did not occasion impromptu street parties up and down the nation, or thousands of British parents naming their first-born sons Daniel (or, indeed, Craig) in his honour.
By almost universal consent, Craig was too young, too blond (too blond!) and not nearly suave – or, perhaps, glib – enough. The man himself seemed somewhat discomfited, too. He had spent the previous two decades building a career for himself as an actor of ferocious intensity, a specialist in wounded masculinity on stage and screen, in the kind of plays – A Number – and films – Sylvia (2003), The Mother (2003), Enduring Love (2004) – that most fans of big budget stunts-and-shunts movies hadn’t necessarily seen, lacking both opportunity and inclination, and perhaps imagination.
Even Sam Mendes, Bond aficionado and director of Skyfall and Spectre, recently admitted he originally felt the casting of Craig could have been a mistake. Crazily, in retrospect, the feeling was he was too serious an actor, too searching, too saturnine. Our expectations of Bond, after decades of increasingly preposterous hijinks and larky one-liners, were hardly stratospheric. The franchise, once seen as cool, even sophisticated – though never, until recently, cerebral – had become a corny joke.
“Austin Powers fucked it,” was Craig’s typically bald appraisal of the situation pre-2006, when I talked to him about it last time. In other words, the films had gone beyond parody. “By the time we did Casino Royale, [Mike Myers] had blown every joke apart. We were in a situation where you couldn’t send things up. It had gone so far post-modern it wasn’t funny any more.”
Craig changed all that. His Bond is hard but not cold. He’s haunted by a traumatic childhood. He is not inured to violence; cut Craig’s 007 and he bleeds. And he loves and loses, in spectacular fashion.
First in Casino Royale (2006), which was as much tragic romance as action thriller, and in which Bond – Ian Fleming’s “blunt instrument” – was revealed as painfully vulnerable, physically and emotionally.
“I would ask you if you could remain emotionally detached, but I don’t think that’s your problem, is it, Bond?” Judi Dench’s M asks him in that film. It turns out to be precisely his problem. He falls in love with a woman who is his equal in every way, including the tormented past. “I have no armour left,” he tells her, “you’ve stripped it from me.” But he can’t save her. That story continues in Quantum of Solace (2008), a revenge drama-cum-chase movie, albeit one hobbled by a Hollywood writers’ strike. Craig played Bond as grief-stricken and fuelled by righteous anger.
Skyfall (2012), described by Craig and Mendes as a return to “classic Bond”, reintroduced many of the gags and much of the glamour familiar from earlier films, as well as beloved characters – Q, Moneypenny – previously conspicuous by their absence from Craig-era Bond. But it also developed the theme of Bond in extremis: shot, presumed drowned, then ragged and cynical, and entangled in a weird Oedipal psychodrama with Javier Bardem’s cyber-terrorist and Dench’s mummy figure, M.
The cartoonish elements – the exotic locations, the evil megalomaniacs, the fast women, the suicidal driving, the techno gadgetry – were back, but Craig’s moody intensity was very much present and correct. He doesn’t do a lot of sunny romcoms. His characters, Bond included, tend to be somewhat wracked. “You meet somebody who is at the best part of their life when they’re really happy and everything’s great, I’m not sure how interesting that is cinematically,” he says. The essence of drama is conflict, and Craig’s Bond is nothing if not conflicted. Apart from anything else, he keeps trying to resign his commission.
When he was first sent the script for Casino Royale, in 2005, Craig tells me now, “I had been prepared to read a Bond script and I didn’t. They’d stripped everything back and I went, [approvingly] ‘Oh, shit!’ It felt to me they were offering me a blueprint, and saying: ‘Form it around that.’ And
I went, ‘OK, I can do that.’
“I’m a huge Bond fan,” he says. “I love James Bond movies, and I love all the old gags and everything that goes along with that. No disrespect to what happened before but this is completely different. It’s got weight and meaning. Because I don’t know another way to do it. However big and grand it is, however boisterous the script is, you look for the truth in it, and you stick to that, and then you can mess around with it. And if you have that and you have the car chases and the explosions as well, then you’re quids in. But there have to be consequences. He has to be affected by what happens to him. It’s not just that he has to kill the bad guy, there has to be a reason for it.”
The last time Craig and I talked matters Bond was in the summer of 2012, and the topic at hand was the imminent release of Skyfall. I wrote then that everyone involved I spoke to exuded a sense of quiet confidence. This is not always discernible in the nervy run-up to a big budget release.
Still, even the most gung-ho 007 cheerleader could not have predicted that the film would be quite as successful as it became. Released that October, it made $1.1bn worldwide – nearly twice the amount of Casino Royale or Quantum of Solace, both of which did extremely well. At the time of writing it’s the 12th highest-grossing film of all time. In the UK in particular, it did phenomenal and quite unexpected business. It is the highest grossing film released here and the only movie ever to take more than £100m at the British box office.
Craig’s summary of the feeling among the film-makers as they began to discuss a follow-up to Skyfall: “What the fuck are we going to do?”
