Daniel Craig on his role in 'The Invasion' where he got to be a real-life hero and 'save' co-star Nicole Kidman's life.

What attracted you to The Invasion?

It was several things. I’ve always loved science-fiction movies, so it was a genre of film that I wanted to try out as an actor. I had done Tomb Raider, but that was more of an action film, and this is a real science-fiction movie with this great conspiracy thriller going on at the same time - very political, very extraterrestrial and very eerie.

What did you learn about Nicole Kidman that you didn’t know before working with her?

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More than anything, I learned that she absolutely deserves that Oscar she won (for The Hours) because she is probably one of the most talented actresses in this business. She had some very tough scenes to do, and not just physically, but emotionally, and she did them with no problem at all.

Are you a fan of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

Yes, I am. I love that original Body Snatchers and the Donald Sutherland remake. But I really don’t consider this a remake or sequel or new installment, because the stories are really very different.

I think that people are using the term ‘based on’ because there are certain plot points - which I have been sworn not to reveal - that the films share. Beyond that, though, I think we made a whole new science-fiction movie.

You became something of a real-life hero while filming a scene at the Chilean embassy. Is it true that you saved Nicole Kidman’s life?

“Saving Nicole’s life,” I think, is a bit of an exaggeration (laughs). Certainly, any of us could have got hurt, but I don’t think I really rescued anyone from being seriously injured.

What happened?

They had the rain machines on heavy, so the water was really coming down hard, so it was very difficult to see much outside of this SUV Nicole and I were in…. Nicole was driving, I’m in the passenger seat, and we were supposed to drive up to the entrance of the embassy and let the valet park the SUV.

Everything seemed fine when Nicole and I got out, but then I noticed that the SUV was still moving - with no one in it! Apparently, Nicole had forgotten to put it in park, so it just started rolling down this hill.

Nicole was right next to it, people were in front of it and it was on its own. So, without even thinking, I jumped in to stop it. I hadn’t closed the passenger door when I got out, so I jumped in, eyed the emergency brake and immediately engaged it. It stopped.

Was there ever any point where you let the tabloid or internet criticism get you down?

I got the passion that people felt for Bond, and I understand it. I make films, and normally when I make a film we wait until we get to the premiere and we get to the time when the press sees it and then I start getting reviews. I was like, ‘See the damn movie and then you can say what you like about it, but watch the movie!’ There was no point in getting in tit-for-tat arguments about the way that I looked.

Do you consider this the best time of your life?

I hope not. Not yet. God, I’ve got a few more years in me - God, I hope.

Will we ever see you in lighter fare? A romantic comedy maybe?

No (laughing). I don’t know, we’ll see. It depends on the script. I never say never because I always said I’d never do a gangster movie, but this one came along and this one was too difficult to resist.

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November 24, 2007
The man with the golden touch

Daniel Craig on Bond, muscles, celebrity and how he’s found himself, at 39, starring in two of the film world’s hottest franchises

Martyn Palmer

Daniel Craig can pinpoint exactly the moment his world changed. He was sitting in a hotel room in Switzerland when the producer Barbara Broccoli – the keeper of the James Bond flame who had selected Craig to become the new, postmodern 007 amid a storm of scepticism – rang with the news that the box office for Casino Royale was looking good. Very good.

“It was surreal,” he recalls. “Just surreal. The numbers kept going up and up and up and it was like, ‘That’s it! We’ve done it.’” Those numbers did in fact keep soaring, to nearly $600 million (£300 million), making it the most profitable Bond film to date. Add to that a host of international reviews that hailed his performance as a triumph, and you certainly have a reason to celebrate.

Suggest that he might have uncorked a bottle of vintage champagne, perhaps, and his face – the one that looks like it was hewn out of a chunk of rock – creases up into a smile and those piercing pale-blue eyes light up as if they’re powered by halogen.

“You’re joking, aren’t you! Champagne? No way. I had a couple of very large vodka martinis. I went to the bar and it was like, ‘Three please! Shaken, stirred or however you want to serve them.’”

As he knocked back Bond’s favourite tipple, Craig could certainly be forgiven for flipping a two-fingered salute in the general direction of the doubters who said that he was the wrong man for the job. “Yes, when it came out and people liked it, believe me, there was no one happier,” he says. “But I wasn’t going to say, ‘F*** you.’ Because there was no need.”

Craig now has the kind of career that few achieve – he’s a box-office star with street cred, and there aren’t many of those around. From Bond he went straight on to film The Golden Compass, the first part of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, in which he plays the rugged Lord Asriel, equal parts explorer and scientist.

The Golden Compass, with a budget rumoured to be $150 million (£72 million) or more, will open next month to a fanfare of publicity and could even outdo Bond in takings. If it’s a success, then Pullman’s two other books will be filmed, and Craig will find himself starring in two of cinema’s biggest franchises. “I know,” he groans with mock despair. “Who’d have guessed?”

At one point, it did indeed seem very unlikely. When it was announced in 2005 that he was the new 007, websites were set up with the express purpose of rubbishing a man who hadn’t yet shot a single scene. One organised a petition calling for him to be replaced, and another raged that he was too, er, blond to be Bond.

“The stuff that people were saying [he adopts a whiny voice]: ‘Oh, he can’t do it.’ I’ve just spent six months doing it, I’ve done it. And it’s funny but, I think because of the furore that was going on, some people were going to come along to see how rubbish it was, so we had that on our side. I wanted people to see the film and be surprised, I wanted them to say, ‘We didn’t know it could be like that.’ But, to be honest with you, all of that was a defence mechanism, so I didn’t have to think about all the s*** that was going on. I was determined to keep my mind on the game.”

We meet in the Soho offices of Craig’s publicist. He’s wearing jeans and an open-necked shirt and he looks remarkably fit – he’s started training again in preparation for Bond 22 (as yet untitled) – although not quite as buffed up as he was for Casino Royale.

I mention the now famous scene in which he emerges from the sea in Casino Royale looking like a poster boy for a muscle magazine. “Yeah, I know,” he interrupts, laughing. “Arrghh! I was big for the last one, and it wasn’t a mistake, it was a definite statement. This guy, when he takes his shirt off, should look like he could kill someone.

“After it finished, I stopped training. I got drunk for three months! No, I didn’t, but certainly relaxed for three months and ate what I wanted, and then it’s hell because as soon as you get back in the gym, you have to work all that off, and it takes much longer than it does to put it on. Last time I did a lot of weights to bulk up because I had to do it quickly. This time I’m going to do more boxing and more running. I need to be physically strong for Bond and, as much as I looked in great shape, I got a lot of injuries, probably due to the fact that I wasn’t doing enough running and jumping, which is what I needed to do in the film. I won’t look physically much different, but I won’t be as ‘no neck’ as I was last time.”

The year since Casino Royale was released has been packed: Craig has travelled around the world, made another two films (Flashbacks of a Fool and Defiance) and attempted to adjust to his new life. The promotional tour for Bond was a whirlwind of airports and hotels, accompanied by his girlfriend, producer Satsuki Mitchell.

“I couldn’t get through it without her,” he says. “You’ve got to have a sense of perspective and she gives me that. It’s a strain on a relationship because we are never in one place and there’s never a lot of time. I have to fight for that, and for my family.” Craig was married, briefly in his twenties, to the actress Fiona Loudon, and they have a teenage daughter. Now he seems settled with Mitchell, whom he met in 2005 when she was a producer on The Jacket.

“It’s a struggle, but I couldn’t do it without having that closeness to somebody,” he says of maintaining his stability during the pressures of the past year. “Being on your own would be sad, sick and weird. I don’t trust myself. I need that balance, it’s crucially important. And we’ve been to some amazing places. I remember one night we were in this sky bar at the top of a beautiful hotel having a drink looking out over Beijing and just being blown away.

You have to have someone to share this stuff with. We got a private viewing of the Sistine Chapel. A fantastic guy took us around and told us the history of all the paintings. How cool is that? I said to Sats, ‘We have to remember this.’”

It is, of course, very cool. But when you are James Bond, it comes with the territory, such as the men’s magazine GQ recently naming him the Best Dressed Man in Britain. “Oh yeah,” he groans. “I mean, that’s very nice and everything, but now when I take the rubbish out wearing a pair of flip-flops, shorts and a T-shirt, some paparazzo will snap me and that’ll come back to haunt me.”

Craig is now in a world where, just as doors open to a life of wealth and privilege, others close behind you – you are fêted all over the world, but a pint down at your local is likely to turn into an unseemly scrum with phone cameras flashing all around you. He laments the loss of the latter, but knew that was part of the price he would have to pay. “You know, if I'm up for it, fine. I have to keep hold of my sense of humour, because you can lose it very quickly and you start retreating into yourself; then you can’t go anywhere unless you are with armed guards, and the whole thing becomes ridiculous. So you have to smile about these things.

“But I tell you, trying to take pictures of me when I’m having a piss is not welcome and never will be. And yes, that’s happened.”

Born in Chester, 39 years ago, Craig grew up in Liverpool. He attended the National Youth Theatre at 16 and then the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. In 1996 he starred in the highly acclaimed BBC drama Our Friends in the North, a corruption and crime saga regarded as one of the best television dramas of recent times. That led to feature films, and along with Sylvia (playing poet Ted Hughes) and The Jacket, Craig has been sought out by directors such as Steven Spielberg (Munich), Sam Mendes (Road to Perdition) and Roger Michell (The Mother, Enduring Love). Craig himself continues to look for more edgy roles to play alongside the big-budget extravaganzas.

Earlier this year, he signed up to play a fading Hollywood star looking back on his youth in England in Flashbacks of a Fool, directed by his friend, Baillie Walsh. The film has a relatively small budget, but with Craig on board it was green lit and in production. “I think we probably could have done it [pre-Bond], but it would have been harder, and a struggle in a different way. It’s not going to be a huge money-spinner because it’s not that kind of movie.

“But to be able to make films like this is important to me. I have to be all these other things now and acting starts dropping down the list, which is bizarre. You go, ‘Hang on a minute, I just want to be an actor, I want to just turn up and do the gig.’”

In musical terms, The Golden Compass is stadium rock, set in a brilliantly conceived landscape with parallel worlds where people’s souls manifest themselves as animals known as Daemons. Craig’s Asriel is the uncle of Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), the 12-year-old heroine of the story. “It clings on to the story of Creation, but it’s also about growing up, about being a human being and figuring out who you are, and becoming better because of that,” he says.

Pullman’s novels are controversial, too, because they feature a strong theological element that casts the Church as an oppressive organisation out to stifle individuality. Some Christian groups have condemned them, and it’s not clear yet how much of this will feature in screenwriter and director Chris Weitz’s epic.

Craig met Pullman on set and they have stayed in touch. “He feels passionately about the books, obviously, but also passionately about life. I’m a huge admirer of his, and I genuinely like him very much. My take is that there is a fundamental right to discuss all sorts of things, particularly at the moment with the way the world is. All we’re saying is faith always needs to be questioned.”

Now Craig is back into Bond mode, involved in every stage of Bond 22. Marc Forster will direct, and writer Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) is finalising the script. Forster, who directed Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland, isn’t an obvious choice. He’s just shot The Kite Runner and isn’t known for action and adventure.

“If we are going to do this, we have to create something that is going to last, that we are going to look at and say, ‘They were different,’” argues Craig. “It’s a risk, but the last one was a risk just because it was me getting involved, and we seem to have ridden that one out. So now we have to go to the next stage. I want to make sure the next two, three, four, whatever films I manage to do before they chuck me out, or before it goes tits up, sit nicely within this era.”

Craig’s enthusiasm is infectious. Bond has changed his life, in both good and bad ways, for ever. He has to deal with that, but there’s part of him that’s determined to cling on to where he comes from, and not let it all go to his head. “I mustn’t get complacent,” he says, “because if I start relaxing about all of this, then I’m going to turn into a dick. I don’t want to do that if I can possibly avoid it.”

The Golden Compass is released on December 5

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Daniel Craig has apparently revealed playing a washed-up movie star in new film Flashbacks Of A Fool was a warning to him.

The 007 actor plays Joe Scot, a fading Hollywood star who has fallen out of favour with the public and whose hedonistic lifestyle has taken its toll.

Daniel, who's 40 next month, revealed to Empire magazine that it made him think about what his own future could hold.

"It's never too early to be a has-been!" he said. "But that's not the relevance. The important thing for me was always that, if you're not looking after yourself, things will spin out of control.

"The story is very simple. Joe has driven himself right into a corner, and I kind of relate to that. I can understand wanting to hide away from everything, because people seem to be staring. It does get you down a bit.

"That's why it seemed fun to do this film, to play around with that image. Who knows, maybe I will be something like Joe Scot in a few years time. Never say never!"

He added: "There's not a lot of point in being unduly optimistic about this business. It'll turn around and bite you on the arse - that's just the way it is.

"But, I mean, I liked this character when Baillie (writer-director Baillie Walsh) first wrote it, and I like it even more now that I can go, 'Ah, maybe we can push it - play with the dark side a bit more'."

The film opens on April 18.

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Notoriously private Daniel Craig has revealed his daughter is proud of his new role as James Bond - reports the Daily Record.

While many 007 fans have been outrageously spiteful at the choice of Daniel as the super-spy in new film Casino Royale - Ella, 14, can't wait.

He never usually talks publicly about the girl he had with his ex-wife, Scottish actress Fiona Loudon.

Ella and Fiona live in London, and Daniel knows his new role, which will make him a household name throughout the world, means his private life will be under more scrutiny than ever.

Daniel, 38, said: "Ella's proud of me being James Bond. I think she's comfortable with it. I try to communicate all the time about it. I'm very happy with the film, but I want to protect her.

"I don't bring her up in conversations much because the more I talk about her the more the Press have a right to take those photographs."

But he added: "I think she is eager to see the film."

Not since George Lazenby has an actor been so vilified for playing Bond - and Daniel hasn't even been seen by most film fans in the role yet.

Early reviews of the 21st Bond movie have named him as the best 007 since Sean Connery.

But, last year, when Daniel was revealed as the actor taking over from Pierce Brosnan, there was a fierce internet debate, with fans trying to do what no Bond baddie has done - get rid of him.

There were claims he felt seasick when he arrived on a speedboat for the London announcement. Also, it was said he didn't care for martinis, didn't like guns and couldn't drive.

Then came the fact he was too short (he's 5ft 11, hardly vertically challenged like Tom Cruise) had big ears, and the biggest no-no, that he was the first Blond Bond.

Daniel, knowing the critics who've seen the film are impressed by the gritty, more violent themes, said: "The internet is a wonderful voice piece for people to use, and I'm a great believer in it. But it's a place where I can't enter into a debate, because people are entitled to their own opinions. It's democracy. All I can say is, go and see the movie.

"There's a passion about this, because people take it very close to their heart, as they have grown up with James Bond - so have I. "I was being criticised before I had presented anything, so it was name calling.

"I just had to be quiet and say, forget it. I can't think about it. I have to move forward and concentrate on getting this job right. But Daniel admitted that the backlash and criticism did get to him. He said: "It kind of affected me in a way. However prepared I was for it, I couldn't have seen that coming."

He added that he relied on his friends and family to spur him on. "That's what friends are for. If I do a piece, then the opinions of my friends and family mean a lot to me," he said.

And Daniel claimed he never thought about dyeing his hair.

He laughed: "Never for one second did I think about dyeing my hair. My hair was not an issue. The only thing I thought was that we're going to cut it short and I didn't want to think about it. I didn't want to be thinking about what's on top of my head.

"Hopefully now it's not an issue. Hopefully people don't see it now. Hopefully I've got other things to offer than hair colour."

His friends may call him Mr Potato Head, but Daniel's charisma is undeniable.

Not only does he have a powerful screen presence but, with his rugged good looks, he has been lucky enough to romance stunning women such as Love Actually actress Heike Makatsch, his former girlfriend of seven years, supermodel Kate Moss, whom he briefly dated, and actress Sienna Miller.

On screen, he has filmed love scenes with some of Hollywood's most beautiful women, including Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sienna Miller.

Playing Bond means spending a lot of time between the sheets on camera.

Revealing a typical English sense of humour, Daniel said: "Love scene, oh, they're just momentous. They are usually cold studios with 15 people watching. I don't get off on that. What else can you do, you sort of cover up and sit and drink tea. Talk about the weather."

