Forster On 'Quantum of Solace': It Should Be Like A Bullet

In less than two days the long wait for James Bond fans will finally be up as Quantum of Solace goes on general release in the UK.

With 2006’s Casino Royale being the highest grossing and best reviewed film in the 007 series to date, the pressure is definitely on for Quantum of Solace to deliver.

‘If this film doesn’t become a commercial success, I’m going to be on a very long vacation,’ laughs the German-born, Swiss-raised filmmaker in an interview with The Scotsman one day before the world premiere in London (which took place just a few hours ago).

As Forster has stated on previous occassions, it took a bit of persuading to convince him to helm a blockbuster Bond film.

He said: ‘It was only when I met Daniel that I was inspired enough to take it. I thought he was incredible. Then I got on a plane to Italy and I thought, what am I doing? Am I crazy? I started thinking maybe I should talk to Barbara and Michael and pull out because I was frightened. There was no script and suddenly I was scouting the world for Bond locations, going, OK, we could shoot here, here, here and here, and all I had was a release date in my head. It was intense.’

Still, Forster managed to survive the film’s grueling production schedule and deliver the shortest and perhaps most action-packed Bond film ever.

‘I just wanted this to be a much shorter film,’ said Forster. ‘Casino Royale was way too long for my taste; that poker game was really slow, so I wanted to make this a really tight and fast film. It should be like a bullet.’

Daniel Craig then arrived and after answering Bond-related questions all day long, he cut right to the chase when asked about his interpretation of 007: ‘I genuinely just nicked a lot of stuff from Ian Fleming.’

‘His Bond is very psychological: he thinks, he’s morally ambiguous, he’s an assassin, he kills people for a living; at the same time he always gets his man and goes after the bad guys. But there’s no deep and meaningful thing here. I don’t approach it like some big dramatic piece.’

I think I’m only borrowing it, don’t you?’ Craig added. ‘This is all great, but I think someone else is going to come along and hopefully do a better job than I’ve done. 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.’

For now, however, Craig stressed the importance of putting everything into the performance. ‘It’s hard to believe, but there is a generation of people who don’t know the Bond movies,’ he said. ‘They haven’t watched them the way I watched them growing up, so just saying the lines and introducing the characters and expecting them to understand who these people are would have been the wrong thing to do. But I do think that means we can do anything in the next Bond movie. We can introduce Moneypenny and Q back into it, I think we’ve just got to get the best actors we can find, and ask them to do the best job.’

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