“I think everyone was just daunted, understandably,” he says. “Like, it’s ‘the biggest British movie of all time’. What does it fucking mean? Where do we go from there? How do you process that? It could have been an albatross around everyone’s necks. It turned out not to be, but there was a massive amount of pressure at the beginning.”
Skyfall’s success he puts down to simple things. “Someone who has just made a six-and-a-half-million dollar movie and is struggling to get it distributed will probably argue that if you’ve got 200 fucking million dollars you can fucking sell anything, but that’s not actually true. There’s lots of flops out there. I just think [Skyfall] had a tight story, great action. I genuinely think it’s a good movie.”
He also pays tribute to the skill of Mendes, the London stage sensation turned classy Hollywood auteur: (American Beauty (1999), Revolutionary Road (2008). It was Craig, who worked with Mendes on his gangster film Road to Perdition (2002), who first approached the director to do Skyfall, and he had to use his powers of persuasion again for Spectre.
On Skyfall, Craig tells me, “I felt like [Mendes and I] got into a real groove with it. I felt like we’d started something on that movie and I was so keen to finish it.” At first the director was resistant – he had other work on – but Craig and the Bond producers waited, and again got their man.
“We did have the conversation: it’s got to be bigger and better,” Craig says. “The stunts, the action, every department.” He holds out his palm, flat. It’s shaking. “I’m all jangly at the moment because it’s over. Sam has to lock the picture off for 7 September, so he’s got fuck-all time, basically. That’s it. Can’t go back and do it again. Tough shit.”
He doesn’t want to jinx it but, “I feel like we’ve all done our absolute fucking best and that’s a good feeling. Whether that makes a better movie we’ll see.”
Spectre benefits not only from the return of the star and director of Skyfall but also from the work of veteran Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, and writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan. Ralph Fiennes returns as Mallory, the new M; Ben Whishaw as Q; and Naomie Harris as Moneypenny. Replacing director of photography Roger Deakins is the terrific Dutch cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, the man responsible for the look of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Spike Jonze’s Her.
Is the “classic Bond” ethos still in place, I wonder? “Times 10!” Craig almost shouts, momentarily revelling in his role as hype man. He repeats it when I laugh, holding his beer in the air. “It’s Skyfall times 10!”
And that is a point he is keen to make. For all the soul searching, he says, Spectre is “a celebration of all that’s Bond”. There is a new supercar, the Aston Martin DB10. There are beautiful women, played by the va-va-voom Italian bombshell Monica Bellucci and the kittenish Léa Seydoux. There are signature set pieces: a thrilling opening in Mexico City; a car chase through Rome; action sequences in the Austrian Alps, in Tangier and in London. There’s a thuggish henchman (the first of Craig-era Bond) played by the former wrestler Dave Bautista. And there’s an evil megalomaniac, played by the great Christoph Waltz, devilish star of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained.
There has been chatter that Waltz plays Bond’s most notorious adversary, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the comical, cat-stroking, Connery-era menace and boss of the shadowy criminal enterprise Spectre.
Actually, Waltz plays Franz Oberhauser. For Fleming fans, that name will ring a distant bell. Franz is the son of Hannes Oberhauser, an Austrian climbing and ski instructor, and friend of Bond’s father, who briefly became the young Bond’s guardian after the tragic death of his parents – in an Alpine climbing accident, no less.
“A wonderful man,” Bond describes him in the Fleming story, Octopussy. “He was something of a father to me at a time when I happened to need one.”
Hannes Oberhauser was later shot dead by the dastardly Major Dexter Smythe; his frozen corpse was discovered in a melting glacier. Bond took it upon himself to track down his former guardian’s killer. So, Waltz’s Franz Oberhauser is Bond’s foster brother. It seems from the trailer he is a senior operative at Spectre – conceivably still under the control of Blofeld – and possibly was connected to Quantum, another nefarious outfit hellbent on world domination (crumbs!), represented here again by Mr White, familiar to fans of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace.
In other words, Craig’s initial reluctance to let Bond’s backstory bleed into Spectre – and to cut back on the angst in favour of, as he puts it to me, “more Moore”, invoking the jollity of Roger Moore-era Bond – didn’t survive much past the first script meeting. “I think I’d just got it into my head that flamboyance was the way forward and fuck it, nothing touched him. But as we got into the story and rooted out the connections, they were too good to leave alone.”
When I interviewed Craig for Skyfall, I tried him on some supposed plot points and he laughed me almost out of the room. This time he concedes I’m doing better.
But according to him I’m still miles off. I’d read that Spectre was the first part of two films. “I don’t think so,” says Craig. (Then again: never trust a spy.) In fact, he says, if it has any relation to other Bond films, it’s as the denouement to the story that began with Casino: Bond’s determination to confront his past and figure out his place in the world, and MI6’s place in the world, and whether he might be able to fashion a life away from all that. “I think we can safely say we’ve squared all those circles,” Craig says.
There has been much speculation that Spectre will be Craig’s last film as Bond. I thought he’d signed on for two more after Skyfall, meaning there would be at least one more after Spectre.
“I don’t know,” he says. He really doesn’t know? “I really don’t know. Honestly. I’m not trying to be coy. At the moment I can’t even conceive it.”