His main Bond girl in Casino Royale is played by French beauty Eva Green, who starred in The Dreamers and Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven.

"I don't know if they listened but I did talk about Eva being cast," said Daniel. "Eva just has amystery about her, and that was what was needed. She has something going on, and those are key elements in a movie."

And Daniel also gets to grips with gorgeous Italian actress Caterina Murino, who makes her entrance in a beach scene that carries more than a hint of Ursula Andress in Dr No.

Daniel's Bond is said to have more of the brooding intensity of Sean Connery or Timothy Dalton rather than the light-hearted Bonds of Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan.

He battles evil villain Le Chiffre, played by respected Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen.

In his films, Daniel, best known for Brit gangster flick Layer Cake, excels at playing dark characters who have violent outbursts, from Francis Bacon's petty criminal gay lover in Love is the Devil, to a rogue gangster in Road to Perdition, an assassin priest in Elizabeth and passionate poet Ted Hughes in Sylvia.

Daniel confirmed that the new film is "darker". And it's younger too.

He added: "We go back to the beginning. We meet this person for the first time, we're obviously suspending belief. He is a raw character. He's someone who's extensively violent.

"He's not out for revenge, he's out for justice.

"But he meets someone who he falls in love with and we have a huge love story. There's a great card sequence with him, and he gets his heart broken because he gets double crossed.

"It creates this person who is no longer emotional, but he is actually going to go out for revenge, which you'll see right at the end of the movie.

"The bad guys are not politically or religiously affiliated. They represent themselves individually, and a network of people who are trying to destabilise the world's economy so they can take as much as they can."

Chester-born Daniel will certainly look the part as British super spy 007.

He worked on a tough physical regime to get in shape for Casino Royale, based on Ian Fleming's first book, and which is directed by Martin Campbell, who steered Brosnan to box-office glory with his first Bond movie, Golden Eye, a decade ago.

Pictures of Daniel looking buff coming out of the water in a pair of natty blue trunks had women's magazines all hot and bothered.

But does he have girls throwing themselves at him now?

He joked: "I have my girlfriend throwing herself at me occasionally.

"But it's not like I was trying to be sexy. I had to get fit because I had to be able to do stunts.

"I thought the only way to do that was to work out and get fit and buff and get physically into shape.

"Thank God I did, because I did as many of the stunts that I could - I got injured, I got hurt but I never missed a day of filming."

But it's usually Bond girls who we see enigmatically emerging from the water.

Daniel laughed: "Ursula Andress was before me. It was a little homage."

"I did a lot of weights. I wanted to bulk up quickly and so I had a lot of high protein diets and that sort of thing.

"By the time we got to the Bahamas, we kind of peaked, and that's where you see me walking out of the water. That was the peak of it, but we then kind of balanced it out."

Knowing he had to deliver a good Bond took its toll, and Daniel made sure he got drunk once aweek to unwind.

He said: "One night a week I drank myself stupid, which was important, otherwise I don't think I could have gotten through the film. I had to separate myself from the movie at least once a week and eat anything, eat cream cakes and just pig out."

Brosnan used to claim that the first film he saw in a cinema was a Bond movie.

Daniel played the same card. He explained: "When I went to the cinema for the first time it was Roger Moore's Live and Let Die. But Sean Connery defined the role. One of my favourite movies is From Russia with Love, particularly because it's with Robert Shaw. He plays the bad guy, and he's blond."

Daniel, who has signed a three-picture deal to play Bond, claims that he hasn't given it much thought yet.

He added: "If this does well, then I'll be making money. I'd love to have the money to buy art. I don't have an Aston Martin either, but I'd like one."

www.mi6.co.uk

I am an actor first then Bond: Daniel Craig

Prithwish Ganguly

Thursday, October 23, 2008 23:59 IST

Believing in essaying strong characters in lively scripts, actor Daniel Craig tells Prithwish Ganguly how he lays a geat deal of stress on being versatile

Apart from doing Bond films, you are also starring in other films in diverse genres. Is it like being versatile?
I am an actor first then James Bond and even the Bond is a creative character which has been kept alive with some outstanding acting, lively scripts and extraordinary directions.

So if I wasn’t a Bond, I was already an actor. An actor has to have versatility. It is this versatility that has helped me bag the role of James Bond. Tell me, when I wasn’t James Bond, then who was I? I was Daniel, Daniel the actor. So that is one tag, I would never want to lose. Having the tag of Bond is an honour but not at the stake of losing Daniel Craig.

What attracts you to sign a film?
A nice script of course, but also my character in the film has to be important for me to take on the role. Then it also depends on how nicely the script has been narrated. And the director matters a lot.

Who/what has been your biggest inspiration?
Well, Sean (Connery) has been my all time idol and I am lucky that I am playing Bond, a character I used to watch on television. His Dr No and From Russia With Love are movies that I admire the most. Those were the massive blockbusters of their time and even today when you watch those films, you know how competitive cinema of an age relatively deprived of technology or skills can be.

If you weren’t an actor, what would you have been?
I don’t really know, in fact no one really knows such things. I had been an acting freak since my childhood and that is why I joined National Youth Theatre, at the age of 16. Later, impelled by this craze, I secured a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, from where I did my grads in 91. But perhaps I would have been a rugby player, because I played a lot of rugby during my high school.

What does Craig love to do when he isn’t acting?
I am a workaholic and can work anytime of the day or night. So when I am not acting, I am thinking of how better the shots could have been or could be. I rest, but my mind doesn’t. It is always active and thinking of the best performance. And when talking of real leisure times, first of all I don’t get that leisure time. And even if I do, more than half of the time is gone in planning out my several projects. But what little time I have, I just chill and rest sleep.

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007 star discusses the 22nd Bond film, performing stunts and more

Written by Devin Zydel on 27 Oct, 2008

Three brief video interviews with Daniel Craig have been posted by Movie Maniacs TV through YouTube.

Speaking about his second time around as 007 in Quantum of Solace the actor explained his expectations for the 22nd James Bond film.

‘To feel secure about where this is going,’ Craig said. ‘To feel secure that Bond is in a really healthy place. That we can be proud, as I am, that this is still this British character that still exists and still carries on. [The audience] will be blown away I hope because this is very intense. We’re not leaving a lot of time for people to breathe in this movie.’

Craig also explained his approach towards stunts in the films, especially considering the level of action that comes with a Bond adventure.

He said: ‘Traditionally, it’s always been that that’s what actors always do. You take movies back to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and that, you know, that’s what those guys did. They didn’t have doubles. They were the ones falling out the windows. They were the ones with the house falling on top of them. And I kind of feel that there’s a tradition there that if I can physically do it, I should be trying to keep up with that.’

‘I wouldn’t touch this [role] unless I could explore the character,’ Craig continued. ‘Otherwise this would have no interest to me. But let’s not get it wrong: this is a James Bond movie. This is not a deep, deep down psychological study of the human being. This is James Bond and there are certain rules that apply to this man. As far as he’s concerned, he’s the best at what he does and there’s nothing that can stop that.’

‘What I’ve always liked about it and what certainly comes through in the Ian Fleming books that here’s a man that believes that and then all the time gets knocked back. And it’s how he deals with that that’s interesting. How he deals with adversity; how he deals with being put down because he does get put down.’

Спасибо Commanderbond

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Daniel Craig Interview, Quantum of Solace
Posted By: Sheila Roberts

MoviesOnline sat down with British actor Daniel Craig to talk about his new film, “Quantum of Solace,” directed by Mark Forster. Hailed as one of the finest actors of his generation on stage, screen and television, Craig returns to the role of the legendary 007 Agent James Bond following his highly acclaimed debut in Casino Royale, the highest grossing film in the history of the 007 franchise.

Quantum of Solace continues the adventures of James Bond (Craig) in Casino Royale. Betrayed by Vesper, the woman he loved, 007 fights the urge to make his latest mission personal. Pursuing his determination to uncover the truth, Bond and M (Judi Dench) interrogate Mr. White (Jesper Christensen) who reveals the organization which blackmailed Vesper is far more complex and dangerous than anyone had imagined.

Forensic intelligence links an MI6 traitor to a bank account in Haiti where a case of mistaken identity introduces Bond to the beautiful but feisty Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a woman who has her own vendetta. Camille leads Bond straight to Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a ruthless businessman and major force within the mysterious organization.

In a minefield of treachery, murder and deceit, Bond allies with old friends in a battle to uncover the truth. As he gets closer to finding the man responsible for the betrayal of Vesper, 007 must keep one step ahead of the CIA, the terrorists and even M, to unravel Greene’s sinister plan and stop ‘Quantum’.

Daniel Craig is a fabulous guy with a wonderful sense of humor. Impeccably dressed in a stylish black suit, he surprises us when he enters the room with his right arm in a matching sling. Here’s what he had to say about his high octane adventures as the legendary James Bond:

Q: I like that it's a black sling, color-coordinated.

Daniel: Well, I had to try. I try to be color-coordinated with all my clothes. What can you do?

Q. So can I ask what happened?

Daniel: No! (laughs) I've had a tear in the shoulder, and I think two Bond movies have just aggravated it and during this one, it started aching really badly halfway through. You know, there was a potential actors’ strike, so we had a deadline. If we didn't finish, we were screwed, so I went to see a surgeon and he just said, “Fine, you might damage it more but you'll be fine and come and see me when you've had a rest.” So six weeks ago I had surgery at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and I’m well on the way. I've just got to keep it in this (sling) for awhile.

Q. Is Bond chipping away at you piece by piece?

Daniel: No. (laughs)

Q. In this film there seems to be a lot more things to identify you as doing the stunts yourself. Did you feel you did a lot more physically in this?

Daniel: You know, we did, we learned a huge amount when we did Casino Royale, certainly I did, and the stunt team that I worked with did, about how much I can do and what's the limit. I think we're getting better, at just, you know, making it look like it's me. And the guys I work with, I've got four or five guys who work really closely with me, who have got incredible skills, fighting skills, gymnasts, acrobats. And luckily, they're all kind of quite similar to me, and we just… I try to get as fit as they are, because they're seriously fit, and then, you know, I get my face in there and if I can get my face in there in that key moment, and not sort of pull the audience out, that's all I want. I don't want the audience to be watching an action sequence and then suddenly to go, “Oh, it's not him.” And there are moments, if you play it really slowly, you'll be able to find it, but hopefully they're few and far between.

Q. The stunts in this seemed even more dangerous than in Casino Royale, especially all the fire at the end. Was there anything that scared you?

Daniel: No, no, not scared, I mean, trepidation but genuinely it's about getting it right because I only want to do it once. And so if you're standing on a roof and you're going to jump over, I'm like, “I don't want to do this more than once if I can help it.” So, that's all you’ve got going through your head. I mean, there were moments where suddenly we were…because we rehearsed it… so with the fire sequence, we went to a fire testing facility, and we basically went in there with fire suits on and got as close as we could just to sort of get us used to the heat. And then you’re covered in this flame retardant which is like gel, which is just plastered all over your body. At some point I had plastic hands on because I'm smashing through all sort of things, and there's guys with fire extinguishers. You hope for the best. (laughs) No, I mean, there's more to it than that. We would plot it out really, really carefully, and all I cared about when we go for the takes is that we're not doing, you know, the jumping out of windows is actually, I didn't want to do that more than once, but after the third time, it's actually getting quite fun, so (laughs), in a sick way that that happens.

Q. I assume you saw Bond films when you were young. When you became Bond, did you think there's something about this I want to preserve or something about it that should change?

Daniel: Not when I was a child. Mark (Forster) and I had a long conversation when we came to do this, many long conversations, which we're still doing. We're big fans of the early Bonds, but also the movies that they spawned in the 60s, because they had a direct effect on movies all over. One of the biggest things that the early Bond movies did was go on location and that was unusual at the time. I mean if it was Hollywood movies, they were shot in the backlot, and they were created sets and beautifully done, but Bond went, he went to Japan, he was in Japan, and that's what we wanted to make sure happened in this movie, the feel, that you were transported to these places. And plus, trying to add some of the style that they developed back then and trying to get some of that back into the movies and the feel because the mood of them is, they're stylized, I mean, even though there's reality in this and everybody will be saying, oh it's grittier and harder, I think it's a very stylized Bond and I like the fact that it has a look back to that.

Q. I'm imagining that you are going to have a little more pull perhaps with the next Bond film, is there a certain place in the world that you want to go to that you haven't been, that you can work into the Bond franchise?

Daniel: A beach (laughs), for about an hour and 20 minutes in the movie, and then about ten minutes of action. That would really, really thrill me. (laughs) There's a look out and explosions could be happening everywhere, occasionally sipping my cocktail. (laughs)

Q. There are so many amazing places on the planet, is there a place in the world that you would love to...?

Daniel: I mean, the problem always is because travel is so much easier than it has been, there are fewer places to go that people haven't been. What we tried to achieve in this is that we went to places which are unusual to visit and then sort of double like Colon and Panama would double for Haiti and for lots of South America. It's to try and photograph them in the best way you can, and I don't know, there's plenty. I can think of ten places I'd like to go, personally. Ten places to film a Bond movie, that's a different thing, because the logistics of that are so great, but anywhere, you know, anywhere, as long as it's anywhere. If we were in Africa, it would be great. Asia would be wonderful. I'd love to go to China, or Hong Kong. That would be somewhere fantastic.

Q. You talked before about how this movie's a book end to the first movie, but the first BBC review that came out said it felt more like a second in a trilogy. Is it possible that the themes of these first two movies will carry on to the third one, or do you think the third one will be something completely different?

Daniel: Personally I think that we've wrapped up all the loose ends that I wanted to wrap up, which is just the Vespa story and also solidifying the relationships, which is so important, with Felix and with M, and sort of where their place in the world is. I think we've got a very kind of stable Bond world now that we can just do whatever the hell we want, and that I find exciting. To my mind, there's no trilogy because we've got to do something different now. I mean we hit a submarine base. Let's be honest. (laughs) Maybe a small one, you know what I mean? But now we need to explore, you know, there's Moneypenny, there's Q, there's all the other characters that we could conceivably bring in. My instinct has always been with those sort of things, and people have asked and said, “Well why is there no Q? Why is there no Moneypenny?” I'm like, because you need to give them to good actors, and you can't get a good actor and say, “Remember how Moneypenny was played? Can you do that?” I think they'd go, “God, no, I want to reinvent this character.” And so that's what I'd love if we get a chance to make another one of these movies and who knows whatever happens and that's where I'd like to go with it. I'd like to sort of hand it on to some people with talent, that's all.

Q. How did you like working with Mark Forster?

Daniel: It was fun, it was great. I'm a fan of his, I've always been a fan of his, and the idea, when he came up, when he was asked to do it, and I said, I've got absolutely no problem with that, because he's a fantastic storyteller, so.

Q. How was it different from the last Bond film?

Daniel: He's a lover of films, he's a cinefile through and through, and you look at how complex his films are but how different his films are, and to me, that sort of strikes me as a very brave person who can sort of say, you know what, I'm not going to stick with it, you know, I'm going to take subject matters completely at either ends of the spectrum. And when he came to do this I met him and within five minutes, because one of the things I knew having done one, is, this is twice the length of any other movie. It’s three months to normally shoot one movie, I mean a movie of fairly regular size, this is six months, I mean it's six months on every location, and as soon as I met him, I knew he was a brave man and that he was up for doing it, and so I've had a great time with him.

Q. A personal question, when somebody hurts you, can you let it go? Bond cannot let it go, can you?

Daniel: He can, I think he can. I think actually, because the mistake in this movie is that he's on a vendetta, he's not. I kind of keep this whole thing about the title, Quantum of Solace, it's actually what he's looking for, it's all he's looking for. He just does his job. He's not out to take revenge. He might be a little angrier than he was in the first one (laughs), but I mean that's kind of, you know, that's the actual point. The point at the end is he gets the chance to do the guy, the one guy who's actually the person that's responsible, not the bosses, not anyone, the actual guy that twisted the love of his life. And he says no.

Q. I just mean, do you have to get even?

Daniel: No. I don't believe in it, if I can help it, I don't believe in it.

