Director Marc Forster tells Jane Cornwell he wanted to go deeper into 007's psyche
AT the end of Casino Royale, James Bond declared: "The job is done and the bitch is dead."
Poor 007. Double-crossed by his first true love, Vesper Lynd, his tough old heart is broken and he just won't deal with it. There's no closure or consolation for the stubborn secret agent, none of the small comforts that his creator Ian Fleming dubbed a "quantum of solace". So this time -- in a sequel that picks up an hour from where 2006's Casino Royale left off -- Bond is hurt and out for revenge.
"Bond is in a very different place now," says Marc Forster, director of Quantum of Solace, the 22nd instalment in the series.
"What does it mean for Bond to lose someone when he himself takes other people's lives? All of this has made him psychologically more vulnerable and even a little cynical. He is unable to trust anyone. For me, the central theme of Quantum of Solace is trust."
It's certainly what Forster was riding on when he signed up to direct his first big-budget action movie. Casino Royale, directed by Martin Campbell, revived the flagging franchise with alterations to the formula and a new, rough-edged 007, Daniel Craig; it became the best box-office Bond in history, earning $US595 million.
Expectations for the follow-up have been high. But despite a resume that spans a range of intimate, character-driven dramas (The Kite Runner, Finding Neverland, Monster's Ball), not one of Forster's films boasts so much as a car chase. Can this "actor's director" and self-styled storyteller deliver?
The answer seems to be yes. With a cryptic title taken from a short story in Fleming's For Your Eyes Only collection and a new plot created while Casino Royale was still being shot, the latest Bond flick pushes the envelope even further. For all its heartbreak and trust issues, it is very much an action movie: there are crashes, explosions and stunts galore.
The film certainly looks exotic. The trademark globe-hopping takes him from London to Haiti -- where Bond meets the fiery Camille (Ukrainian actor Olga Kurylenko, who reportedly became Forster's girlfriend during filming) -- and to Austria, Italy and South America. Along the way there's a sinister plan, several MI6 traitors, a mysterious organisation called Quantum and the evil Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric, French star of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), a ruthless baddie posing as an environmentalist. Oh, and a climactic sequence in the wasteland of Chile's Atacama Desert, a place as isolated and lonely as Bond.
"I wanted to go deeper into Bond's psyche and reflect his state of mind," Forster says. "No Bond film had been done in the desert before. It's a great metaphor. There's this rough, hard shell around Bond, but inside he's just the opposite."
Forster admits he baulked at taking the job. Recommended to the producers by Craig, a fan of his films, he was eventually persuaded by the success of Casino Royale and their willingness to add depth to the Bond character.
"There are fewer studio hassles than you'd normally expect on a movie with a budget of $200million because it's their franchise. Everything starts and ends with them. They really tried to support my vision as much as they could."
Forster's vision involved shooting scenes at as many real locations as possible and restricting the use of Pinewood Studios sets to fight scenes, MI6 headquarters and Bond's Bolivian hotel suite. He'd hoped to make Bond wander alone in the Australian desert. But his vision had its limits: "The problem was the distance; I was told to find somewhere closer."
Forster is the youngest of three brothers born to a German doctor and Swiss architect, and his background certainly sounds like the stuff of 007: his family moved to a resort town in the Swiss mountains after learning they were blacklisted by the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang. But he has also said his upbringing was idyllic. He didn't see a television until he was 12, in 1979, the same year he saw Apocalypse Now and was inspired to become a filmmaker.
His breakthrough film was 2001's Monster's Ball, the story of a black woman in the southern US who becomes involved with the man who executed her husband. Carefully directed and astutely acted (not the least by Heath Ledger as a sensitive prison guard), the starkly realistic film won a best actress Oscar for Halle Berry and gave Forster his A-list status in Hollywood.
"I always like to go through scenes with actors so that they have a basic understanding of what I would like to do," Forster says. "I can never turn the camera on and just let the actor go; ultimately I have to lead it slightly, verbally or non-verbally, to get what I want." He smiles. "Judi Dench said I was the first Bond director who'd ever met her before shooting."
Forster once declined $US500,000 to direct a film because he didn't like the script and thought it might harm his reputation, despite having no money at the time: "I can only do films I am passionate about." Offered the job of directing Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), he opted instead for Finding Neverland, about children's author J.M. Barrie. "Harry Potter already had a vision in place. I couldn't extend that vision," he says.
His biggest challenge before Bond was directing the adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's mega-selling novel The Kite Runner, which follows an Afghan-American man who returns to war-torn Afghanistan to save the son of his best friend.
So how did it feel to shout "action!" on his first day on the 007 set? "I don't shout 'action'," he says. "My first AD (assistant director) suddenly started saying it, so I thought, 'OK, he enjoys it, so let him."'
Unlike earlier Bonds with cartoon Cold War villains, Quantum's baddies are neither black nor white. Nor are its good guys.
"It's very clear to me that times have changed. Things go back and forth. The bad guy is not pure evil any more and Bond is not pure good. But he is still a mystery to us, which is part of his continuing success.
"Bond isn't a character who will ever talk emotionally about himself, which is why I created the character of Camille as a sort of mirror image. She says the things that he won't say."
Would Forster direct another Bond? "No," he says firmly. "At this point I'd rather go back to doing something smaller. It was a good experience but it was exhausting and it took a long time. It's important to live life as well, you know, though I did really enjoy it."
So the job is done? "Yeah." He flashes a grin. "The job is done."
Quantum of Solace is released nationally on November 19.
(Credit: The Australian)
Media Man Australia Profiles
James Bond