Would he at least like to do another one? “At this moment, no. I have a life and I’ve got to get on with it a bit. But we’ll see.”
Unless there’s something he hasn’t been telling us, Daniel Craig is an actor, not a spy. He is married, to another actor, Rachel Weisz, and he has a grown-up daughter from an earlier relationship. He is 47 years old. He lives quietly, and as privately as you can when you are an A-list movie star and so is your wife. He is often to be found with his head in a book. He likes a few beers now and then. He looks good in a suit but is more often to be found wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He does not carry a gun. If he did, he’d have to put on his glasses to fire it accurately.
“I’m not James Bond,” he says, not for the first time. “I’m not particularly brave, I’m not particularly cool-headed. I have the fantasy that I would be good in a certain type of situation, like all of us, and I put those hopes into [playing] him.” But Craig also likes to think that his own non-Bondness adds something to his interpretation of 007. “There are bits when he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, and I like that.”
One touchstone for his work on Bond is Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, especially in Raiders of the Lost Ark. “The brilliance of that performance is that he’s so fallible, to the point of comedy. You know at any time he might fuck up, and that adds to the danger and the excitement and the joy of it.”
It’s harder to do that with Bond, he says. No one in the audience really believes 007 won’t, ultimately, cheat death, defeat the baddie, save the world. But he hopes to borrow at least some of Ford’s haplessness. And worse things have happened to Craig’s Commander Bond than to Ford’s Professor Jones. The love of his life drowned in front of him. His mentor and substitute mother died in his arms. “[Bond] failed,” he says, of Judi Dench’s character’s death at the end of Skyfall. “That was a big decision.”
Does he like James Bond, I wonder? “I don’t know if I’d like to spend too much time with him,” he says. “Maybe an evening but it would have to be early doors. What goes on after hours, I’m not so sure about. But I don’t judge him. It’s not the job of an actor to judge your character.”
Nor does he think it is his job, specifically, to rescue Bond from the critics who see him as a throwback to an earlier, less politically correct era. When I interviewed Craig in 2011, we spent quite a lot of time on what Bond represents as a figure in the culture. What does it say about men – British men especially, but men all over the world, too – that our most potent symbol of masculinity is a lonely, socially maladjusted killer with no family or friends, unable to maintain a loving relationship with a woman and with apparently no life whatsoever outside his work?
“He’s very fucking lonely,” Craig says now. “There’s a great sadness. He’s fucking these beautiful women but then they leave and it’s… sad. And as a man gets older it’s not a good look. It might be a nice fantasy – that’s debatable – but the reality, after a couple of months…”
What does it say, too, that Bond is a fantasy figure for a Britain that no longer exists, an Imperial warrior who satisfies the rest of our vicarious appetites – no longer as easily fulfilled as they once were – to travel to exotic locations, execute the natives and then have sex with their women?
“Hopefully,” he says, “my Bond is not as sexist and misogynistic as [earlier incarnations]. The world has changed. I am certainly not that person. But he is, and so what does that mean? It means you cast great actresses and make the parts as good as you can for the women in the movies.”
It’s a difficult line to walk, I imagine, to keep the essence of brand Bond, but to update it so he doesn’t seem like a dinosaur. “There’s a delicate balance to it,” he says.
Bond, of course, represents something different to Craig than to anyone else. “For me,” he says, “it’s an opportunity as an actor to take part in movies that are thin on the ground: where you have a producer, in Barbara Broccoli, who’s dedicated her life to this; where you get together a team of people and push them as far as you can; where I can push myself as far as I can. When it boils down to it, if you’re going to make these kind of movies you want to be in that atmosphere. It’s all you can ask for.”
***
It’s been three years since we’ve seen Daniel Craig in a new movie.
In 2013, he acted in a play, on Broadway, with his wife – a very well received revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, directed by the late Mike Nichols – but between Skyfall and Spectre, he has done no screen acting.
For a time, he says, especially at the beginning of his Bond career, he felt pressure to prove he was more than a blockbuster hunk.
“I worked a lot before [Casino Royale]. I did lots of things, I worked with amazing directors. I was very relaxed about what I did. I knew I could act.” Then Bond happened. “There’s kind of a rigidity to it. You’re playing this very specific character and everybody starts looking at you in that way, and you’re like, ‘I’m not that.’
“I did feel like, ‘I’ve got to look like I’m doing other stuff.’ But then it was, ‘Who for?’ So the public think, ‘Ooh, isn’t he versatile?’”
More recently, he’s decided to stop worrying about all that. On Spectre, he says, “I relaxed. It was like, ‘Fuck it. I’m James Bond, for fuck’s sake. So I’ll do James Bond.’ The fact of it is, it’s not a bad position to be in. I used to get asked all the time, ‘Don’t you worry that you’re going to get typecast?’ ‘And?’ I mean, talk about a high-class problem.”