Q. Did you go into this one with more confidence, because obviously with the first one, you know, all the eyes of the world were on you...

Daniel: Kind of. (laughs) Sorry, go on.

Q. ...I know you said back when you were doing press for the first film that you blocked all that out when you went to work, but there's obviously going to be some pressure. The fact that the first one was a success, were you able to start this one with more confidence, and not worry about...

Daniel: I wasn't, I mean, this is going to sound with hindsight like I'm just making this up, but I got over that a long time ago. All of that sort of pressure of doing it was something that happened in the Bahamas about three weeks into the shooting of Casino Royale. We had a good film, I mean we had a good crew, we had good actors, we had a good director, it's like, there's nothing else we can do to make this a better situation, so all the pressure that was on, I'd put to bed, just completely put to bed. By the time we'd got to the premiere in London, people were going, don't you feel vindicated now, and I'm like, I don't feel anything. (laughs) I feel like we've got a great movie. I have no reason to turn around. I never wanted to get into a dialogue about it. So, come to this one, all the same pressures were there, but in a very, very different way. I mean we're on the back of success, which is, I mean thank goodness. We could have been on the back of a dud which would have just been (laughter) I can't imagine. So obviously there's different pressures but there always is. It's a 200 million dollar movie, I don't know how you could do that without thinking there's a little bit of pressure.

Q. Could you talk about the first time they gave you the script? How did they present it to you? Did somebody deliver it to you and what was your reaction the first time you read it? Were you a super fan?

Daniel: You're talking about the script?

Q. Yeah.

Daniel: Was I a superfan? (laughs) No, I mean, it's always, it's a much longer process than that because the whole thing, it took about, I mean I've been working on this for nearly two years now, and so the ideas that we were putting together and the ideas we were putting toward for Paul (Haggis) and the whole thing were coming back and forth, so no one ever presented me with ahhhhh (laughs). I mean it was like I got drafts and I read drafts and we read ideas and we looked at things and it's kind of a continual process. It was not like that with the first one. That was really a kind of, you know, security guards and trying to…no, I’m joking... (laughs), but metaphorically speaking, it was like that, yeah.

Q. So, for you, this was a much more collaborative process?

Daniel: Yeah, very much, yeah.

Q. When you're on set with a film like this, is there a lot of room for any sort of improvisation, or is it really a very structured environment?

Daniel: There's a lot of improv. There's a lot of improv. I mean it's like, I mean obviously, the jumps are not improvised (laughs), “I'll go this way,” you know, “Aahhhh!” (laughter) That would really screw things up, but there's stuff, you know, there's takes and you change lines and I mean, I'm not Robert DeNiro, believe me. I don't kind of go on and on, you know, take after take, but I do do three or four takes and change the lines around and sort of just screw around with it as much as I possibly can. Just to loosen it up, you know?

Q. How was Mark with coverage? Was he a one camera guy or did he have a lot of cameras and a lot of stuff?

Daniel: He likes sticking very classically with one camera, but we'd bring two cameras in, if we could fit it in. You know there's always the thing with two cameras, if you're shooting quickly and you're trying to shoot quickly, is that there's a thing about pushing yourself around the room and the camera kind of starts getting in the eye lines or something if you stick two cameras in, but with dialogue sequences, it's good to shoot it like that sometimes because then you'll get both, you'll get a very continual flow. But, it's not that strict. I mean, I don't know a director that is, that sticks with one camera, unless there's a financial issue involved.

Q. How was it working with Olga?

Daniel: She's great, I mean, you know, we kind of cast her as a… I was involved with the casting process, and she came in and she just had this sort of quiet kind of, I don't know, toughness about her and also something going on, you know, this sort of like secret that she's carrying with her, and you know, she was kind of thrust into this, and we started training and we started sort of getting into it, and sometimes I'm going, this is kind of what it's like (laughter), and she just did a great job and I think that her story kind of ties in so nicely with it and no they don't, they don't get into bed, but they kiss you know. (laughter)

Q. This is an incredible role, but it's also very all consuming because it takes so much of your time now, are you able to do other things that you really want to do?

Daniel: I've done three movies since I did the last one, a little movie called Flashbacks that came out a couple of days ago, kind of very quietly because it's a small movie and then Defiance which is coming out at the end of the year, so I'm just looking at scripts, I mean you know, good scripts are hard to find, you have to go looking for them, so I'll keep doing that if I can.

Q. Have you ever worked with Judy Dench before in London?

Daniel: No...

Q. What is your relationship like working with her?

Daniel: It's good. It's very good, I mean it's a joy to work with her, you know. I mean I'm a very selfish actor. If I can work with really good actors, my job is sliced in half, at the very least sliced in half. I mean she just comes on, she commands, and she could literally speak the phonebook and I'd listen to it.

Q. You mentioned Defiance, which I believe is getting an Academy Award run at the end of the year.

Daniel: It's getting a quick limited release on something like the 31st of December.

Q. Could you talk a little bit about your role in that film and what was it like working with Ed Zwick?

Daniel: Great, Ed sort of presented me the script. It's a story, a very little known story set in Belarus during the second World War about four brothers who organize a resistance really against the German army but also against sort of the local population who are siding with the German army, and there's a forest which is around Belarus, Lithuania which just goes on for miles and miles and miles and it's still impenetrable today. And they went in there, and they sort of committed acts of revenge, and then, formed a society and survived four years and got 1500 people out of the forest, created schools, synagogues, factories, organized with the Russian partisans and it's just a good story. He showed it to me and I said, “Yes, thank you, I'll get involved with that.”

Q. Who do you play?

Daniel: One of the brothers.

Q. With subject matter like that, did you do a lot of research to prepare and was your process a little different?

Daniel: Not really, no. I treat everything just about the same. If there's research to be done, I'll do it, but if there's not research to be done, then you know, I'm off to the pub. (laughs)

Q. What do you think Tom Ford’s suits brought to the look of Bond?

Daniel: He's a very classical modern tailor, you know, I mean I can't talk about tailoring, I don't know a great deal about it, but I know when you put on a good suit, that it feels good. And there was something about the line he created, that I think sort of just, I think it fits with this Bond, I just personally do. And you know, he works in a very classical way, but there's always a twist and it's kind of nice, a nice subtle twist. They’re not kind of flourishes.

Q. And it’s fun to destroy all of them?

Daniel: It's a shame, it's a sadness really. Thank you.

“Quantum of Solace” opens in theaters on November 14th.

MoviesOnline

Spy games with Daniel Craig
By Sarah Lyall
Published: November 2, 2008

LONDON: It took two years of high-level negotiations to arrange a meeting with Daniel Craig. In an era when MI6 - the agency that employs his best-known character, James Bond - blithely advertises for agents on the Internet, Craig may well be the world's most elusive pretend spy.

The long wait allowed plenty of time for disturbing rumors to marinate. For instance: He is surly and defensive, a reporter-averse utterer of combative monosyllables. Or this, from two female film publicists: He has more sexual magnetism than anyone we have ever met.

Perhaps nothing short of Craig's materializing in his snug powder-blue bathing trunks from "Casino Royale" and offering to shake the martinis himself could have realistically lived up to all that anticipation.

But there he was in normal jeans, his arm in a sling from recent shoulder surgery. He was wearing a thick cardigan that, truth be told, walked a sensitive line between doofusy and stylish. He was, of course, unfairly attractive anyway, in his craggy, lived-in, blue-eyed way, but not so much as to render anyone speechless or unable to operate a notebook.

He was polite to a fault. He stood up when his publicist's assistant brought in a cup of tea. He apologized several times for being five minutes late. He acted as if he were not sitting in a soulless conference room, which he was, and as if he had all day to chat about Bond and other interesting topics, which he didn't. (He had an hour.)

Unlike many movie stars who come to believe the myth of their superiority, Craig, 40, tends to mock his own celebrity. Now that he is too famous to go to the movies without being recognized, he said, he might be forced to install a screening room at home. Actually not. "I could stick it next to the indoor swimming pool," he said sarcastically.

Passing beneath two celebratory posters of himself as James Bond in his publicist's office here, he grimaced and muttered, "That's my Dorian Gray portrait." Asked whether he saw himself as a natural leading man, he said, "Fat chance." And then, "There's not a skin-care product in the world that would have made that happen for me."

When he was cast as Bond, filling the position most recently vacated by Pierce Brosnan, Craig did not seem like an obvious choice. He was an actor's actor known for his intensity of focus and his wide range of challenging, counterintuitive roles. He has played, among other things, a sharp-lapeled pornography baron from Manchester in the BBC mini-series "Our Friends in the North"; a professor pursued by a male stalker in "Enduring Love"; a builder sleeping with his girlfriend's sexagenarian mother in "The Mother"; a drug-dealing businessman in "Layer Cake"; a killer full of murderous range and heartbreaking tenderness in "Infamous"; and the poet Ted Hughes in "Sylvia."

"Everybody said, 'Oh, aren't you afraid you'll be typecast?"' he recalled, of taking the Bond role. "And I said, 'Of course I am,' but if it has to be this - well, that's not too bad."

Traditionalists were appalled. The British tabloids, whose writers possibly had not seen Craig in his other films, sniped that he was too short, too blond, too actory, too potentially Lazenbyesque; they spread the rumor that he didn't know how to drive a stick shift, let alone one attached to an Aston Martin.

But from the first scene in "Casino Royale" (2006), in which Bond brutally kills a man with his bare hands and then coolly shoots and kills his own corrupt boss, Craig proved to be a rare combination of plausibility, physicality and charisma. He got rave reviews, and not just from Bond's traditional fan base.

(Full disclosure: Craig's mix of emotional vulnerability and cocky insouciance discomfited to an alarming degree many of this reporter's female acquaintances. One saw "Casino Royale" five times in two months. Efforts to find a way for interested outside parties to pose as a reporter's assistant during the interview, or to dress as plants and hide on the windowsill, proved unsuccessful.)

The latest movie, "Quantum of Solace," which opens in Britain, France and Sweden on Friday and worldwide throughout the winter (see http://007.com/international/ ), is full of the usual Bondian big guns, big explosions, big-busted women and big, improbable, high-testosterone stunts, many of them performed by Craig. While he bulked up for "Casino" - he wanted to "look as if he could kill people just by looking at them," his personal trainer, a former Royal Navy commando, said recently - in this film he focused on building up his stamina, going for lean and mean over brawn.

(Craig was recently quoted in The Times of London as saying, "I am not an athlete, although I have always enjoyed keeping fit between bouts of minor alcoholism.")

Craig said that he had been determined to ensure that the story made logical and emotional sense. "Quantum" begins moments after "Casino" ends, with Bond, wielding an enormous firearm, on the island where he has just shot one of the men responsible for the death of Vesper Lynd, the treacherous love of his life.

Craig particularly wanted Bond to have to contend with the emotional repercussions of Vesper's death.

"It was very important that we deal with that," he said. "I just felt that you can't have a character fall in love so madly as they did in the last movie and not finish it off, understand it, get some closure. That's why the movie is called 'Quantum of Solace' - that's exactly what he's looking for."

Last fall he and the director of "Quantum of Solace," Marc Forster, set out to fill in the gaps in the script, left incomplete because of the Hollywood writers' strike. Forster said he was struck by how much Craig wanted to get the story right and ensure that his interpretation of Bond was "not just a cliché, but a character that people can connect to."

He added: "He's very shy and slightly modest and humble, and he doesn't like to be the center of attention. It's more like, 'Let's make good movies and tell a good story and do a good job."'

Along with "Quantum," Craig is appearing this fall in "Defiance" (set to open in the United States and parts of Europe in late December and January), based on the true story of the Bielskis, a trio of freedom-fighting Jewish brothers in World War II. Defying the Nazis (and the odds), they set up an unlikely community of tough, armed refugees in the punishing Belarussian forest. Craig plays Tuvia, their complicated leader - sometimes hot-headed, sometimes coolly rational; now seeking revenge, now preaching restraint.

The shoot was tough. The actors had to speak Russian in a number of scenes; they also had to live more or less in the woods, in sometimes extreme frigid conditions, for three months. Most of the cast came down with some sort of bronchial flu, Craig said, "but when we started drinking more, it seemed to get better."

The director of "Defiance," Edward Zwick, said it was interesting to watch Craig take on the role, with all its ambivalence and inner conflict, in tandem with playing the self-assured Bond.

"You see very clearly his ambition as an actor; he refuses to be just one thing," Zwick said in a telephone interview. "What you have to understand about Daniel is that he is a working actor who considers himself that. He began in the theater and did all sorts of ensemble work, and in some ways this was a territory in which he's more comfortable than in being the star who's out in front of the movie."

Craig grew up in Liverpool and spent much of his spare time watching movies, sometimes by himself, in a small cinema down the street from his house. He left home as a teenager to seek his fortune as an actor in London. He worked with the National Youth Theater, went to drama school and began being cast as romantic leads, a designation he brushes aside.

With each part, he explained, "I said to myself: 'Romantic lead - what is he? Is he an alcoholic? What's his deal? What's his problem?' For me, that has always been the way. That's what I did for Bond and what I try and do with everything."

He is determined to continue pursuing extra-Bond roles.

"I've been so fortunate to land this amazing role in a huge franchise," he said. "It's set me up in a really good way for life, and that's wonderful. But I love acting, and I genuinely think it's an important part of what life is about. I get a kick out of it, and I'm not good at sitting around."

Craig, who has a teenage daughter from an early marriage, genuinely seems more interested in talking about other topics - the books of Philip Pullman; the exciting-to-him proposition of Barack Obama being elected president; movies he likes - than he does in talking about himself.

But he mentioned his longtime American girlfriend, with whom he lives in Los Angeles and London. He wears a silver necklace inscribed with a quotation "about taking your heart wherever you go," he said when asked, sounding suddenly shy.

Recently, he said, the two drove up the American West Coast, through to the Pacific Northwest. They ducked into a small-town movie theater to see the Guillermo del Toro movie "Hellboy II: The Golden Army."

Someone approached Craig.

"Has anyone ever told you you look like Daniel Craig?" the person asked.

"No," Craig answered, and walked on.

‘Must get it right. Must entertain.'

JOHANNA SCHNELLER

November 7, 2008 at 11:35 PM EST

He was hooked to a wire, and he'd trained with the stunt department for two months. But when Daniel Craig was actually standing in an upper-storey window in Siena, Italy, on location for Quantum of Solace – his second outing as super-spy James Bond, opening Friday – about to jump onto the roof of a bus that was barrelling down the narrow alley below, he found it, he deadpanned, “very disconcerting.”

“Your mind just goes, ‘No,'” Craig said, from the safety of a Toronto hotel sofa during a whistle-stop publicity tour (Chicago last night, Los Angeles tomorrow). “You've got half of Siena who've turned up to watch – ‘What's this idiot doing?' You want to nail it first off so you don't have to do it again. Then this actor thing comes out in me: ‘Must get it right. Must entertain.' It's awful.”

Not for the audience. Craig, 40, is unlike the five men who preceded him as 007, and not because he's blond. He's the most serious actor of the lot, having played roles as varied as a selfish poet (Ted Hughes in Sylvia), amoral drug dealer ( Layer Cake), family slayer ( Infamous), lover of painter Francis Bacon ( Love Is the Devil) and tormented professor ( Enduring Love). His fierce realism in his first Bond film, 2006's Casino Royale, reinvigorated the franchise, earning the highest grosses of its 46-year history, $594-million (U.S.) worldwide. The first thing that went out the window was the kind of nudge-wink irony that had come to characterize the series. When Craig gets hit, he looks like it hurts (in fact, during filming, he sliced off a fingertip and got a black eye that required eight stitches), and when he jumps, his body is taut with purpose.

In person, however, he's not what I expected. Yes, he's insanely handsome, with a face that seems carved by a sculptor to suggest manly experience, and blue eyes so bright it's as if a key light is permanently aimed into them. But he's more compact and delicate than he appears on screen, and much friendlier. He doesn't brood or glower; he's modest and laughs a lot. He is, dare I say it, jolly. He refers lovingly to his teenage daughter, from a two-year marriage that ended in 1994. He wore a white shirt, black tie and tan cardigan that was half GQ, half grandpa, and his right shoulder was in a sling, healing from recent surgery on an old injury that he'd exacerbated playing Bond.

