Let's bond (From The Northern Echo)

Let's bond

10:47am Thursday 30th October 2008

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As the latest Bond movie opens in cinemas tomorrow, 007 Daniel Craig talks to Steve Pratt about being in Bondage and why he’s dropped the tight swimming trunks.

THE time is approaching five in the afternoon at the end of a long day of back-to-back interviews for the new James Bond film. But Daniel Craig can’t stop talking, jumping in with his answer before a question is even finished.

He apologises for interrupting. “I’ve been talking all day and am wound up like a coil,” he says.

The 40-year-old actor is clearly more comfortable being 007 now than two years ago when he debuted as the secret agent in Casino Royale amid snide remarks about a blond Bond and an internet campaign to remove him.

He can afford to stick up two fingers at his detractors after that picture became the biggest-grossing Bond movie ever by taking nearly $600m worldwide, collected a Bafta nomination, good reviews and, perhaps most importantly, satisfied diehard Bond fans.

Following that was never going to be easy. If Quantum Of Solace doesn’t quite reach the heights of Casino Royale, the film continues the reboot of the cinema’s longest-running franchise.

Craig had plenty of input on the new production, not least concerning the development of James Bond’s character, as he seeks revenge for the death of true love Vesper at the end of Casino Royale.

For him, that film’s success wasn’t a doubleedged sword when it came to the follow-up. “It’s better this way, though. If we had a dud last time, this would be a very difficult process,”

he says. “Yes, it gives us added pressure, but it’s good pressure and we’ve just got to try and use the impetus of it, and work on the success, as they say.”

One thing on which he doesn’t care to dwell is the flak that greeted him being named the new Bond because “I got over that a long time ago. As far as I’m concerned, it’s in the dim and distant past.

“I half expected what happened because I understood people’s passions for these movies, I had passion for them myself and understood that people were going to react passionately to a new thing.”

WHAT he couldn’t have predicted was that one scene would set tongues wagging – that shot of him emerging from the sea in skintight trunks. Rather than talking about his performance, he was treated like a Bond girl with the accent put on his body, not his acting. No, he says, that didn’t tick him off at all.

“There are worse things in life, aren’t there?”

he says. “It just wasn’t in the script this time.

Again, it’s like forcing something in there, and I’m certainly not going to get the blue swimming trunks out just for a giggle. They’re done and dusted now.”

He’d much rather talk about acting. Having a serious actor as Bond has helped revive a series that was starting to seem dated and out of place in the 21st Century.

Craig doesn’t deny the importance of action in the series. The new film isn’t short of chases on land, sea and in the air. “The action is central to who Bond is. We can’t have one without the other. Hopefully, what we do is marry up the story, and we have an emotional link in this story that pays into each other.

“I said it last time, with Casino Royale, that having two separate movies – one action movie and one story movie – doesn’t make much sense. You’ve got to make sure that they tie into each other. That’s half the battle.”

These are the sort of debates I’m pretty sure Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan didn’t have with producers, but an indication of how seriously Craig takes this I spy business.

He’s applied himself with equal dedication to performing the action-filled sequences, whether a pursuit on foot across the rooftops of Siena or speedboat chase. He didn’t escape unscathed, slicing off the top of a finger on one occasion.

Whether the shoulder injury that causes him to wear a sling during the interview is a result of Bondage is debatable. “I didn’t push myself further this time, I was involved with the action sequences a lot earlier. We had to rehearse them two months before we set up, because I wanted to get them right,” he explains.

“It wasn’t particularly harder, in certain respects it was easier because I knew what I was doing. But we had time constraints on this film.

We had to finish on a certain date, there was a potential actors’ strike, so we had a cut-off date. I had to film and then, in the evening and days off, rehearse. That’s what made it more physically challenging than the last.”

He claims not to know when he injured his shoulder. “I could give you three or four moments where it hurt, but I don’t know whether I tore it at that point,” he says.

He’s careful about claiming ownership of Bond now.

“I think I’m only borrowing it, don’t you?” he says. “This is all great, but someone else is going to come along and hopefully do a better job than I’ve done and move it on.

“It’s not mine, it’s Ian Fleming’s, it’s the Broccolis’.

I could say I’m the caretaker but that’s a really naff thing to say. I’m enjoying playing it and I do think the potential now is we can do anything in the next Bond movie. I genuinely believe that.

“We can bring back Moneypenny and Q. I think we’ve got to offer them to the best actors we can find and ask them to do the best job.

“It’s hard to believe there’s a generation of people who don’t know Bond movies. They’ve never seen them, they don’t watch them the way I’ve watched them growing up. So just saying the lines and introducing the characters and expecting them to understand who they are is the wrong thing to do. We have to re-introduce them and earn the right to have them.”

Producers Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli tell me they’re happy for Craig to continue for as long as he wants. The man himself doesn’t know how long he’ll carry on being 007 but says: “I’d love to do another one. Maybe I’m just superstitious or stupidly pessimistic, I just want to see how it goes. And if I get the chance, I’ll do it.”

■ Quantum Of Solace (12A) opens in cinemas tomorrow.

■ See 7Days today for Quantum Of Solace review and interview with new Bond girl, Olga Kurylenko

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