In any case, he says, his break from the screen “wasn’t because I couldn’t get the gigs”. He does an impression of a desperate luvvie: “It was just terrible, agent wouldn’t answer the phone…”
So, where has he been all this time? “We’ve got a place in the country, in New York,” he says. “There’s a lot to do there. I read, I photograph things really badly.” I’d noticed him doing just that earlier in the day. “Maybe one-in-a-thousand comes out. I’m working that ratio down.”
He has an office in the house. “I try to get there once a day, surf the internet for half an hour.” He laughs. “Phew! Knackering.” He’s being self-deprecating. In reality, he’s been working on Spectre, on and off, for two years, and he’s been at it every day for the past six months at least.
There’s a chance he won’t play Bond again but no chance he’ll stop acting. “I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I didn’t act,” he says. He tells me he’s made a pledge to himself to be a bit more proactive about work. Watching films over the past year or so he’s occasionally thought to himself, “‘God, I’d love to meet that director.’ And then it’s like, ‘Oh! I can!’ That realisation is weird. Like, maybe if I phone them up they might go for lunch with me…”
All that said, he has no plans. “Nothing at all. But I’m not worried. Not yet.”
In 2012, he told me that his transition from jobbing actor to A-list star had not been an easy one. “It threw me for a loop. It really shook me up and made me look at the world in a very different way. It confused the hell out of me. Fame and fortune, for want of a better expression, is fucking scary. I couldn’t find a lot of fun in it.”
That is another aspect of his life he’s learned to be more philosophical about. Of the attention and the hoopla and the press commitments, he says, “You just have to go, ‘Isn’t this great?’ As opposed to, ‘Isn’t this fucking awful?’ But believe me, after the fifth interview of the day, sometimes you’re like, ‘Get me out of here.’ I used to get a bit pissed off about things, and if somebody else gets dodgy with me in an interview now – and it still happens – I’m less likely to say, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ Now I just laugh, and go, ‘Really? Of all the things that are going on in the world at the moment, this matters most?’ It really doesn’t.”
Our attitude to Bond, and to Hollywood movies in general, he thinks, should be, “Let’s celebrate this. It’s good fun. And of all the industries that make lots of money in the world, yes, the movie industry is a bit crooked and there are some sharks and not very nice people, but it’s a fairly open book: you come and see it, we make money. It’s not, ‘Come and see it and we’ll fleece you somehow and sell your house.’ We’re not bankers. It’s entertainment. I think there are worse professions to be involved with.”
Will he miss James Bond, when it’s another actor carrying the Walther PPK, at the wheel of the Aston Martin?
“Yeah, of course I will.”
What will he miss most? “Doing the films; just that. You know, it sounds awful but I’ve been left a wealthy man by doing this. I can afford to live very comfortably. Things are taken care of. Family and kids are taken care of and that’s a massive relief in anybody’s life. I’m incredibly fortunate. But the other stuff that goes along with it…” He trails off for a moment. “The day I can walk into a pub and someone goes, ‘Oh, there’s Daniel Craig’ and then just leaves me alone, that’ll be great.”
For now, at least, were he to walk into a pub, people would see James Bond first, Daniel Craig second. And they would not leave him alone. He’s made his peace with it, for as long as it lasts.
If it were to be the case that he’s shot his last scene as James Bond, would he feel satisfied with what he’s achieved? “Immensely,” he says. “I’ve done my best.”
And with that we drain our beers, stub out our fags, and head off back to work.
http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/film-tv/8782/daniel-craig-interview/
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| natta | Дата: Воскресенье, 04 Окт 2015, 11:09 | Сообщение # 55 |
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| Cracking Bond
‘He’s a misogynist. That’s clear. He’s got problems.’ Has playing the world’s best-known spy messed up Daniel Craig’s own life?
Daniel Craig is James Bond, despite the efforts of danielcraigisnotbond.com, the protest website launched amid the general scepticism that greeted the casting of the actor a decade ago. “Too short, too blond, too thespy,” he recalls. “Can one be too thespian?” He laughs camply — a hugely confident man whose strand of emotionally knackered 007 is now in the DNA of the icon. His inspiration was Indiana Jones. “What was brilliant was that he was fallible, he bled,” he says of the archaeologist. “It’s never left me. If you do action, an audience has to feel jeopardy.” He smiles frequently. That site, by the way, is still live.
The latest Bond film, out this month, is Craig’s fourth, on a continuous story arc that is a first for the franchise. Yet it’s the scale of these movies that pistol-whips you (or should that be PPK-whips?).History haunts each scene: the history of 53 years of a very British franchise and — crucially — the $1bn made by Skyfall, the most successful 007 film ever. It’s an operation that, at the latest count, has seen 610,934 uses of the title’s hashtag since December, when Sam Mendes announced his second Bond would be called Spectre. It is the 24th in the series.
Think of these films like Beethoven’s Fifth. A huge start — da-da-da-dum — followed by dovetailed violent crescendos and quiet moments in bed. It is the form of the latest, with a turbulent, personal plot that sees Bond face both his demons and the Spectre group, led by Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz). It also stars huge international action scenes, certainly more than in Skyfall, which barely left Britain. How, though, with such a leap in scale, can Spectre avoid being Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan’s flabby farewell? “Because,” says the production designer, Dennis Gassner, a beaming man in a boater who spends a lot of time on Maui doing yoga, “we have better taste.”