“I couldn't tell you which scene did it,” he said. “I look at the movie and go, ‘Oh, it could have been there, or then.' I phoned up my mother earlier and said, ‘I'm aching today.' She said, ‘Welcome to my world.' “I'd love to do a movie where I'm doing the same stunts, but where I can go, ‘Holy shit!'” Craig continued. “Like that great scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where they jump off the cliff, and they both go, ‘Aaaahhh,' and their arms are pinwheeling, trying to fly. That's a weird one – when you first do a jump, you do start flapping your arms. The stuntmen go, ‘Don't do that.' It must be some bird instinct in us somewhere.

“But the action stuff doesn't look right if you react to everything. If I'm in a car chase and I go ‘Ooo! Oh!' every time something happens, the audience says, ‘It's okay, it's a movie.' I don't want them to remember that. I'm driving into Siena in that car and it could be a big gag [here he mimes waving]: ‘Morning, everyone!' But [expletive] that, I want it to be serious. The audience should be breathing quite heavily at that point.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger had rules when playing his action heroes. For example, when you walk down the stairs, you never look at the stairs. Craig found that hilarious. “My influences – though believe me, I'll never get there – are people like Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy,” he said. “That manliness those guys had – they could look at the stairs, they could do whatever they wanted. There were no rules for them. Tracy would enter a scene looking down, and when he'd look up, his blue eyes would spark. But he'd say, ‘I'm just looking for my [expletive] mark,' because he was so short-sighted.” Craig laughed heartily. “Fred Astaire – he rehearsed for weeks upon weeks, and then shot his dance routines in one take. That is skill. Those are my heroes.”

Craig took his time signing on to play Bond. His attitude during his first, exploratory meeting with the franchise's long-time producers, siblings Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, was: “‘This is so nice of you. Quite frankly I can't imagine it, but good luck,'” Craig said. “We had a productive conversation about how they wanted to strip the franchise down and start again, but I went, ‘Wow, great idea – big job! I'll be going now,' and kind of backed out the door.”

He kept them waiting a year and a half, until he read the finished script. “Daniel is serious about his work,” Wilson said. “He shoots all day, then goes to the gym for an hour or two, goes home, has a very light dinner and is in bed by 9. He's very intelligent, interested in all kinds of things, politics, art. But he's very careful about what he does. He's chosen his career path very carefully.”

This December, Craig's serious-actor side gets a workout in Defiance, based on the true story of three Jewish brothers who survived the Second World War by setting up a camp in the frigid Belarusian forest. “It's a really interesting dilemma because they committed nasty crimes, but for the sake of survival,” Craig said.

Hmm. For a charmer, Craig seems perpetually drawn to playing bastards. “I've always liked a weakness in character,” he said. “I like flaws. Moral ambiguity is more interesting that somebody who just goes, ‘I'm right and you're wrong.' I like debate. How someone breaks. With Ted Hughes, for example, there wasn't an awful lot of redemption in the film, but I understood him. And reading Birthday Letters that he wrote for her [the poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide during their marriage], you went, ‘Oh, he loved her.' What happens in any relationship, nobody knows. Those things are interesting. Breaking someone down and building them up again is life, and you must explore that.”

He paused, grinning. “Drawn to bastards, am I?” he said. “Maybe you've picked something out. I'm a bit worried now.”

Источник

“James Bond walks into a room wearing a sling” sounds like the beginning of a joke.

Except for our interview, James Bond really does walk into the room with his right arm in a sling. The international spy may be invincible, but the guy playing him—Daniel Craig—isn’t. “I had to have shoulder reconstruction,” Craig explains. “I think it’s an old injury, but two Bond movies over the past three years have not helped.”

Bond hasn’t lost a step in the new film “Quantum of Solace,” a sequel of sorts that takes place right after the end of “Casino Royale.” In “Quantum,” 007 is out for revenge and teams up with a mysterious Bolivian babe (Olga Kurylenko) while pursuing a businessman (Mathieu Almaric) whose environment-friendly organization may have ulterior motives.

Craig told Metromix about why Bond never walks around in a sling, the difficulty of getting in shape for the role and how 007 would fare against Jason Bourne.

Nice sling. Who’d you have to kill on your way here?
Nobody yet ...

How come we never see Bond walking around in a sling?
Because I think it would be fairly dull, wouldn’t it? [Maybe] if he was walking around with plaster on his foot…

If you read the books, it’s funny because he always goes off on these missions and then M gives him a holiday. But invariably he’ll be on holiday and something else will happen. I’m kind of waiting for the holiday at the moment.

Doesn’t Bond ever wear something casual? He wears suits even when he knows he’ll be in action.
I don’t think he ever knows he’s going to do action things. I think he dresses for the day, and he dresses as perfectly as he can, and if something happens, it happens. He doesn’t think, “Well, I won’t wear that today. I might get shot.” I don’t think that actually goes through his head.

How much of a pain is it to get in shape for the role?
It’s a pain in the ass, I can’t tell you. There’s two things. One is the narcissism attached to it. I think he likes being fit. But the other one is I want to do as many of the stunts as I can, and the only way I can do that is to keep myself as fit as I possibly can. Because if I do get an injury I’ll recover quicker. It sounds like I really think about it all the time, but I don’t. I just think: OK, go to the gym, rehearse, work. Go to the gym, rehearse, work.

What is James Bond fighting for, as the world changes?
Let’s boil it down to what it is. There’s someone somewhere out there, the bad guys, and I go out and get them. It’s no more or less than that. I’ve never tried to do anything with the part to suggest that it should be anything other than that.

Bond is loyal to the queen let’s say, but actually he’s a civil servant so he’s loyal to nobody really. In fact the only people’s he’s loyal to are the people because those are the people he’s protecting. And there’s something I think that’s quite good about that.

Do you miss the privacy you had before you became Bond?
Of course I do, yeah. What I do know is how much more important to me [it is] than it ever was. I had very little press interest in me back then [around the time of “Layer Cake”]. Maybe something would happen and my name would appear in the paper and suddenly I’d get a paparazzi outside my house for some reason. I didn’t enjoy it then. I’ve always retained my privacy, but now I protect it even more. My friends and my family, they need to be looked after.

Other globetrotters like Jason Bourne try to achieve Bond-like stunts. If Bond and Bourne were in a race around the world …
James Bond would win. That’s the answer. No need to go into it. He would win. [Laughs]

Even in a sling?
And I’ll have one arm tied behind my back.

Источник

Добавлено (20.11.2008, 13:43)
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Добавлено (20.11.2008, 13:49)
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Интересное интевью.
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Daniel Craig on James Bond and morality

With Quantum of Solace breaking box office records in north America and most of the train stunts behind him, Daniel Craig sat down with WELT ONLINE to discuss royalty, strong women, Jason Bourne and the question of morality when it comes to smoking.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but did you mention that you wanted to have some gay implications in the next Bond?

No I don’t think I said that. I’ve never wanted a gay Bond, I might have said I have nothing against being gay in a movie, but I never wanted a gay Bond.

How British is Bond today?

I hope he remains as British as he possibly can. I mean I can only say that because I am British so therefore I try to instil within him things that I understand. The British Bond which was post war is a very different man than the Bond now. I hope there is a sort of integrity within that part of government [MI6]. I’d like to believe, I fantasize about that, that somebody does know what they are doing out there. Otherwise, we’re all in the shit.

Are you a royalist yourself?

I’m not a royalist, no.

When you started being Bond, you were mocked in the beginning. Now everyone says you are the best Bond ever. Does that give you a kind of satisfaction?

Um. I don’t think about that .... It’s a wonderful compliment to have and I hope someone comes along after me and does an even better job. That’s the way it should work, it should continue like that.

Was the second time easier for you than the first time?

I think yes. There is the expectation that was there, but it’s good expectation - I mean we had success. It would have been dreadful if ‘Casino Royale’ had been a dud: this would be an awful process to try and drag the thing back up now but we used the impotus of ‘Casino Royale’ to make something - for certain make two very special movies and I think we’ve managed to do that.

Was there any pressure because of the success?

Of course, yeah, definitely. But I mean, that’s the sort of pressure we like, isn’t it? I think ... (laughs)

Some people even argue you’ve become a symbol of the new masculinity. What do you make of that?

People have said it made him very male and I think that his masculinity is very ambiguous. Not that his maleness is ambiguous, but that his being a man would just come up and I think that he’s quite amoral – he kills people for a living – everything that’s sort of good about him as a man is bad about him. And therefore I’ve never tried consciously to create a man that is particularly male. The people I know or met that are very male aren't necessarily male at all, some of them are women. And those are the people I find more interesting than men.

There are writers and critics who have said people argue now the movie is more of an action thriller now, and less of a classic James Bond.

I disagree. I really disagree. Because we made a very conscious effort, Mark (director) and I sat down and we said what movies do we love the most. And the movies from the early sixties, particularly ‘Dr. No’ and ‘From Russia With Love’, I’m a huge fan of, but these movies certainly influenced the rest of the sixities, political thrillers and the look and feel of them and the stylish way they were put together. Mark has done this with the cameraman to create a movie that sits in that era and sits there because the movie is more stylistic than ‘Casino Royale’ ever was. Stylistic in the sense that it’s a different world, this world does not exist. And we go back to that old-fashioned way of shooting and put it in a modern setting.

Earlier you mentioned amorality. Certain aspects of amorality have been dropped. Bond doesn’t smoke anymore ...

I don’t think smoking is amoral.

Yes, but no smoking and just one drink in the movie ...

No, six drinks.

And what about the girls?

We’re going to take the story on from Casino. We made a statement, he fell in love, he had his heart broken. And it was a huge deal that we decided we wanted to continue the story, so that we could finish off telling the story. If he would have jumped into bed with ten women it would have contradicted the story. There will be time for that. There will be plenty of time for that. If we get the chance to make another one, there’ll be time for that. It was just wrong for this film and we have to make choices like that. It’s like the martini line, like the Bond line: if we put them in because we should, then they won’t sound right. Because there is actually a generation of people out there who have never seen a Bond movie and we can sit round here and maybe some of us have seen a lot of Bond movies and we know those lines but there is a huge part of the population that has never seen one so to just drop them in there makes no sense, you have to introduce them again and give them weight and give them meaning and they’ll be funny hopefully. I’m very keen to do that, I love those lines.

Were you able to make a lot of choices on the Bond film?

I don’t shut up. From the moment I started working on this movie I’m in the director’s ear, I’m in the producer’s ear. There are rare movies I don’t go to sleep when I am making them.

There have been several versions of the screenplay. How early on are you involved with the screenplay?

Right from the beginning.

How much did it change?

Quite drastically in some respects, but Mark and I decided early on what we wanted to achieve and this is to discover what was meant by ‘Quantum of Solace’, which was this moment of peace that he’d lost because he’d lost his love. But it also represented who your friends are, who your allies are and who you can trust. And characters like M, Felix Leiter and certainly with Olga’s character later on, about forming allies and gaining strength from people you trust. And once that’s made, and I think we do very successfully in the end of this movie, the step to make another Bond film is in place. Because I feel now we’ve solidified this arrangement. And next time round, I mean, you know, Moneypenny, Q, submarine bases, bases under volcanoes, you can do it all.

So will Bond get his humor back in the next film?

No no no. (laughs). I think he’s really funny. It’s just that we don’t write gags. I think maybe there will be room for it. I’d like to spend the first 40 minutes of the next movie on the beach with a cocktail, and plenty of gags. But I mean this was very much about telling the story so putting gags in, again, just kind of contradicted what we were trying to do. But there’s laughs in there. Many laughs in there.

In the last two movies Bond is surrounded by strong women.

I just think it’s interesting to put up strong characters in front of somebody to get something better out of them. I think all of the characters are strong; Felix is strong, Mathis is strong, Gemma is strong, Olga is strong, M is certainly the one woman in his life, or the one person in his life, who solidifies who he is. My main thing with the director and with the producer is to please get the best actors we can get front of me because my job is cut in half and I think it’s the most entertaining thing you can do because there’s friction and there’s conflict and there’s love, any great emotions – it’ll be interesting to watch.

The director comes from a different kind of movie-making than the one you worked with before on ‘Casino Royale’.

Not where I come from, I mean I’ve been working with directors like him for most of my career.

But how does it show? Does it show in the preparation of the screenplay or does it also show in the shooting of the movie?

I wish I could give you some sort of scoop about that but he’s a filmmaker and he’s a lover of cinema an he’s incredibly diligent and prepared when he gets to a film set – like many great directors are. It doesn’t matter whether they are making a movie 25 million Euros or 10 million Euros or 5 million Euros or 250 million Euros – it doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing you have to apply, which is: do you know what you want to do? Are you prepared? And if something could change, would you be prepared to change as well? And Mark has just a love of making films and a love of putting the right people around him and I think that’s a skill that big directors and small directors, great directors have.

You mentioned the necessity of introducing Bond to new generations of moviegoers, but after two years I thought Bond is some sort of trademark like for example Tarzan of Darth Vader.

You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But I know for a fact that there a lot of kids who have never seen Bond, and have never seen ‘Casino Royale’. I don’t think you can sit still, you should never sit still, especially when you’re doing a franchise, you should never sit still. You should never rely, I personally believe, on what’s gone before. As an artist you should never rely on what you’ve done before because that means that you’re looking to the past, going: "Oh, look how good that was" – there’s nothing forward-thinking about that. So you should be constantly readdressing to try and improve on what you have.

The high-frequency editing in the action scenes reminded me more of Jason Bourne, rather than a Bond movie.

What we did was, - I don’t agree, I’m a huge fan of Jason Bourne films, I think they’re wonderful – we filmed this in an incredibly classic way. Filming in Sienna, we’re using six cameras, wires, and we’re filming it in a very old-fashioned way. Yes we come in and we go tight but we’re not hand-held, we’re on dollies and we’re on cranes. And if you went back and you compared the two I think you would see they are very, very different, because Jason Bourne is shot 90 percent hand-held, and the reason it has that quality is because it’s hand-held. We’re shot the other way around, we’re 90 percent on dollies and on cranes. That’s the big difference. Plus the other thing is what we do is we pull back. We pull back every chance we get to show the scope of where we are ... which is a much more old-fashioned way of shooting. But it’s what a Bond film is about. I don’t have a problem with being compared to the Jason Bourne, I think they’re great movies, but we’re so not those movies.

Has Bond influenced the way you are choosing other roles?

Look, I’m not going out to play a British spy (laughs), I’m not jumping out to do that.

I was wondering about the physical stress of the movie. How do you cope with that afterwards? Is that why you’re taking a rest now, because it’s so exhausting?

It is exhausting, but it’s exhausting now because we’re going around the world selling the film. It’s hard but this is part of the process. I’ve been working on the film for over a year. It’s hard work but it’s a big, big film and I’m involved in a lot of it. I’m taking the rest of the year off. If I do a job where I have to hang off a train I’ll rip my shoulder out of it’s socket and I need to give that a rest.

Do you think your Bond is more able to change than the others?

I’d like to think so, yes. I feel very much we’ve closed a book with these two stories. And I feel there is a bigger space of ideas. People keep saying there’s no Q there’s not Moneypenny, I’d love to get those characters in but what I’d like to do is I’d like to offer those parts to the best actors we can find and then ask them what would you like to do with it? How would you invent those characters? I want them to be reinvented. And I think if we do that we’ll get a much richer tapestry for these movies and they’ll remain events because they’re part of my growing up and other people’s growing up and to look after them in that way, to keep them healthy, it would be wrong of me not to do that. I can only do it in the way I know how which is moviemaking, which is trying to get the best people you can.

This is the shortest Bond film ever.

We didn’t set out to do that. You never do. What you do is you go off and shoot, you get the best material you can and then the director puts together what he’s got. And this is the movie Mark had. We also had an incredibly short period between finish and release. He had a lot of very hard choices to make, which I think has given the movie a sense of immediacy and an excitement, which it might not have had if we’d stretched it out to make a longer movie but then I don’t think it’d have been an interesting movie. I think he made exactly the movie he needed to make.

Have you become an opera lover?

No.

When you were making ‘Casino Royale’, did you already know there was going to be a sequel?

