ANTOFAGASTA, Chile — It looks like the surface of Mars. The rust-colored rolling hills of the Atacama desert appear alien, devoid of life — just sand and dirt and rock baked into vast, barren slopes that stretch endlessly into the bruised horizon.

Against this unforgiving backdrop, Daniel Craig is exploring the merciless side of James Bond. Quantum of Solace is the 22nd film in the 007 franchise, Craig's second after 2006's blockbuster Casino Royale, and the first true sequel to a Bond film, picking up the story just minutes after the previous film ends.

The movie, opening Nov. 7, is about halfway through filming. They've been to Panama and Baja California, Mexico, with plans to shift next to Italy and Austria before returning to London's famed Pinewood Studios for more stage shooting.

The action sequence shot in the Chilean desert last week is a turning point for the embittered superspy, his chance to discover whether his thirst for vengeance will turn him into the same kind of cold-blooded killer as the people he is fighting.

"He has his heart broken," says Craig, who turned 40 during the shoot. "The love of his life is killed, and he finds out she's not who she said she was. … He's out for revenge. But he's also out to find — and this is what the title is about — a 'quantum of solace.' Something has been taken away from him, and he's out to get that back."

Craig is running at full speed along the rooftop of a long, narrow building, wedged like a man-made plateau into the rocky red valley. He's firing a prop pistol into the mirrored skylights below.

The building is supposed to be an "eco-hotel," a buried tropical oasis amid this wasteland designed to lure the rich and powerful with the latest environmental technology. The hotel is a front for the villain, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric, the French star of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), a tycoon using a "Save the Earth" facade to hide his plan to seize control of part of South America's water supply.

"The villain has taken over this place. Greene is pretending to be 'green,' but he's obviously not," says producer Michael G. Wilson.

In real life, this partially subterranean structure is home to scores of visiting astronomers at the Paranal Observatory, site of four of the world's largest and most advanced telescopes. The silver domes stand sentinel on a nearby hillside awaiting sundown and the universe's nightly display of galactic fireworks.

These are the only structures for 75 miles and are situated in the thin air of the 8,700-foot elevation, where it's easy to run out of breath doing take after take of sprinting and gunplay.

Craig's sprinting gunshot scene is literally breathless — his chest heaves hard after multiple takes, but he laughs matter-of-factly later when asked about the high-altitude challenges. "It's (expletive) hard!"

The thin atmosphere has been hardest on the new Bond girl, Olga Kurylenko, 28, who plays a mysterious Bolivian-Russian rogue agent whose quest for revenge puts her in league with Bond. But even she prefers it to the marshy conditions of their last location.

"It's much easier to work here than in Panama, weather-wise," she says. "It's hot in both countries, but in Panama it's humid, and we were working on the boat and I was sweating. Here it's dry, it's different, it's much easier, but I'm out of breath a little bit."

Director adds humanity

Director Marc Forster says setting the climax in the wasteland of Chile's Atacama Desert fuses the plot with the internal life of Bond.

"I chose the desert because it's isolated, you feel lonely, and that's what Bond is struggling with himself," Forster says. "In the desert, it's unforgivable. You're out there, and you might die."

He's an unusual choice to direct a big-budget Bond action film; his previous films, such as Finding Neverland, Monster's Ball and The Kite Runner, all were intimate dramas.

"I was very surprised," Forster acknowledges. He was persuaded to join because the producers saw value in adding depth to the crowd-pleasing flick.

"Heart might be the wrong word, but it's human," he says.

In the finished sequence of the Chilean rooftop fight, Bond will shatter the skylights and plunge down atop the fleeing Greene. Forster says the underlying tension of the scene is Bond wrestling with his eye-for-an-eye temptations.

"I said, 'Look, you're not shooting Greene, you're only shooting the glass because you want him alive. You want to crash through and find him,' " Forster says. In that moment, facing the impending explosion, Bond must decide whether slaying his nemesis is worth the cost of other innocent lives.

"When they have this moment between them, Bond has a decision to make," Forster says. "Bond lost someone he loved. But what does it mean to kill someone, when you just lost someone?"

Risks and changes

The last time the James Bond producers gambled on major alterations to the long-running formula, there was a huge outcry — and a huge payoff when Casino Royale finally came out.

During filming, many die-hard fans of previous Bond star Pierce Brosnan jeered the choice of the blond, blue-eyed, rough-edged Craig for the traditionally suave and sophisticated British agent.