At 9.30pm on a cold March night in Rome this year, part of the elegant Via Nomentana was closed to residents, tourists and blow-dried dogs, held back behind temporary barriers by a disco dazzle of hi-vis. Balcony parties whooped and clinked while, below, two policemen sat idly in a pizzeria: the Italian idea of security, which seemed to involve waiting until the British told them what to do.
The point of this fuss — 341 crew needing food, 200 locals guarding doors, a mile of road — was a scene in which Bond drives through so many tourist spots that the film even tyre-screeches around St Peter’s. Come 3am, two souped-up supercars were on an umpteenth race up to 110mph. Roar, vanish, repeat, until dawn. The Aston Martin has a button labelled “fire igniting start”, and the gargantuan cost for seconds of a chase that’s no different, really, from those in The Fast and the Furious films is absurd.
What, then, makes Spectre special? History, yes, but it’s more. It’s the power of a man not even in Italy when I visit; an actor who took a tired franchise and updated it to such a millennial and twitchy extent that Roger Moore feels as worth revisiting as a saucy seaside postcard.
Four months after the shoot in Rome, I meet that man. Craig is an actor so hooked on his role that, for Spectre, he was involved from the beginning: in the writing, casting, crewing. What a presence he is, pacing through the corridor of a London hotel, dressed casually in jacket, jeans and brown boots. He makes the walls shrink in. The first detail that stands out is his bright blue eyes, 291 on the Pantone scale. He’s very loud, puts his feet up on the table and swears a lot. You need his trust early. At parties he hosts, I imagine, he’d always want attention at the top of the table. In bigger groups, though, he would skulk in a corner, waiting for the evening to end.
There’s an old review of a play (“Oh-oh,” he says), from 1992 (“Mm-hmm,” he squeaks, intrigued), in which the critic wrote: “Craig contains his violence like an unexploded mine.” Is that a good catch-all for the depth he has found in a once cartoonish Bond? “I suppose,” he says, nodding. His 007 lost a great love in Casino Royale, was furiously bereaved in Quantum of Solace, showed extraordinary restraint in Skyfall when faced with Javier Bardem’s hair, and, for Spectre, may finally find his family. Interest in this backstory — barely bothered with before — is “hard-wired” into him as an actor, Craig explains.
“First and foremost,” he says, leaning in, always making eye contact, “get the story right. Then make whizz-bangs part of it. Character becomes important, and that’s the interesting way of doing this. He’s got older as I’ve got older, and I’ve changed and he’s changed. I don’t know how else to do it.” If you stick within the rules of Ian Fleming’s creation, he adds, you can do “anything you want”.
The problem, though, is this very set of rules, laid down by the books and the first big-screen Bond, back in 1962, the 007 fans measure all others by. Played by Sean Connery like Dapper Laughs with a licence to kill, he is the embodiment of the “sewer of misogyny” that the journalist and commentator Bidisha claims Fleming wrote. It’s as dated as an authentic tagine: women in bikinis have sex with him, then die. That’s it. And despite Judi Dench, Skyfall wasn’t so much a leap forward as a fan-pleasing step back. Articles had headlines such as: “Women, the makers of Skyfall hate you.”
I tell Craig that viewers didn’t think much of the scene in which Bond had sex in a shower with a prostitute to whom he offered a chance of freedom. “Did they not?” he asks, surprisingly. She was a former slave, and Bond did what men had done to her when she was 12. “That’s interesting. It’s not how we wanted it to perform. Maybe it was because she was a victim. That’s very valid.” He takes the criticism as if it is the first time he has heard the charge. (Later, supporting this, he argues that “if you’re even slightly famous, you should avoid the internet at all costs. It’s like being bullied at school.”)
Still, aware or not, he adds that, for Spectre, he and Mendes tried hard to make Bond a little bit more modern. As with a train line after an upgrade, there are issues, and bits creak, but it’s better.
“He’s a misogynist,” says Craig, matter-of-fact about his role. “That’s clear. He’s got problems. Serious f****** problems. But it’s not my job to judge him. I like the fact that if you put him up against a very strong character — especially a female — who goes, ‘What are you about?’, he goes, ‘Oh, OK.’ I like to see that change.”
Was the desire to update the spy’s attitude to women the main reason for casting Monica Bellucci, 51, as his lover? She has four years on Craig: it’s almost a third-wave feminist act in a series with Pussy Galore and, more recently, Quantum of Solace shoving the actor, then 40, into bed with Gemma Arterton, then 22. Sitting here pushing a blockbuster, and wary of being “overtly political”, Craig says picking Bellucci “wasn’t as self-conscious as it has become”. Rather, her age just fitted. “But later,” he continues, “people started to say it’s a really good thing — and it is. If it raises debate, that’s no bad thing. If it helps the conversation about the disparity in wages, not only in this business, but in every business, then bring it on.” Bellucci plays a character called Lucia Sciarra — finally, no double entendre.