No, when we were doing it, we didn’t, no. The decision was made at the beginning of last year, I think, when the writers were getting on board and we were talking about it and then the decision was came quite early on last year.

http://www.welt.de/english....ty.html

Licence to thrill
Written by Clive Simmons
Wednesday, 03 December 2008 16:28

Clive Simmons meets every bad boy’s wet dream, the deliciously dangerous Daniel Craig.

“The question with James Bond is a fundamental question of ethics,” Daniel Craig says. “It’s, ‘Am I the good guy or a bad guy who works for the good side?’ Bond’s role, after all, is that of an assassin. But, you know, I have never played a role in which someone’s dark side shouldn’t be, or wasn’t, explored.”

The first thing you notice about Daniel Craig is his looks: the blond hair, the toned body, and his blue eyes. Craig could have played ‘beefcake’ roles and had a successful career, but instead, he has forged a career playing dark or tormented characters in movies such as Layer Cake and Love is the Devil. More recently, he was chosen to play James Bond in a remake of Casino Royale, in which he redefined Bond as a dark character rather than a man playing with intricate gadgets and women with names like Pussy Galore.

Raised in a small town in Cheshire, Craig’s parents divorced when he was five. His father, a merchant seaman, went off to manage “exotic bars” in the Caribbean, while his mother trod the boards with a prestigious theatre company in Liverpool.

Craig started acting at the age of six in a school production of Oliver, but was “beguiled” by the cinema at an early age.

“I got the bug in the cinema,” he says. “I just went and watched films like Quest For Fire and Blade Runner. I had no idea what was happening, but I knew then that I wanted to make movies. Seeing those guys’ faces get blown up on that huge screen, I thought ‘I want to do that.’ I always wanted to be an actor, I think, and I had the arrogance to believe I couldn’t be anything else.”

He dropped out of school early, although not before singing in a rock band, Inner Voices, and studied at the Guildhall School of Art and Drama, where Joseph Fiennes and Ewan McGregor were fellow students.

He was cast in the film, The Power of One, which he later termed “a piece of shit”, and drifted into television, starring in shows such as Drop the Dead Donkey, and another hugely successful series, Our Friends in the North, opposite Malcolm McDowell.

His big break came when he starred in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, opposite Angelina Jolie, although it is not a film he is proud of. “I thought I’d got myself into something I didn’t understand,” he says. “Those films by their very nature stop you acting. I should never have said yes to it. That movie was so crap. I couldn’t get my head around what was going on.”

But it did give his career a boost, and he was cast as a gangster in the film, Layer Cake. “What decided me on that was the script. What I liked about it was its intelligent through-line, and secondly – and selfishly I guess – I liked the moral aspect of the movie, which was that violence has consequences.

“You know, I believe that this is an art form, and every piece of work you do is political, regardless of whether it’s a blockbuster or a smaller movie. It has a political message to put across, and the audience should understand that message.”

More recently, he has worked alongside Nicole Kidman in The Invasion and The Golden Compass, although neither film worked in terms of box-office. In the case of The Invasion, there were rumours of ever-changing scripts and directors being sacked.

Regarding The Golden Compass, press seemed to focus not on the film, but whether its author, Phillip Pullman, had penned an “anti-religious” work. “He’s a very subversive human being,” Craig says, “and that’s very appealing. But it’s the debate the books have raised which I find interesting. It’s true that the books have been accused of being anti-religious, but I think it’s quite the opposite, really. They believe in faith and all the original Christian ideas of love and charity. And if a film raises that kind of debate, then that’s a good thing.”

When he was originally approached to be James Bond, Craig was not enamoured of the idea; in fact, he steadfastly resisted it. “Barbara Broccoli wanted to do a new adaptation of Casino Royale, and when I got the call, it was left-field. I knew that she was trying to take Bond in a new and different direction, but I turned it down. At the time there wasn’t a script, and I can’t say, ‘Yes’ without a script.

“But then Paul Haggis sprinkled his magic dust on it and when I read the script, I broke into a sweat. I worried about being typecast, but then Pierce Brosnan said, ‘Go for it. It’s a ride’ so I decided to do it.”

Like Casino Royale, Craig’s new Bond film, Quantum of Solace, has a leaner, meaner feel than its predecessors.

“It would be wrong to make a movie like this without using all the technology at our disposal, but it was important for us not to use those gadgets which were more from the late 60s period of spy and political thrillers. These films are heightened realities. They’re not Bond. This is the world of Bond.”

Источник

by Joanna Cohen | November 23, 2008

After months of hype and expectation the 22nd Bond film, Quantum of Solace, has been released around the world to a flurry of red carpets, analysis, and unabashed panting from Daniel Craig fans everywhere.

The man himself appears to be largely unmoved by the fame and the media circus that has accompanied the release. While being very protective of his family's privacy he is realistic about the immense interest in his professional life and refuses to become, what he calls "Greta Garbo" about it. He laughs easily and his conversation, while articulate, is peppered with a natural humour and a spontaneity that offers more colour than the average sound bite. Even his lined face makes him a stand out from the botoxed, heart-throb throng; his only facial surgery appearing to be the eight stitches he received as a result of an injury sustained during the filming of Quantum of Solace.

When the Bond star walks into the room for today's interview, there is a swagger to his walk that speaks to the effect he is accustomed to having on his audience. His stylish black suit and shirt are slick and tailored over his equally tailored physique. In fact, he is the very picture of elegance. That is until his publicist trips and pours a large jug of milk into his lap.

Without a hint of celebrity tantrum, he laughs at the incident, mops himself down and makes a wisecrack about what the stain may resemble on his trousers.

Basically, Daniel Craig is still positively human for a man who is every inch the movie star.

"I have all the same people I have had around me always. I think that is very important. Professionally the same rules apply. There are a finite number of good scripts out there. Just because you get a little success doesn't mean that a whole lot more boxes open. Some things just don't change. It is still about what appeals and what you feel you can do. There is a whole library of books out there but only a third of them are worth reading and the same applies here. Just because you up the number it doesn't mean that the quality gets better."

Of course, some things do change. Thanks to his success as the sixth Bond, he is now the highest paid actor in the United Kingdom. Not bad for a Chester-born son of a teacher and Merchant Navy midshipman who got into acting because it was all about "dressing up and showing off".

"I have been dressing up and showing off for as long as I can remember. Though I think it is a worthwhile profession. I think we need it as an outlet as human beings so we can figure out emotions outside ourselves. You want people to walk out of your movie and communicate. That is essentially what movies do".

While he claims not to take his character home with him, Craig does confess to becoming quite obsessive when he is working.

"You have to eat, drink, sleep and live it. It is a seven day week for me. I don't just do the five or six days of filming on set. I also have meetings and training. I have stunts to work on and scenes to figure out with the director. That is my job for six months. And it is a good job."

One aspect of the job that clearly demands a lot of his attention during the making of a Bond film is the stunt work. He describes the choreography of a knife fight with relish and the importance of him participating as much as possible rather than handing the entire responsibility over to a stunt team.

"We choreographed that over a 6 week period. I was working on that before the movie started and working on it every single night coming up to it. It is like a dance routine. To be honest that is what they boil down to these fights, a dance. And it needs to be me doing it. There are a couple of moments when my stunt double, Ben Cooke, comes in but for 90% of that fight, it is me."

While Craig will talk happily about the physicality of becoming Bond, he laughs off questions about his injuries.

"I have very little of the fingerprint left on this finger because I ripped the pad off," he says holding up a fingertip. "I also had stitches in my face and shoulder surgery but that was more of an old injury that I needed to get fixed."

"A lot was made of the injuries. I am not trying to be macho I promise you. It is just that I work with stunt guys and those guys are working through pain barriers that I couldn't even imagine. For me to start whinging about hurting my little fingers," he laughs, almost with embarrassment, "I will get text messages from them saying: 'Wuss!".

This same level of preparation went into his discussions with director, Marc Forster, in the development of Bond's character. They also worked together to forge the look and feel of the film. Due to the impending writers' strike they "had a script but not the script they wanted" and were forced to create much of the film as they entered production.

"We had lots of conversations. Both of us agreed that we wanted to capture something about the early movies. The style of those movies was just innate. If you look at a film like Goldfinger it is kind of ridiculous but is beautifully stylish. Everyone looks fantastic and if we can achieve a little bit of that in a modern setting using modern facilities then we would have achieved that which makes it a Bond movie."

The question of what makes a Bond movie, and how it is possible to satisfy the fans' desire for the traditional elements of the franchise is an inescapable discussion when a new Bond film is released. One aspect of Quantum of Solace that truly pays tribute to the tradition is its number one ranking as the Bond film shot across the highest number of exotic locations.

"Dr No, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger are all stylish movies. They went on location. They put the money up on the screen and we continue to do that now. We go on location. It's up there and you know you are watching a movie that has cost money because hopefully it has been spent in the right place."

He believes strongly, however, that a good Bond film can't rely entirely on the constructs of its franchise. He is quick to point out that there is a generation of people who have never seen a Bond film and as such the film must work in its own right. It is not enough to drop in lines, gadgets or characters just because one person in the audience has an expectation that they should be there regardless of good plot or characterisation. A case in point being the gags and humour that are traditionally scattered throughout Bond films.

"I love those lines and I think they are absolutely valid but we have to find a new way of doing them. We owe it to Bond. If you drop them in just because a member of the audience thinks that it is not a bond movie without them, they are bad gags. With good writers, and good actors we can find a way. We did it a bit with Casino and we did it a little bit with Quantum of Solace."

Not only are gags for the sake of gags dropped from the repertoire in Quantum, but here we have a Bond, a heartbroken Bond, who appears almost respectful of women, particularly strong women.

"The days of the misogynistic Bond are sort of over. It doesn't stop him from being misogynist at times but if he comes into contact with strong people, not just strong women, but strong people, it is just sexier. It is more interesting if someone challenges him and it is a woman."

He believes the most interesting relationship in the film is that between Bond and M. Both Craig and Forster felt that that relationship was crucial to the success of Quantum of Solace.

"We felt if we got this right it would make the movie. She doesn't trust him because her bosses are telling her to figure this guy out. She is in a dilemma because she thinks that she can trust him but has been ordered not to. I am really happy where we got it to and I hope we do get to make another one because that relationship is really solid."

Also evident is his pleasure in working with the actor behind M, Dame Judi Dench.

When asked about her sense of humour he laughs that he has "known dirtier senses of humour but hers is pretty dirty."

"I have never worked with her before. It has obviously been a dream of mine to do so and this dream has been fulfilled. Maybe we will do something serious one day but this ticks all the boxes."

Another actor he respects in the film is Rory Kinnear who plays M's aid, Bill Tanner. Craig laughs that he is basically the modern Moneypenny.

"He plays it beautifully and gives a brilliant performance in this. He has a really small role but he does it pitch perfectly, the way he plays off Judi. It is a very subtle performance going on in the movie."

Craig sees Kinnear's performance as a key example of why you don't just throw traditional Bond characters into the films, anymore than do gags and gadgets.

Like Moneypenny, Q is an obvious and much loved character missing from the franchise. Craig would love to see Q come back to the modern Bond but not just for the sake of having him there.

"We should give Q to a good actor. We should find an actor and find out what they think and find a good story. If we just drop it in there and then go to the basement and there is Q with exploding bananas, it is not going to work. Q has been done and it has been done brilliantly and with great humour. We have to find a way to bring Q into it properly. I think we owe it to the franchise."

For all this discussion, does Daniel Craig like James Bond?

"I don't dislike him I just don't want to judge him really. I think he is totally morally ambiguous as a character; he kills people for a living. If I start judging him or taking the piss out of him, which would be the worst thing to do, then it is all over and there is no room to go. I think it would be nice to get to know him a bit more in the next movie. I think he could be relaxed. I do think Quantum of Solace is the end of this sort of intensity. The next version of the intensity we will come from a different angle. It won't be so balls to the wall. It will hopefully be something that we can slowly come into and explore in a different way. Also, there will be a lot more gags."

Rotten Tomatoes

With terrorism afoot seemingly everywhere, where is agent 007, James Bond, when we need him? Well, he may not be available to save us in all his athletic and dashing glory, but in Quantum of Solace--the 22nd official installment--Bond exhaustingly gives it a damn good try. If he can't defeat the bad guys who pose the threat of corporate terrorism, then he at least exacts retribution for the death of his love, Vesper Lynd (who died in Casino Royale).

Not only is this the most traveled James Bond film ever (they shot in 17 countries), but its star, Daniel Craig, has been talking about it to everyone, everywhere (from TV talk shows to newspapers to a HuffPo vidblogger), and even to a small band of reporters --including this one as well. Though he talked for a prim 21 minutes, Craig spoke fast, packing in as much as he could that would serve his interrogators. But judging by the hard-driving workout this 34 year-old British actor endures as the revamped and rebooted Bond, handling wimpy journo queries was the least of his travails.

While the compact Craig has had his limits tested by this character and the demands of extending Bond's emotional color, Craig still has had other opportunities to apply his actorial skills to characters that offered different challenges, such as the Jewish resistance fighter he plays in director Ed Zwick's Defiance (due out at year's end).

Q: Bond is being reinvented in a different world and time now, so he was cast differently. Is there some--if not a "responsibility"--the possibility to add a fresh interplay with the real world and give the Bond saga more of a mission?

DC: They've always done that to a certain extent. It's just that you have to remain apolitical. I don't think you can start getting into making huge comments about society with a Bond movie. Otherwise that defeats the object, really, because it's a fantasy movie, and as soon as you start giving it worthiness, you're shooting yourself in the foot. But it's going to be influenced.

I like that there is a sort of morality to these movies, and I think you should play around with that. That's interesting. People talk about this movie being about vendetta, and I say it's not. It's actually about the fact that when he gets the chance to shoot the guy in the head, he doesn't. He says, "No. You're coming in." And I know that's ingenuous, because he's shot lots of other people [laughs]. But it's an important statement to make. It's not deep and meaningful, but it's there.

Q: You're born with desirable blond hair and blue eyes -- the standards of good looks. Then you're up for this role, and it's, "Oh, a blond Bond? What!?" Did you feel a reverse prejudice?

DC: No, I did not [laughs]. I mean, what could I do? "You're blond, you're too blond." I'm too blond? Someone said to me, "Did you ever think about dyeing your hair" and I went, "God, no."

The whole thing was a nightmare to think about. I couldn't argue... especially when I got older, and started dyeing my hair [for that reason] as well. I mean, a lot of the criticism was directed through the internet, because that's where a lot of people --obviously, for good reason, it's good place to get things off your chest. But I couldn't respond. There's nothing that I could say. I could start my own blog going, "I don't think I'm too blond." But what do you do? You only enter into a crazy world.

Q: It's still going on; on The Today Show they kept saying, "Blond Bond, Blond Bond!"

DC: They're never, ever ever going to get rid of that line. Ah, never mind....

Q: Executive Producer Barbara Broccoli has said you had a hand in collaborating on the script in parts, where the character goes and what he does in these films.

DC: I'm a big Bond fan, always have been. So the idea of introducing, let's say, Moneypenny and Q, into the next movie is very exciting, but I want to give those parts to proper actors, and say "invent it." I mean, because the gags are movie history, to just drop the gags into Bond movies -- I don't think it stands up anymore, not with what we've done with the films. So introducing the gags, and the lines, the Bond line, [like] the martini [bit] -- I want them in the film, but we need the right to say them.

Having Q and Moneypenny back in -- we've got this organization now. We know they're everywhere, we know they're in control of the world, so submarine bases are definitely on the cards. I mean, we can do anything. Because we've opened up this world of fantasy--and it is a fantasy world--as long as we root ourselves in some reality, we can then do what we want.

Q: Was it necessary to enhance Judi Dench's character, M, with more dialogue?

DC: We got a bit more in there. The role wasn't quite as big when we got the first draft of the script. Whether it was me or Mark or whoever, I just thought that we needed to make that relationship solid. She needed to not trust him and think that he failed, but instinctively know that he hadn't. And that little journey that she goes on -- she says, 'fuck you, he's my man,' and he feels confident about that. It's that whole mother-son thing -- I've got no problem with it, it's all great -- more of that, why not?

Q:This movie is populated with great theater actors who know how to build characters and add subtleties that you wouldn't think could be in a Bond movie.