But then Casino Royale became the highest-grossing Bond film in history, earning $595 million worldwide (about $150 million more than 2002's Die Another Day), and many fans and critics praised Craig as the best Bond actor since Sean Connery originated the role.

More changes to the traditional formula are in store for Quantum of Solace, among them the notion of a true sequel. Bond has always been ageless, and the previous 21 movies stand largely independently of each other, but Quantum of Solace picks up where Casino Royale ended, with Bond working his way up the chain of command of the terrorists who blackmailed his lover, Vesper Lynd.

"We set something up in motion in the last one that we need to keep in touch with in this one," Craig says.

Producer Wilson, who is the stepson of the late founding 007 producer, Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli, and has worked on every Bond film since 1979's Moonraker, says filmmakers might go back to stand-alone plots the next time, but for now they wanted to continue with an evolving Bond.

"He has the realization that there's no place for him in the outside world," Wilson says. "And also he's tempted by revenge and tempted by becoming a cynic, by losing his humanity. He has to fight all of these things."

Another curious twist is the hint that there may be less romance this time for the notorious ladies' man. "We felt Bond could not immediately fall into another relationship. And we needed someone who had her own agenda and probably could not form a relationship either because of her situation," Wilson says.

Kurylenko says her vengeful rogue agent, Camille, is so focused on "what she's doing, she doesn't care about meeting a boyfriend or something."

Bond does bed another MI6 agent, played by British actress Gemma Arterton, 22, a relative newcomer. "He has one relationship in this movie, a kind of fling. It's mutually beneficial," Craig says. "I think both parties enjoy it."

Then there's the title, a moniker some fans ridicule.

Quantum of Solace comes from a short story by 007 author Ian Fleming, and it's not a spy story but a tale told to Bond about another couple's tragic romance. The short story has nothing else to do with the movie.

Wilson explains: "The title we thought was appropriate for a couple of reasons. The villainous organization is called Quantum, and what Bond is looking for in his life is a measure of comfort, and that's what a 'quantum of solace' is. He's just trying to find a little bit of comfort because his life is in turmoil."

The Chilean uproar

The filmmakers are hoping for a measure of comfort from the Chilean people, who at first welcomed the production as a source of national pride — and then became annoyed when word spread that Chile's desert will be identified in the film as neighboring Bolivia.

Sierra Gorda's mayor, Carlos Lopez, dramatically interrupted filming Tuesday by driving his vehicle onto the set and was briefly detained by police. He previously organized small protests over the Bolivia issue, though Wilson has tried to explain to locals that it's quite common to film in one place but call it another.

Bond producers preferred the look of Chile's Paranal location, but chose to set the tale in Bolivia partly because Bolivia has a history of water problems, including takeover of public water systems by private for-profit corporations. "It seemed like the best way to tell the story without making a false country," Wilson says.

The location question is especially sensitive because the Antofagasta region, with its rich copper mining industry, was seized by Chile in a war in 1879 — cutting off Bolivia's access to the sea in a move that still generates resentment between the nations. James Bond symbolically returning the disputed land naturally irritates the locals.

Yet many Chileans (and travel guides) agree that the grimy industrial city of Antofagasta is a bad representation of Chile, which has many more beautiful regions. That means the hard feelings, in a sense, are over which country gets credit for an eyesore.

Chile's government is staying out of the fray. Andrea Lagos, media representative for the nation's embassy in Washington, says national leaders are declining to comment.

Broken Bond

When Quantum of Solace makes its debut, the squabbles during filming will no doubt largely be forgotten, and 007 fans will now be wondering: How will the film further change the iconic superspy?

The Bond of the past was calculating and in control, rarely caught off guard and more bemused than tortured by the havoc he confronts. Quantum of Solace transforms him into damaged goods. Craig says he prefers to explore the weak spots of a previously invulnerable hero.

"It's a simplistic story that has been around for a long, long time: There's one lone hero going after the bad guys. It has been around forever. But you have to apply morals to it, and within that you show somebody's flaws. That's what makes them interesting, the mistakes they make along the way and how they adjust.

"The fact is he's hurt. He's damaged and he wants revenge. And that's another facet of somebody, and it's not a good emotion to have. You've got to see how he deals with it. Last time around, it was just duty and duty alone. This time around, there's a sense of revenge. That's how he's going to screw up. Because he will — but then he gets up and gets it right."

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