Craig has few reservations about being Bond, the most scrutinised role in cinema. As Britain’s film figurehead, Bond is expected to be a spokesman, pushed to represent the country, mirror its culture. It’s all-consuming, then, and if its current incumbent has a complaint, it is the total lack of anonymity. Last year in Ireland, he and his wife, Rachel Weisz, spent a long night in the pub. They were, he tells me, left alone, really happy, and only at closing time did the locals ask for photos. The couple said yes, of course. They had respected privacy, so the celebrities offered selfies and small talk as a way of saying thanks. This is how Craig wants it, but not how he gets it. Mostly, if he goes somewhere public, he’s got “an hour, then it gets out of hand”.
Yet all this, he admits, simply shows his age. He is 47, and shakes his head and frowns at a mention of Twitter — “anathema” to him. He hails from a “different generation”, and all these lights and the desire for photos, he doesn’t understand.
“If me and my mates went out and all got shit-faced, and someone started taking photographs, they’d get thumped,” he says, chortling, before flipping back to serious again. “The other thing I don’t get is, people are happy to take pictures of me without asking. But things have changed so rapidly. Nobody really gives a f*** what I think about the modern world, but that part I can do without.”
The conversation moves to Citizenfour, the disquieting Edward Snowden documentary about this modern world and its strangulation by surveillance. Craig had to “stop halfway, as it was making me sweat” — he was caught in the phone-hacking scandal, after all, before Sony, the Bond studio, suffered email-hacking on an industrial scale — and such themes are “messed around with” in Spectre. The new ways of spying, though, are tricky to introduce into 007: as Craig puts it, his agent is “of the old world”, using intelligence-gathering methods that don’t focus on listening into millions of phone calls and hoping.
“I presume they get information,” he says, with a lack of conviction that suggests he doesn’t think they do. “That things are thwarted. But looking someone in the eye, having a conversation... In big conflicts, peace has come because people sat in a room together. I hope that is still happening.”
Face-to-face is in Spectre. For one thing, because cybercrime — watching files download — is cinematic paint drying; and because Bond lives in a “fantastical world” that has “supervillains”. The latter is important for audiences. Is Waltz’s baddie based on anyone?
“I don’t know if supervillains exist,” Craig says, shaking his head. “They could. There’s maybe an island somewhere that sinks. Or maybe they are in plain sight, parking boats off St Tropez every summer.”
Never — from Connery (definitive), to George Lazenby (one-off), to Moore (silly), to Timothy Dalton (serious), to Brosnan (mixed) — has an actor playing Bond been as invested in the part as Craig. He is obsessive, saying “we” about the film-making when others would say “they”, and suggests that I talk to the director. He knows this role — not his theatre origins, his mainstream breakthrough on television with Our Friends in the North or his career-best film, Enduring Love — is how he will be remembered. So he wants it to be weighty, a reel to take to his teachers at the National Youth Theatre, to show them his talent wasn’t wasted. Indiana Jones, the inspiration, has a scene in which the rogue’s heart is nearly torn out. He bleeds. He’s vulnerable, and that is Craig’s Bond in microcosm.
Will the film after Spectre, the 25th, be his last? “I don’t know. Yeah. I mean, yes. Maybe.” Then it’s the question of who takes over. A woman? “That’s another story. But why not? Jasmine Bond?” A black actor? Idris Elba is a rumour. “The right person for the job should do the job, and I don’t give a f*** what colour their skin is,” he says sternly. “It shouldn’t be an issue. We should have moved on.” And next for him? “I need to meet more directors,” he admits wearily. This is his first film since Skyfall. He needed time off as he’d “got married and needed to settle”. But he won’t rest long, and hints at a stage return.
Back in 2001, the young actor summed up his career: “Grew up on the Wirral, left home at 16 or 17, came down to London, went to drama school, became an actor.” What’s to add? “I feel the same,” he shrugs, playing down stardom, millions and a United Nations post as global advocate for the elimination of mines and explosive hazards, which led Ban Ki-moon to say: “You have been given a licence to kill. I’m now giving you a licence to save.”
He continues: “I always had an ambition to be an actor, and every actor who says they didn’t want to be famous is lying.” He pauses. A very large watch sits on his wrist. “But I never foresaw this.”
On day 110 of the Spectre shoot, June 11, 2015, Pinewood was sizzling. The studios sit in a bleak crater where vast indoor stages offer essential cooling: acre on acre of dream factory and chill. The biggest is the 007 stage, which, for Spectre, held a full-scale replica of Westminster Bridge, laid with real tarmac for this colossal film. Gunshots fill the air. A fight scene is prepped and the crew wait for their key prop. All this structure and personnel — one has work as “crowd hair supervisor” — and you still spot a vacuum in the shape of the man this is for, whose obsession over a role many didn’t want him to take led to quiet desperation to prove the doubters wrong, or annoy them.
An assistant rushes to Mendes to tell him “DC” has arrived, as a 4x4 with tinted windows pulls up. It stops, sprays dust in the air. A door opens. Everything clicks into its place. “Action!” The tone is modern, serious, suffering. It is, thanks to Craig, impossible to think of this spy as anything else these days.