DC: If you get the chance, you give these jobs to the best actors you can find. For me, it cuts my job in half. Acting with Judi Dench, I'm just going to stand there, and I just let her talk. She's phenomenal. She's incredibly skilled as an actress, but she gets a huge kick out of it and enjoys it. Like all actresses or actors I know that have been around for long enough -- stars, we call people stars--those that still love what they do, it's always really inspiring. I want to be doing this for awhile yet and be still getting a kick out of it.

Q: Last time you were here [like this] with the film you did with director/producer Matthew Vaughn...

DC: It was Layer Cake. It's been a few years.

Q: You still look as fit and fine as those days.

DC: Thank you very much [chuckles]. I'm keeping body and soul together somehow.

Q: With that in mind, how much are you like James Bond?

DC: Oh, I'm not even slightly like James Bond. Not even -- nothing, absolutely nothing we share.

Q: Does that make him easier to play?

DC: I think we can take him wherever we want to take him. I think that with this movie, the idea was to finish off the story we started with Casino [Royale] and now he can be who he [is] -- he can be Bond now.

Q: There's a lot of work spent getting in shape for these films, isn't there?

DC: Yes, it is -- it's dreadful. It's seven days a week of obsessive behavior. It's not healthy. It's something we really need -- keeping fit's good - -but so is drinking, and eating, and enjoying life.

Q: Does it amuse you, that though your chief nemesis smokes, drinks, is rail-thin and doesn't look very healthy, he puts up quite a fight? Meanwhile you were working out every minute of the day to stay fit.

DC: I was, I was. There's narcissism involved, and I'm sorry, I'd be lying to you if [I said] there wasn't. They said, "there might be a scene where you're taking your shirt off" and I [thought], "Hmmm, I should get in shape then."

I love the casting of Mathieu [Amalric] because in fact that was a great thing. And the fight at the end, I could squash him like a bug. But actually, it's about his character and the fact that he's just waving his arm around and that plays into it. I mean, there's something about having someone like that -- Mathieu wields power really well. There's a great line about walking out with your balls in your mouth, and with your successor smiling over you... He delivers just bang-on.

Q: There's this feeling that you were a lot more reticent to talk to press until these films came out and you were settled into it. Now you've gone into the whole marketing thing.

DC: I knew that when we made Casino, we had made a good movie. That's all I could do. Beyond that, I had this reputation for being anti-press, and "Oh, he won't talk to the press," because I saw no reason why I needed to be out there and self-promoting myself.

Well, when it came to Bond, they asked me, "Are you going to do press?" and I went, "Of course I am." I mean, I can't get all Greta Garbo about it. You cannot say "James Bond" and 'I want to be alone'. They spent how-many-millions of dollars on a movie, and I go and hide away from selling it. That completely made no sense whatsoever.

Q: People have asked a million times before, how many more of these Bond films are you going to do? and you point out, "Well, I've got two more in my contract."

DC: So I'm nearly there [chuckles].

Q: There a certain shelf life to playing Bond -- you get punished playing this character -- so I can't help thinking that you must say "How much longer am I going to do these things?"

DC: God yes, I think so. There is some quote from Harrison Ford which I love, and particularly now it makes much more sense. It's something about his knees going. And we do it until we do it, and we make it as safe as we can. But I'd genuinely love to do another one. I mean, I had surgery on my shoulder this year, which is a long-term thing, that I ripped out when I was doing this movie, and it's crazy. I've seen more doctors this year for stupid things, like stitches and cuts and things like that, than I've seen in the past 20 years of my life. But you know, it really is part of the job. As long as it's still coming across and it's real enough and entertaining enough, I'll continue doing it.

Q: Instead of doing one big franchise, you might have ended up in two if The Golden Compass had been more successful. In some alternate universe you might be talking about playing Lord Asreal in The Subtle Knife. As an actor--Is that strange when you don't know which film is going to be the real winner or not?

DC: I made two movies: this one, which is seeming to become a success, and Casino Royale, which was a huge success. Before that, box office was just not on my agenda. Well, it is, yeah, but it was [to make] a little big movie. It was never about the money it would make, it was about making the movie. And that's the way I've always made movies.

If I'm sitting there with the director in a cinema, and I've looked at it and gone, "Wow, we made it! We made it into a cinema!" -- that was my criterion. So the whole idea of whether or not a movie's made millions and millions and millions of dollars is still, for me, an anathema. I still can't quite relate to it.

Movies
Terrorism
With terrorism afoot seemingly everywhere, where is agent 007, James Bond, when we need him? Well, he may not be available to save us in all his athletic and dashing glory, but in Quantum of Solace--t...
With terrorism afoot seemingly everywhere, where is agent 007, James Bond, when we need him? Well, he may not be available to save us in all his athletic and dashing glory, but in Quantum of Solace--t...

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Daniel Craig elaborates on his vision for Bond 23

Bond 23 - 11-12-08

Daniel Craig is ready to quantify Quantum of Solace. 007's 22nd big-screen adventure proved to be a box office bonanza, earning over $500 million worldwide so far. And while the critical reception to the film was not unkind, the consensus was that it wasn't quite as licensed to thrill as its franchise-redefining predecessor Casino Royale.

As Craig prepares to launch his next big film Defiance, director Edward Zwick's serious-minded but still action-packed exploration of a group of Polish Jews who fought back against the Nazis during the Holocaust, ComingSoon.net talked to the blonde Bond about the reception to "Quantum" and his plans to get shaken and/or stirred for the next installment.

ComingSoon.net: The critical reaction to "Quantum of Solace" was somewhat different than that for "Casino Royale." Did that surprise you?
Daniel Craig: No, because "Casino Royale" was based on a novel and we're always going to have that. When you do a movie like that, where the basis of a story is really strong and also the momentum of it, everyone thought that it was going to be sh*t. So when it wasn't, they were all just completely surprised. I think that "Quantum of Solace" is as good a movie as "Casino Royale." I think that the difference is that last time people were surprised by the fact that they enjoyed it. The fact is that we get reviews in newspapers that we'd never had reviews in before. Certainly with the Internet we get seven and a half million reviews, which are all worth looking at, obviously.

CS: The financial success of the film does suggest that people really respond to you as James Bond.
Craig: I don't try to intellectualize that. I do know what we've done is make a movie that the first time I saw it I got a huge kick out of it. Ultimately that's what we're trying to do at the end of the day: putting a movie out that's an entertaining, exciting, hopefully slightly moving Bond movie. That's all our goal ever was. The way that people have taken to it is just amazing.

CS: Do you think that calls to go to work on the next one will come a little quicker after the huge success of "Quantum?"
Craig: I haven't heard anything - but then I'm not answering my phone.

CS: What more do you want to do with Bond? What other parts of him would you like to explore?
Craig: Well, I genuinely think we've got a blank page now. We've finished this story off. "Quantum of Solace" was exactly the right thing to do. We started something with "Casino Royale" and we wrapped it all up with "Quantum of Solace." We're ready to begin again and we can do what we want.

CS: So you think that the next one will be a throwback to another Bond era?
Craig: Submarines and outer space!

CS: Are you all still looking at unused Ian Fleming story elements, since that worked so well in "Casino Royale?"
Craig: Yeah, but there's nothing left. It's all done unless someone finds a dirty manuscript under the couch at [Fleming's Jamaican estate] GoldenEye, we're stuffed.

CS: Is it important for you to do projects other than Bond between the films?
Craig: It's not really the method that I go by. Look, I'm not going to take another part as a British spy who drives nice cars. That's definitely not going to happen, but I'm not closing the door on anything.

CS: So there's nothing else on the horizon about it?
Craig: Not for the moment. A holiday.

CS: How will you be spending the holidays?
Craig: Happily, hopefully [laughs]. Very quietly.

Quantum of Solace is now playing worldwide and Defiance opens in limited theaters on Dec. 31 before expanding wide on Jan. 16.
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Over the weekend ScreenCrave had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Daniel Craig about his upcoming role in Edward Zwick’s film Defiance. Craig has obviously received a lot of recognition for his role as James Bond, but he seems more than willing to leave that all behind for a nice vacation.

Craig is in the midst of his 15 Super-God-Like minutes of fame. He was a well established actor before this and hopefully will be for some time, but it’s always odd interviewing someone in their peak of fame (notice how I don’t say success) and the reason is, they really don’t want to talk about it and Craig was no different. You could tell he was eager to help promote his film Defiance and when Bond was discussed he didn’t skirt the issue but answered it in a very honest and at times sarcastic or jovel way. You could tell from talking to him that even with his success he has not turned into a “star” but a well received hard working actor. The man is dedicated to his work and everything that comes with it.

I gained a lot of respect for him through this interview. The important thing to realize about Craig is that he is an amazing actor, he’s been involved with so many amazing films and really all he wants to do is get back to making them. He is happy to help promote, but his real talent lies in the work, not in his ability to talk about it.

So without further ado, let’s hear what he has to say…

Big question! How is the elbow?

CRAIG: It hasn’t been healed completely, but it’ll be done in January. I’m not ready for going back to work quite yet which I’m really quite relieved about really.

You’re the hero throughout this film, but in order to help people, you do have to do a number of horrible things. How did you approach that duality?

CRAIG: Well, that’s what fascinated me about this really. It’s obvious if anyone watches the film, if anyone reads the book, obvious if you sort of understand the storyline, these people did bad things. They did very, very bad things and you always have to look at the net result which is that twelve hundred people walked out of this situation and survived. But keeping that many people together and under control, there were power struggles and major sort of shifts in power. There was Zus Bielski who was sort of trying to gain control. They took revenge on the local population. They fought very hard against the Germans at times. It’s that moral line that they’re walking, but for kind of a good reason that I found fascinating. The question is what would you do in a situation like this, how would you defend yourself? You’d like to think that you’d protect your family, that you’d protect the people around you, but what would you be prepared to do to actually make that succeed, to protect yourself and your family.

Were many of the events in the film based on real events?

CRAIG: Most of what happens in the movie is absolutely reported and it happened over a three or four year period. We sort of condensed a lot of that into one year, but the sort of running away, going through the swamp, the fact that a whole infantry of Germans were sent in to get them, twenty thousand men were sent in to actually root them out, them and other troops like them – it all happened. Obviously, this is a film and we’ve got to put it dramatically into a context.

I heard that the grandchildren of the men you played came to visit the set, what was it like meeting them and did that have any kind of an effect on your role?

CRAIG: Very much. It’s sort of difficult because your mind is full of expectations when meeting a family member, a son, a daughter because you sort of feel that there will be an immediate connection to what you’re doing and that’s not the reality of it though. What did strike me about them is that you’re kind of awkward when you meet someone like that. You’re like, ‘Hi. It’s lovely to see you in Lithuania. It’s very nice over here.’ [laughs] There’s no sort of starting point for the conversation. So, I kind of sat them all down and I’m in uniform and working. I went, ‘Vodka? Vodka? Vodka?’ I kind of wandered off and found the caterer and I said, ‘Have you got any vodka?’ ( ) And of course they did because we were in Lithuania, [they have it] for breakfast over the cornflakes. They cracked it and I sort of slowly passed this around and we all sort of toasted and they kind of came out of their shells and got very load and had to be told to leave because they were making so much noise. We connected and they’re full of life. They’re full of energy. They’re a big family. They’re a strong New York family. You kind of go, ‘Good. That’s what this is about.’ The heart of this movie is my relationship with Liev [Schreiber] and Jamie [Bell] and the fact that we’re a family unit and how we then make that into a bigger family unit. So I kind of felt good about it.

Did they tell you anything that you were able to use in the film?

CRAIG: Well, the thing of it is that, for all sorts of reasons, he didn’t talk about it. My theory and I think it’s fairly accurate is that the children of the people that went through it started growing up and of course started asking questions and saying, ‘What was your experience?’ They were people who had gone through The Holocaust and had survived Auschwitz and these people [in the film] had survived, certainly, in a very different way.

You are compared to Moses a number of times in the film, did you become familiar with the story of Moses?

CRAIG: So badly. [laughs] It’s not really historically accurate. Well, I think the obvious thing to say is that my character is not a particularly good Jew. He’s certainly not, but where we took that from in effect was that in Lithuania, Yiddish was the second language. These were totally integrated communities that got wiped out. That’s another part of the tragedy. There was trade. There was intermarriage. It was actually a huge melting pot that got destroyed and Tuvia is sort of a businessman. He’s first and foremost a Belarusian businessman. So we take the story on, like Allan’s [Corduner] says, ‘I remember you in glass –’ and him going, ‘I don’t remember you even slightly.’ School was never really that interesting to him. He only wanted to live life. I think that his faith is something that he’s never used and doesn’t even want to draw upon in this situation because he feels guilty about that fact, but in spite of that it sort of brings everyone together and it brings him together eventually. That was because my bible reading is not particularly good.

You have a lot of action scenes in this film, but you play them completely different than you do in a Bond film. Is it hard when you start doing a Bond scene to not switch into James Bond mode?

CRAIG: No. I don’t sort of have those connections in my head. The situation is that the guy can’t really use a gun that well and certainly he’s never shot anyone in cold blood before and so it’s a completely different sort of mindset. The Bond soundtrack isn’t going on in my head when I’m doing that.

The brothers, even though you know they loved one another, had a pretty intense fight scene that felt extremely honest, was that something that you and Liev Schreiber worked on together?

CRAIG: Well, having done a few now I know that the only way that you get them to look right is by rehearsing them. So that’s what we did. We did it for weeks before we started shooting. We went into the studio, put mats on the floor and sort of figured it out. What we wanted to do was try to make it as brotherly as possible which is why there’s punch in the bollux and aspects that would make you go, ‘Those are brothers fighting.’ There’s obviously a Cain and Abel thing with the rock and that came about as just a piece of improvisation. There was a rock there and it was about how we were going to end this, how we were going to end the fight because that was the only way to end the fight, the other one had to want to kill the other one. So there’s a rock to hand. Also, he’s bigger than me and I had to hit him with something.

Did you make any connections between your work in this piece and your work in Munich? Jewish sort of vengeance?

CRAIG: I don’t think like that. If you’d like to do that you’re more than welcome to that, but I don’t put my work into a sort of DVD collection, my blue period here or my Jewish period here. I mean, genuinely, and I know this might sound kind of naïve, but when I read this script the last thing on my mind was ‘Munich’. I just read this. This deals with something that’s close to my heart because my grandparents went through the second world war, but it has a direct sort of link to all of us which is the second the first world war was the war to end all wars and this war was the war that stopped and made us all human which was that we all signed treaties and said that we’d never do this again. We’ve been doing it ever since, year by year, worse and worse and wiping our asses on these treaties. It’s an important piece of history. This story in itself I found so inspiring because it was about the way that people survived this situation and when they stopped fighting. That was the other thing that came up for me. When do you stop fighting? When do you actually sort of find peace? When do you start living? That line in this movie is sort of drawn in the sand by Tuvia saying, ‘We stop this now and we start to live.’

Did shooting on location help you with your character?

CRAIG: Very much. A great deal. We always had to have in the back of our mind that reality. We were doing long days and six day weeks, but we had warm beds to go to and apparently, we were probably bitching about it, but we did have trailers somewhere. There were different sort of map references. They would give us a map in the morning and say, ‘If you can find it you can have it.’ So we’d stay on set, but we stayed on set literally constantly and we’d be under tents, tarps sort of watching the scenes. That made it very immediate. It made us all feel involved with everything and it gave a community feeling to us which was kind of essential for the movie, giving it that life. Like I said though, it’s cold and wet and damp and uncomfortable but you knew that you were going home that night so it was okay.

Did you rehearse with Ed Zwick a lot before shooting?

CRAIG: We had a lot of discussion before we started shooting. Sometimes you’d get to a scene on the shoot and it’d just click and you’d go, ‘Okay, we know what want to do.’ We’d set the camera up and we’d shoot it. Then other times there’s the very emotional stuff and you kind of give it more time and let there be more air around the scene. Then sometimes you’d just sort of hit a brick wall like you always do and everyone would come in and sit down and discuss it. We’d discuss the camera. The camera department would come in and say, ‘Maybe we can shoot it from up there. Maybe it’ll give it that feeling.’ If the scene wasn’t working we could rewrite. Clay [Frohman] was on set and would rewrite scenes as we were going along or we’d sort of improvise bits and pieces if we could.

You had a number of scenes in the film where you had to speak Russian. Did you have to learn the language and how hard was that for you?

CRAIG: I mean, I left school at sixteen and I can’t conjugate a verb in any language, even English. So Russian, I just did it phonetically. Liev has an education and so he took pains to learn it a bit. It was tricky and difficult and especially because Ed suddenly heard, [that we were doing] remarkably well from whoever was teaching us Russian and decided to make two or three other scenes in Russian as well. I’m glad that we did it. I’m glad that we made the distinction because obviously the conceit is that we’re all speaking Yiddish to each other and that Russian is spoken and German is spoken around us and we all have an accent because it grounds it and it makes it sound that we have a uniformity because obviously we’ve got English, Lithuanian, French – there’s a whole international group of actors in there making it the Tower of Babel if we were speaking in our own accents.

Quantum of Solace was a huge success worldwide. As someone who is a part of the film, do you pay attention to the films success at the box office?

CRAIG: I mean, of course I pay attention. It’s not like, ‘No. I’m not interested.’ It’s great. We couldn’t have expected it to do as well as it has done. We put the work in. We put the energy in and we made the best movie that we could. You can only hope from there on. If you knew that everything was a sure fire winner everyone would be doing it. So there’s always a risk involved and it’s been a pleasure to do it so well.

Is there going to be a trilogy?

CRAIG: No.

Absolutely not?

CRAIG: No. No fucking way [laughs]. I’m done with that fucking story. I want to lie on a beach for the first half hour of the next movie, drinking a cocktail. I don’t know what we’re going to do with the next one. I know that we’ve finished this story as far as I’m concerned and we’ve got a great set of bad guys. There’s an organization that we can use whenever we want to use it. The relationship between Bond and M is secure and Felix is secure. We can try to find out where Moneypenny came from and where Q comes from. Lets do all that and have some fun with it.

With the films success are they trying to get something new going quickly? Would you want to be involved in that or possibly another film like Defiance?

CRAIG: We don’t know when we’re going to do the next ‘Bond’. Certainly no one is thinking about it just at the moment and we’re going to give it a rest for the moment. If we can squeeze something in, if I can do something next year I will, but I haven’t found out what that’s going to be yet, but not another ‘Defiance’, not in the cold.

Have you thought about doing a beach picture?

CRAIG: A beach picture? Well, I can’t surf. I can lie down.

You produced and starred in a smaller film Flashbacks of a Fool, which just came out this year, would you consider producing another film like that?

CRAIG: I’d love to. That was really a kind of labor of love. That was a friend of mine who had written that about seven or eight years ago for me. We managed to get it made and I’m very keen to sort of get stuff like that off the ground if I can, whether I’m producing or not or whether I’m in it or not. It’s nice to get that stuff on to encourage people I know with a lot of talent to just get on with it.

You have gained a lot of status from the Bond films, do you think that you signing on helps to get some smaller films made?

CRAIG: For sure. In a sense this movie was definitely very much like that. Ed’s been struggling with it for a long time. He went to Europe and basically raised the money in individual territories, getting the money for this, and I think that me saying yes to it and getting my name it gave it that little extra push and thankfully Paramount and Vantage came in and picked it up here. So it’s that process. It’s not a very clear cut process. As much I’d like to say that I’m definitely going to do that it’s still a lot of work involved. But I’m going to definitely work that way and try to encourage things if I can.

Do you feel a sense of responsibility to those film?

CRAIG: I think so, yes. I mean, there’s definitely a responsibility and you have to sort of pay it back a little bit into the business. It’s also because I love doing it. It’s a narcissism as well.

Do you think you would ever be interested in helping to adapt any books or plays?

CRAIG: Yeah, but I’ve got to read it [laughs].

When you look for films, do you look for things with actions sequences? What type of material draws you in?

CRAIG: I’m not consciously trying to [pick stuff]. If there was that much material around for me to pick and choose from I would be doing that. But there is a finite number of good scripts. There are only so many good pieces of material, good books out there and you have to look for them. To say that I won’t do this is really kind of shutting the door on so much material. I keep my mind totally open and we’ll just see what comes along.

Would you ever be interested in starting a production company to help push those through?

CRAIG: Yeah, look, what you would normally do is if I was going to do a movie and it was going to go like that I would start a production company. I don’t need to start a production to do that. I can have a production company and office and sit in there and go [sighs]. It doesn’t have to work like that. You find the material. You get the job and you make the job. Having a production company is a byproduct of making a film. It doesn’t make a movie.

Is there anything you dying to develop? A dream project?

CRAIG: The first five books of the Bible. It’s a small thing I’ve been working on for years, but it’s just something that I really want to do [laughs].

And that was how we ended it! On the first fives books of the bible.

In case any of you were wondering (I know I was) his eyes really are THAT blue. It’s almost ridiculous.

Check him out in his upcoming film Defiance, in selected theaters December 31st, and nationwide Jaunary. 16th.

Источник

Вот еще одно с Dark Horizons

British heartthrob Daniel Craig may now be known as 007, but he is as accomplished an actor on stage or screen as exists in Britain.

Following on the heels of the critically mixed "Quantum of Solace", Craig returns to the screen in "Defiance", the true story of three Jewish brothers who escape from Nazi-occupied Poland into the Belarussian forest, where they join Russian resistance fighters and endeavor to build a village in order to protect themselves and others in danger.

In this interview, Craig talks about the film, its issues, relevance to contemporary audiences and his reaction to the reception of the latest Bond film. Daniel Craig talked to Dark Horizons:

Question: You've played a Mossad agent and now this role. Does that give you some insight into the Jewish experience and are you converting?

Craig: No. No, I'm not. Does it give me an insight into the Jewish experience? I suppose that it does, but religion was not a factor in taking this job. It was just literally one of those situations that I sort of looked at, read it and thought that it was an amazing story.

Question: Was it the story or the character?

Craig: Both. I mean, the character is in just a dreadful, dreadful, dreadful situation. There's no going away from it. God forbid any of us should be put into that situation, but something is asked of him and he's very reluctant to do it and I love the fact that they're sort of saying, 'No, you must do this.' He's going, 'No. Fuck off. I mean, I want to protect my brothers and I want to look after what's left of my family and I want to run away.' And they were saying, 'But you don't have a choice here.' I think that process and obviously we condense it in the film and this is over a three or four year period, we condense the whole thing in the film but it's incredible.

Question: Did you have a period of self-analysis once you saw the story and thought about how you would've handled the situation?

Craig: Completely. I think that hopefully is one of the questions that people ask themselves when they're coming out of the film, but I don't know.

Question: How you would've reacted?

Craig: I mean, it's unimaginable what those people went through. Obviously you'd like to think that you'd do the right thing.

Question: Does physical geography help you define the way you play a character like this, the fact that you working in that environment in the forest in that weather? According to various sources the trailers were a half mile away.

Craig: It was a quarter mile yesterday and it's gotten up to several miles today. It'll be sixteen miles away by the end of the day. We didn't have a trailer. We had a bucket and a tarpaulin and I was happy with it. Yes, of course it does. It has a huge influence on what you're doing and it did have an influence on us, the fact that we all decided that we'd rather not spend time in our trailers, that we'd rather spend the time on set. I think that's key to a lot of what went on there on the set. It was cold. It was miserable. It was wet. It was uncomfortable, but you always have in the back of your mind the idea that you have a bed to go back home to that night and that there is some hot food somewhere within the forest. You're prepared to go looking for it at some point. These people did three winters there and that's just mind blowing.

Question: People have said that they were surprised that such a big movie star like you didn't go back to your trailer. You don't strike me as being a big movie star type person.

Craig: I don't strike you as being a big movie star? Thanks. [laughs] This is going well. I don't spend much time in my trailer anyway even if it's huge and it never is. The last place that I want to be is in a smelly caravan. I mean, I'd rather be on set trying to get some work done.

Question: Did you read the Beilski story and meet their family? What did you do when you met them?

Craig: We did, yes. We sat and we drank and we talked and we had a conversation and we didn't talk much about Tuvia, but we sort of talked about…I just wanted to get a feel for them really. They were just sort of incredibly forward people, really energetic and really full of life and a proper family. They're like families are, sitting there and shouting at each other. Why whisper when you can scream. They're kind of like all families are and they're full of life. I mean, both Liev and I said, 'These guys are kind of scary guys.' They were like, 'Hey! Come on!' I can imagine that that's how their parents were, their father was.

Question: It seems there was more brutality in the real brothers’ experience than was in the movie. Was it out of respect for the family that that wasn't shown?

Craig: It's not at all that, I think. I think we tried to be as straight as possible. The events that take place in the movie happened. They happened in different ways. They happened in different contexts, but they actually kind of all occurred. This film takes over a year to happen roughly speaking and we've condensed a huge amount into that period, but we haven't shied away from anything. It's known and it's fact that they had to survive and in order to survive they had to do bad things. It's documented and it's there.

Question: Tuvia had to do the martial law thing when his leadership was threatened. Can you talk about finding that part of the character, him being very tough on those people?

Craig: He was. Again, it was clear if you read about it that there were power struggles and there were very serious power struggles. You can judge it if you like. One could judge it and ask if it's just because he wanted to remain in power or if he was just trying to keep it together. It's probably a little bit of both. It was just a completely extreme situation, and again, the question that you ask yourself is what would I do. Would I for the greater good of the group take this person out and quell this dissension aggressively and violently or do I leave it alone and allow the whole thing to just sort of disintegrate.

Question: How physically demanding was this film given that you like to do all your own stunts?

Craig: I mean, obviously there aren't the same amount of stunts as in the 'Bond' film, but it was physically demanding because we were literally filming on slopes like this in wet, cold weather all day long. We had a crew of grips that were running around with track and putting them at all sorts of angles. I mean, we were all physically running and up and down these hills day.

Question: You're going after tanks and stuff in the film too though.

Craig: It was lying down, shooting at them. I wasn't really going after them. That was Liev. He did that.

Question: The reaction to this latest 'Bond' film was very different than the reaction to 'Casino Royale'. Did that surprise you?

Craig: No, because 'Casino Royale' was based on a novel and we're always going to have that. When you do a movie like that where the basis of a story is really strong and also the momentum of it, everyone thought that it was going to be shit. So when it wasn't they were all just completely surprised. I think that 'Quantum of Solace' is as good a movie as 'Casino Royale'. I think that the difference is that last time people were surprised by the fact that they enjoyed it. The fact is that we get reviews in newspapers that we'd never had reviews in before. Certainly with the internet we get seven and a half million reviews which are all worth looking at obviously.

Question: The financial success of the film though must suggest that people really respond to you as Bond.

Craig: I don't try to intellectualize that. I do know what we've done is make a movie that the first time I saw it I got a huge kick out of it. Ultimately that's what we're trying to do at the end of the day, putting a movie out that's an entertaining, exciting, hopefully slightly moving 'Bond' movie. That's all our goal ever was. The way that people have taken to it is just amazing.

Question: Do you think that calls for the next one come a little quicker after this opening weekend?

Craig: I haven't heard anything, but then I'm not answering my phone.

Question: What more do you want to do with Bond, what other parts of him would you like to explore?

Craig: Well, I genuinely think we've got a blank page now. We've finished this story off. 'Quantum of Solace' was exactly the right thing to do. We started something with 'Casino Royale' and we wrapped it all up with 'Quantum of Solace'. We're ready to begin again and we can do what we want.

Question: So you think that it'll be a throw back?

Craig: Submarine space and outer space.

Question: Are you still looking at Ian Fleming story elements because that worked so well in 'Casino Royale'?

Craig: Yeah, but there's nothing left. It's all done unless someone finds a dirty manuscript under the couch, we're stuffed.

Question: What about the Gardner books?

Craig: I've never read them. I would bet any money that someone sort of optioned them and that they're tied up in something else. It's a very closed box.

Question: How was doing the language work in this film that you had to do?

Craig: It was a nightmare for me. I'm just the worst student in the world. I left school at sixteen. I literally cannot conjugate a verb in English. You can't conjugate a verb in English, can you? So, God knows what I know. So that's it. I really did screw up there because I actually don't really know what a verb is. Liev has years of education ahead of me and took to this very well and learned the language a little. I had to do it phonetically, learn it and understand it. I understood what I was saying, but Russian is a tricky language to get far with. It's quite easy to sort of communicate in Russian, but to actually sort of speak the language is hard.

Question: Did Liev make fun of you for it?

Craig: He tried to [laughs].

Question: Do you have to have a mastery of languages to be an actor?

Craig: No. I think that you have to have an ear. I mean, part of acting is sort of mimicry, but I don't like acting as mimicry. I don't think that mimicry is very interesting in acting. I think that you have to have an ear. I've tried to learn languages and I know there's a certain stage that you get to where you have to make that sort of leap of faith and go, 'Okay, I know how to put this accent through my mouth.' It's a really hard process to go through. As an actor you have to try and make that leap because you're trying to communicate and communication is the name of the game. If you're not doing that you're kind of failing.

Question: Is it important for you to do projects other than 'Bond' between the films?

Craig: It's not really the method that I go by. Look, I'm not going to take another part as a British spy who drives nice cars. That's definitely not going to happen, but I'm not closing the door on anything.

Question: What kind of things ideally would you like to do?

Craig: I'm keeping a very open mind about it.

Question: So there's nothing else on the horizon about it?

Craig: Not for the moment. A holiday.

Question: How will you be spending the holidays?

Craig: Happily, hopefully [laughs]. Very quietly.

Question: How shocking was the revelation that the Jews fought back? Have you seen people reacting to that notion?

Craig: Well, I knew about it a little bit. I knew that there was a Jewish resistance, but the only things that I've read about it is that it was wiped out mercilessly. It makes complete sense. Of course they did. The fact that nobody did would've been totally strange, but there were major pockets of resistance everywhere. People did fight. The fact is that there was really nowhere to run. The situation here is that the resistance happened within places like this where there was a forest, where people could get away from them. The local population was in cahoots. Unless you could get on a boat and get out of Europe you were absolutely stuck. This was an incredibly well organized exercise by the Germans. I mean, they did it really efficiently as we all know. I think that our knowledge of the second world war is based on, and so it should be, what the result of The Holocaust was. Those are the images and the knowledge that we have of that period as we should and we should be reminded of it as often as we possibly can.

Question: Why do you think that The Holocaust remains so cinematically timely?

Craig: Well, that's a sort of weird question. I mean, I don't know if it's a question of whether it does. It just should.

Question: It should remain so?

Craig: Yeah. There was an article in 'The New York Times' that said world war two movies have become genre movies and I can't argue with that. Every movie in a sense is a genre movie, but a genre movie suggests that we were cynically sort of going out to make money with this project. That was never the object. This is recent history and especially if you're in places like Lithuania or even if you're in France or parts of France or parts of Germany or parts of Holland – this is recent history. It still has a huge effect on the way that Europe is shaping itself. You only have to look at Bosnia and Croatia and what happened there. What happened in the second world war was used to inflame that situation and it's still there. Those hatreds still lie very, in some places, close to the surface, just below it. The treaties that were put into place after the second world war to stop it from happening again have all been fucking walked over steadily every year since.

Question: Especially in the last eight years.

Craig: I think every year since. I mean, obviously the last eight years haven't helped, but the human rights treaties and the laws about genocide and trying people in the international courts, they tried and haven't succeeded. That's why stories like this have resonance still. But also with this story it's about surviving and how you survive with your humanity intact as opposed to coming out the other end a monster.

Question: Being a father, some of those paternal notions would probably show up in a role like this. Do you imagine when you do something like this protecting your own offspring?

Craig: Well, in that situation I keep my family out of my work. I'd never use them for that reason. I think it's a sort of weird notion. Of course that's your instinct. Your instinct is, 'I would protect this tooth and nail.' But that's the thing, isn't it? That's what was so dreadful about this happening and any other circumstance like this happening in recent times. The notion in this is that family matters more than anything else and that's what keeps you together, but obviously we throw into that this brotherly relationship where the two of them kind of hate each other and the fact is that they can't live with each other. It's more complicated and the more complicated it is hopefully the more interesting it becomes. Of course there's the paternal instinct to sort of look after people, but there's just as strong an instinct to be looked after and it's a reciprocal thing. You help someone and the idea is that they'll help you back. It's all of those things, paternally, brotherly, sisterly.