Months later, I speak to Mendes. Yes, Spectre is emotional, he says, but that’s just what he and Craig are good at. It’s a long way back to knowing winks. The creator of danielcraigisnotbond.com, however, was far from a lone voice back in 2005. How popular, I ask, is Craig now?
“Oh, I have no idea,” Mendes says. “When we were in Istanbul on the last movie, a cab driver told me how much better Bond was since it stopped trying to be funny. Then I went to the hotel and a woman at the desk said, ‘Are you going to put some jokes in it?’”
This is the director’s final Bond and, soonish, producers need a new actor for the tuxedo, too. Who the hell can replace him? “The good thing is, Jonathan, it’s up to someone else!” Mendes bursts out laughing — loudly, unsympathetically.
Sam Mendes, the director of Spectre, on his unusual relationship with Daniel Craig and the super-spy. By Jonathan Dean
Daniel Craig says he was involved in Spectre right from the start, in script and casting and more. Is that unusual for a film of this size?
I think it’s probably very unusual, but that’s the nature of Bond and Daniel’s involvement in it. He hasn’t done a movie since Skyfall, and he really put all his focus on it. And because he and I already had a relationship, we picked up where we’d left off, so he could get involved on a more creative level. And on this movie, I have to say, that was incredibly useful. Because, although he’ll be the first person to admit he can sometimes get inarticulate when it comes to script or artistic issues, his instinct is unreally good. So because he was involved from such an early stage, I didn’t need to explain anything. He understood the genesis of every idea, of every sequence. He’d seen my storyboards, conceptual art...
It’s hard to imagine Roger Moore having a similar approach...
[Laughs] But I don’t think Daniel knows any other way. He said this himself. He can’t choose which way he’s going to approach a role. He approaches it the same way, looking for the truth of it. It’s always difficult to talk in broad, generalised terms, but that is what he’s doing. He’s trying to find some way of making it believable, psychologically and emotionally. And physically too, in terms of actually doing things himself. He just applied the only way he knows how to act to Bond. I don’t think it was ever a strategy or a choice. It’s just who he is.
What changes have you and Daniel brought to the franchise?
I think [Casino Royale director] Martin Campbell made the biggest stride, which was to take away the camp that had overtaken the genre. He eradicated the self-reflective jokes, the nods and winks. You’ve got to remember this is a franchise that once had George Lazenby turn to the camera and look straight into it and say: “This wouldn’t have happened to the other guy.” To put someone in the “real” in the middle of that is a big leap. In a way, the biggest leap was made in the casting of Daniel. Then the obvious thing we brought to it all in Skyfall was the idea that he’s ageing.
You also brought in a through story, some continuity to the films’ plots?
There’s definitely a connection between Spectre and Skyfall, and a connection between Spectre and all the movies Daniel has made. That was a very deliberate attempt by me and him to impose some kind of coherent journey on the character. Here, the character is developing across a series of stories. And, again, I didn’t introduce that. Quantum of Solace follows on immediately after Casino Royale.
Let’s say that when Craig was cast, people in favour of him being Bond were 70:30 against. What is that ratio now?
Oh, I have no idea. Bond belongs to everybody and everyone has an opinion about it. When we were in Istanbul on the last movie, a cab driver told me how much better Bond was since it stopped trying to be funny. Then, I went to the hotel and a woman at the desk said: “Are you going to put some jokes in it?” And that’s basically Bond. Everyone has a different version in their heads. Everyone has a different touchstone, and that’s what makes it interesting. This is our take on Bond. It’s not going to be the universal take on Bond. The moment you do that, you please no one. This is where we were guided by what we’re interested in as a director and an actor . It’s what we feel we’re good at, and beyond that it’s up to people to judge whether it works or not.
At some point, Craig will no longer be James Bond. Who do you think could replace him? He’s a hard act to follow...
You know, the good thing is, it’s up someone else. That’s my answer. It’s other people’s jobs to speculate and to enjoy the dialogue. What happens to Bond? Is he culturally significant any more? All of those things. But one thing I would say is that two months before Skyfall came out, the front cover of Entertainment Weekly had a photograph of Daniel and the headline was, “Is Bond dead?” Before every movie, there’s always the debate: “Does he make sense any more?” That’s up to the culture to decide and the filmmakers, people who have a little part of the mythology that is Bond. The only job is to be interesting. Nothing else.
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto....553.ece
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| natta | Дата: Воскресенье, 11 Окт 2015, 19:18 | Сообщение # 56 |
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| Spectre: Daniel Craig's fourth outing as James Bond is likely to delve into 007's past – this is a worrying prospect
When Bond 24, Spectre, is released later this month, cinemagoers will discover whether Daniel Craig (in his fourth movie as 007) will finally be getting in touch with his inner Roger Moore… or whether this will be Bond back in Hamlet mode, agonising over the metaphysical meaninglessness of being an action man spy in the Edward Snowden era.
As ever, ahead of the release of a new Bond film, there has been wild speculation over which turn Bond will be taking. The talk among foreign distributors (who claim to have seen the film in advance) is that the franchise is going back to basics: no eyebrow arching and winking at Moneypenny, but no self-indulgent neurotic navel-gazing either. The trailer seems to back them up. “Is this really what you want, living in the shadows, hunting, being hunted, always alone?” Dr Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) asks Craig’s Bond. “I don’t stop to think about it,” he blithely dismisses her line of inquiry.
However, Spectre director Sam Mendes spoke recently to one British newspaper about the importance of eradicating the “self-reflective jokes, the jokes, the nods and winks”, and in making Bond “real” and “emotional”. This is a process that began (Mendes suggested) with director Martin Campbell on Casino Royale and that he has sought to continue in Skyfall and Spectre. There have even been rumours that, in Spectre, Bond “may finally find his family”.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/spectre-daniel-craigs-fourth-outing-as-james-bond-is-likely-to-delve-into-007s-past-this-is-a-a6689751.html
One of the main reasons that the James Bond franchise has lasted for more than 50 years is precisely that Bond doesn’t have a backstory. As a character, he arrived on screen fully formed. In Dr No, his personality was already as faultlessly tailored as the dinner jacket he wore at the gambling tables. This is not a man prey to introspection, or fretting about the past or wondering how he might change in the future. He isn’t worried (like George Smiley) about being cuckolded by a colleague. He is promiscuous, but either has low sperm count or a faultless record with contraception: his girlfriends never seem to get pregnant. He doesn’t have elderly relatives he has to take to the hospital, nappies to change or children he has to pick up at the school gates. Nobody gives him birthday cakes and he is never called up by old school friends. He doesn’t age. The same observations found in Skyfall about him being too busy with his nocturnal activities to be in the shape required of “Double-O officers” were found in Dr No too.
“That’s basically Bond. Everyone has a different version in their heads,” director Sam Mendes recently observed of 007, pointing out that some people always grumble that the films are too funny, while others complain that they are not funny enough. His remarks hint at Bond’s secret. The 007 agent is a character of such monumental superficiality that we can project on to him. He is defined by his gadgets, weapons, cars, clothes and lovers. To invoke his childhood, put him in the psychiatrist’s chair or bring his family on to the screen would therefore surely be a huge mistake.
Craig has always approached playing Bond with all the drive and thoroughness of a Method actor trying to dig under the skin of a peculiarly troubled and complicated character. You can see why Craig follows this tack. The more details he absorbs, the richer he feels his performance will become. The actor has described Bond as a “misogynist” and someone with “serious f*****g problems”. Asking what made Bond that way is to risk undermining his mystique. Craig’s brilliance in the role lies in the way he is able to hint at an interior life that Bond watchers know isn’t really there.
The screenwriters behind Bond have been performing a delicate balancing act for the past half century, trying to maintain what Richard Maibaum (who wrote more Bond movies than anyone else) called “the proper balance between the suspense, the sex and the fun”.
The spy has had his emotional moments along the way. Long before Daniel Craig, George Lazenby’s Bond had to cope with seeing his new bride, Countess Tracy Di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg), shot to death in front of him in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
“It’s alright. It’s quite alright really, she is having a rest,” the distraught secret agent, cradling her body in his arms, tells the policeman who turns up on the scene. “It’s no hurry. We have all the time in the world.” It’s a suitably atrocious piece of acting from Lazenby, who doesn’t look upset at all. Instead he looks rather embarrassed to be caught at such an intimate moment. This was not how anyone wanted to see Bond and the only surprise was that Lazenby didn’t wink to let us know for certain that he was only putting on the grief.
Helpfully, the scene came right at the end of the movie anyway, which meant that by the time the next Bond was made, Diamonds Are Forever, with Sean Connery back in the role, Countess Tracy was long since forgotten.
Timothy Dalton’s Bond was also shown close to tears, much to the indignation of many Bond watchers. Dalton was a better actor than Lazenby and even more soulful than Craig in the role. His Bond seemed less comfortable with violence than any other – one reason, perhaps, that he only lasted for two movies.
Generally, the Bond series has managed to auto-correct. If it lurches too far in one direction, it will always move swiftly in another.
As Maibaum noted, Fleming’s novels generally served up much the same basic ingredients: “a monstrous villain, torture scenes, card games, the femme lead involved with the opposition etc.” The trick was to tailor the screenplays so the “love stuff,” the suspense and the comic elements were all in the correct alignment. Delving too far into Bond’s memories would be one certain way of unbalancing the money-making machine that Broccoli and Saltzman coaxed into existence more than half a century ago.
Bond himself always looked forward, not back. That is why Spectre seems such a tantalising and worrying prospect. Its very title invokes memories of the shadowy organisation Bond fought against in earlier films. In the trailer, we see his name scrawled on a memorial listing of those who died serving their country. Christoph Waltz’s villain, the “author of all your pains”, seems desperate to dig his claws into Bond’s past and torment him that way. That raises the possibility of a more neurotic, conscience-stricken and traumatised Bond than we have ever seen before – a prospect most decidely not to be wished.http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/spectre-daniel-craigs-fourth-outing-as-james-bond-is-likely-to-delve-into-007s-past-this-is-a-a6689751.html
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