Question: Culturally we mourned those who were lost during that period. Have we not celebrated those who survived enough?

Craig: I think there's an element of that. I think there's an element to the fact that stories like this represent that. For me this is an allegory for the modern life or parts of the modern life for parts of the modern world. When do we stop fighting? When do actually decided to stop fighting so that we can live and despite the fact that there's this society that Tuvia had to kind of build up with a very authoritarian manner, and had to be because of the circumstances, the decision not to go to war and start living and start living as human beings, when do we actually make that switch and go, 'Can we stop this now and get on with life?' It's a debate because obviously these men fought and they fought for their lives. But they fought to sort of get back to normal. That just rings true with me.

Question: Did you hear any stories about Tuvia's adjustment after all of this?

Craig: He found it very difficult. He went to Israel. I think that he fought in The Six Day War. He was given a commission, I think, and made an officer and didn't really succeed. Then he came to New York with the family and they started a cab firm in New York and forgot about it, left it. But that's a testament to them as much as anything. The fact is that in spite of the horrific things that they went through they managed to live a life of peace afterwards and kind of forgot it and lived a life. It must've been tremendously difficult. I'm sure that he got very little sleep.

Question: Where does your egoless attitude come from?

Craig: Listen, you're absolutely determined to make me egoless. I'm certainly not. I'm a nightmare on set. I just paid them all off. It's just the way that I like to work. You're asking me a question about my ego which is embarrassing to answer. The way that I like to work is with people. If you separate yourself from the work in process then there's no connection. Otherwise why go to work.

Question: What are your hopes for the New Year?

Craig: I can't answer questions like that without it sounding like a stock answer. Obviously I want world peace. What can I tell you? For myself I want health for my family. I want health for my friends. I'd like to continue what I'm doing. It's what everybody wants really.

Question: Do you want to go back to the theater?

Craig: Yes, I'd love to.

Question: Are you looking for something to do?

Craig: I'm not looking for something, as it were. I mean, if something comes along.

Question: Is there a classic role you'd like to do?

Craig: No. Too many lines. Too many words.

Question: Is there something about your level of fame now that you truly enjoy and something you truly despise?

Craig: My privacy is obviously the thing that gets invaded. I weigh it all out.

http://www.darkhorizons.com/interviews/defiance1.php

Вообще, хорошие интервью, много интересного узнаешь, но и похожи очень, такое чувство, что это записано в одно и то же время, только один журналист выкинул некоторые вещи, которые оставил другой

Daniel Craig’s new film turns him from chilly Bond action man into a thoughtful leader of Jewish partisans fighting the Nazis. But how has playing the hero affected him?Christopher Goodwin
You wonder where he finds the stamina. Just a couple of weeks after finishing the punishing worldwide promotional circus for Quantum of Solace, Daniel Craig is back in another hotel room, this time in Beverly Hills, banging the drum for his next film, Defiance. But stamina is not his problem.

As soon as you meet him, it’s blindingly obvious why he was selected to be the new Bond, the different Bond who would reinvigorate a tired franchise: his raw energy. Past Bonds were notable for their nonchalance, their irony. Craig has a kinetic, masculine vitality that, unlike with most actors, is even more palpable in the flesh than it is on screen. What I find more surprising, though, is his forceful, if untutored, intelligence, tempered by a self-deprecating wit.

In Defiance, Craig is transformed from the relentless, even humourless, action hero Bond has become into Tuvia Bielski, a real-life, flesh-and-blood action hero: hard-drinking, hard-loving, the leader of a band of Jewish partisans who held their own against the Germans in the forests of Belarus during the second world war. The film, based on an extraordinary true story, co-stars Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell as two of the other Bielski brothers, who were farmers before the war. By refusing to surrender and by waging an often brutal three-year guerrilla campaign against the Nazis, the Bielskis managed to keep more than 1,200 Jews alive deep in the forests of Belarus. It was as astonishing a feat of endurance as anything that happened during the war, yet it remained essentially unknown until 1993, when the book Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, written by Nechama Tec, was published. Only now, with the release of the film version, directed by Ed Zwick (Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai), is the story becoming widely known.

“Well, the big story is the obvious one: that there was total annihilation of the Jewish population in Europe,” Craig says, explaining why it took so long for the facts behind Defiance to come to light, mainly because of the reluctance of those who took part in it to talk until many years later. “So, in a way, this is a small story about a relatively small number of people who resisted. But there was also survivor guilt. And they did bad things to survive – though that makes for an interesting moral argument.”

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The film highlights the intense differences between Tuvia, the leader of the Bielskiotriad, and his brother Zus, played by Schreiber, over tactics and morality. Zus favoured retribution, not only against the Nazis, but against the locals who sided with them. Tuvia believed they needed to survive with their morality intact. “We may be hunted like animals,” he declares in the film, “but we will not become like animals.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Craig says. “What’s worth fighting for? What I find fascinating was that this normal man, a farmer, was thrust into the role of leadership and somehow figured out these great moral questions. That really made the story interesting for me.”

I ask whether Craig decided to do Defiance because the part offered the opportunity to show a more sympathetic side of himself than Bond has become. “No, it’s always, ‘Does this story work?’ Everything falls into place around that. And, really, I try to keep it as instinctual as possible, because if you start thinking, ‘I must do a romantic comedy now, because I’ve just done a psychotic’, you’re stuffed. It would seem the antithesis of art.”

At the same time, from quite early in his career, Craig, who has played everything from a gangster, in Layer Cake, to a poet, in Sylvia, has tried to make sure he isn’t typecast. “The first time I came to LA, in the early 1990s, all the jobs I seemed to be going up for were the Nazi or the thug, the bad guy,” he says. “And I remember sitting in a casting and looking around at these actors, all of whom were there to play the bad guy, and I thought, ‘I don’t want to be here. This is not who I want to play.’ You know, on paper, that it’s a career, you’ll make a living, but I knew I didn’t want to be typecast then. I wanted to be able to play anything.”

Even though Bond has made Craig, at 40, the most famous Englishman after David Beckham, and he’s on the way to becoming a very rich man, he says he tries not to think of what he does as a business, but to keep in mind what inspired him to become an actor: “I can remember wanting to act as far back as I can remember.” His mother, an art teacher, used to take him to the theatre in Liverpool, where they lived. “I was just amazed that one minute people were on stage, then they would come off and be completely different,” he says. “It was magic. And it obviously had a deep, deep effect on me.

“I was always impressed by loud people, too, which is a bad thing to be impressed by, because most actors are drunks, and, as the evening goes on, they get louder and more entertaining - well, hopefully more entertaining.”

Acting offered Craig, who left school at 16, a way out - out of Liverpool and out of the low expectations a lot of people, perhaps even he, had of him. “Liverpool at that time was going through a depression: it was just horrendous,” he recalls. “I was failing miserably at school, and my mother said, ‘Well, I know you want to act, so get out and do it.’ It was a gentle but firm push. She also said, ‘If you want to act, go to London.’ ” Craig studied first at the National Youth Theatre, then at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, at the same time as Ewan McGregor and Joseph Fiennes, graduating in 1991. “And it all kind of worked out,” he says wryly. “My mother is very, very relieved.”

Part of the reason for his ebullience when I meet him may be that he has just been told Quantum of Solace has topped $500m in worldwide box-office sales. “Although I wouldn’t know $500m if it sat on my face,” he says. “But it would probably be quite nice if it sat on my face. I know that, when it comes down to it, these films are about box office, but the moment I start thinking about the figures, I’ll be stuffed – though maybe I won’t be saying that in a year’s time, when I’ve spent everything.”

Craig hardly needs reminding about the vitriolic reaction of die-hard fans to the news that he had been chosen as the sixth actor to play Bond. “My God, don’t the producers have any brains?” one fan asked in a typical internet posting. “Bond must be tall, dark and handsome, or at least two of the three, and he isn’t even one.” Craig admits it got to him at the time, but, after all the doubts, he says the success of Quantum is even more satisfying than Casino Royale’s was. That is mainly because he was more involved than he has acknowledged in the development of the character and story. With Quantum, he took full ownership of Bond.

“The first film was a huge punt, although I think if it had failed miserably, I could have walked away with my head held high and said, ‘Well, I gave it a go.’ But the fact was that it wasn’t. It was a success, and in a way that nobody could have predicted. Quantum was about keeping it interesting, relevant, and the only way I could think about doing that was just to throw myself headlong into it. So I know the work we put in. We didn’t have a complete script, so Marc [the director, Marc Forster] and I had to batter it into shape, to find the story we wanted to tell.”

Craig isn’t bothered that Quantum has been criticised for being too dark. “Well, I nicked a lot of the ideas about who Bond is from Ian Fleming,” he says. “But the point is, we did the movie we had to do to finish the story off, and comedy and lightness weren’t relevant. This was a story about loyalty, about friendship, about who you can trust. Gag-writing wasn’t at the top of the list.” Looking forward, he says that having finished the story they began with Casino Royale, everything will be up for grabs in the next film - although nobody has started working on it yet - and the tone could be completely different.

“I love the idea of putting Moneypenny in the film,” he says, to my surprise. “I’m dead keen to do it. And Q.” Moneypenny, to those few who may not have seen earlier Bond films, is the secretary who is always flirting with Bond, Q the Secret Service boffin who equips him with the latest spy gadgets. “But I work from the premise that there are millions and millions of people out there who never saw one of the earlier Bond movies. So they don’t understand the martini gag. Or the Moneypenny gag, which is a gag - it had ceased to be a character. So, let’s find out who she is. We can have fun doing that. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m up for a submarine base, as long as the gag works. The problem is that Austin Powers screwed everything up. He exploded the genre. Did I just say that? I did.”

As satisfying as the success is, Craig admits he still hasn’t fully come to terms with how much Bond has changed his life, although he insists that the people closest to him, including his long-term girlfriend, the producer Satsuki Mitchell, and Ella, his 16-year-old daughter, treat him as they ever did.

“I’m in denial about it, but it has changed everything for me,” he says. “Life just got flipped on its head. All of a sudden, everybody recognised me. I can’t go out without being recognised. Simply put, it’s a pain in the ass. You can’t have the sort of spontaneity of saying, ‘Let’s go to the pub.’ People say, ‘You’re an actor. Isn’t that what you do?’ But I don’t do it to be recognised. I do it because I get a kick out of doing it. I’m not moaning, but I have had to reassess the way I look at the world, the way I live my life. I knew I would, I just didn’t have a plan for it.”

Defiance opens on Friday

отсюда

Saturday, January 10 2009, 06:00 GMT

By Stella Papamichael

Before his crowning as James Bond, actor Daniel Craig was best known for his stage work and critically acclaimed indie films like The Mother and Enduring Love. Coming hot on the heels of his second 007 film, World War II drama Defiance is another modestly-budgeted but ambitious story. Under the direction of Ed Zwick, he stars as a Jewish man who, along with his brothers played by Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell, builds a resistance movement in the freezing Belorussian woodland during World War II. Talking to DS, Craig reveals why the spectre of James Bond is never far away and how the icy conditions in Lithuania helped the cast to get up close and personal…

You must get offered a huge number of scripts since becoming James Bond. Are you more careful about the roles you choose outside of that?
"I don't think anything has really changed in that respect. I do get more offers, or at least I get to see more scripts, but they're just as crap as they were before. I mean there are only so many good scripts out there, genuinely, so you have to sort of riffle through all of them and go through that whole process. If anything I suppose it's even harder because instead of four scripts you've got eight scripts and I have to read more, which is obviously a bore!"

This character Tuvia Bielski, a bit like Bond, has a lot of repressed rage, doesn't he?
"I know, but I'll never choose a role because of another role. Genuinely this came along and I read it and just went, 'I want to make this movie.' It's a story I want to tell. And it's also something that fascinated me because, well, for obvious reasons really, but I never look at something and say, 'Oh, it's a bit similar to this or it's a bit like this.'"

It's been said this is your second 'Jew fighting back' role since Munich…
"Hey, it's a career and that's all I can say! Again, this might sound naïve but that didn't bother me. I mean of course I looked at it and thought, 'Well there's Munich and people will look at that and maybe compare that…' But again, if I went through my life trying to 'construct' my career I would lose all of the inspiration. I was inspired by this story and hopefully I will continue to be inspired by stories. I mean I'm not actively looking for another Jewish freedom fighter, but you never know. Maybe a very old one?"

Has Bond given you the power to green-light films like this which might be a tougher sell?
"Well, you'd think that but I tell you this was a real f**king struggle. I mean we couldn't get this made in the States. I mean it [Bond] helped, it definitely helped… I think if I'd picked a rather nice romantic comedy then it would have been easier to raise the money for it. But this is a tough storyline and thank God for Paramount Vantage who stepped in to help, but we came to Europe for the money. Thankfully, European sales and worldwide sales on Bond have been fairly healthy so we managed to get some money… Hopefully I can continue to use that [power] positively and productively as opposed to wasting it. I'll try."

You had members of the Bielski family visiting the set. Does that put an extra weight of responsibility on your shoulders?
"I suppose it does to a certain degree, but I always have approached acting and filmmaking, therefore [with the attitude that] this is always going to be an interpretation. Obviously Ed Zwick and I sat down and talked for days on end, and I did do with Liev [Schreiber] and Jamie [Bell]. We all talked about what we thought was essential for this story and then you just make this leap of faith. And the leap of faith is that, 'This is what we understand about the story and this is the story we're going to tell and hopefully it will raise a debate.' The Bielskis have been to see the film, and they reacted very well to it. I'm glad that happened, but you can't have that on your head while you're shooting a movie. You've got to be strong about your opinions."

You're no stranger to physical roles, but how did you cope with the outdoor shoot?
"Lots of alcohol! The weird thing was that I was filming this - and when we finished it was just at the beginning of November or the end of October - and we were starting Bond in January and I had to start trying to get into shape. But when it's freezing cold outside you have to eat and you have to drink and so I, uh, well I didn't... No, you know what? It got cold, but in fact this is about as cold it got and this is, like, rather a beautiful today compared to the way it could be [in Lithuania]. We had flurries of snow, but the worst thing that could've happened is the rain, and it rained for a little bit, and because we were filming on slopes and there was heavy camera equipment and things, it could've got really dangerous. But we got through."

Did being out there in the freezing woods encourage a bit of male bonding...?
"Ah, like one of those things where we hit each other with twigs!? You know we did that, but no! Um. It definitely had an effect. All I can say is that, we didn't sleep rough, and we didn't sleep out. I went home every night. We were there twelve hours a day, we were there six days a week and it got f**king cold, but there was something about that experience. Nobody did this movie for money and that includes the crew - and we had a top-notch crew on this and everybody stuck around on set. We had Lithuanian actors, we had British actors and American actors, and the crew, and we all just huddled around and while the film was being made we were all involved with it. So there was male and female bonding going on but not in that way! Apparently."

Источник

How acting in Liverpool spurred James Bond actor Daniel Craig on

Jan 5 2009 Liverpool Daily Post

ACTOR Daniel Craig has spoken of how being taken to the theatre when he was a child in his native Liverpool encouraged him to make a career out of the stage.

In an interview ahead of the release of his latest film, the James Bond star explained that his mother, Carol Olivia, an art teacher, used to take him to watch performances where they lived.

He said: “I was just amazed that one minute people were on stage, then they would come off and be completely different.

“It was magic. And it obviously had a deep, deep effect on me.

“I was always impressed by loud people, too, which is a bad thing to be impressed by, because most actors are drunks, and, as the evening goes on, they get louder and more entertaining – well, hopefully more entertaining.”

He also spoke of how acting gave him a chance during the economic depression that hit the city in the 80s.

He said: “Liverpool at that time was going through a depression: it was just horrendous. I was failing miserably at school, and my mother said, 'Well, I know you want to act, so get out and do it'.”

Craig, who spent part of his childhood in Fairfield, Liverpool, and later Hoylake, Wirral, went on to study at the National Youth Theatre, then at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, graduating in 1991.

He added: “And it all kind of worked out. My mother was very, very relieved.”

Источник