By Rob Scheer in New York
Ever since bursting on the scene (and winning the Independent Spirit Award for ‘Someone to Watch’) with his 2000 film “Everything Put Together,” director Marc Forster has put out a new film nearly every year, and rarely has one of them had much in common with the others. So now, after a string of five modest grossers centered around relationships or characters’ emotional conflicts, this Friday sees the American release of his first film likely to set the box office ablaze (it’s already grossed $170 million overseas). That film is his first – and he says his last – entry in the James Bond series, “Quantum of Solace.” And for a director whose closest work resembling “action” is a rough sex scene between Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton, he’s made his Bond installment perhaps the most action-filled, propulsive film the series has seen in years. Having directed movies such as “Monster’s Ball” and “Finding Neverland” to multiple Oscar nominations, and helming more offbeat fare like the Will Ferrell vehicle “Stranger than Fiction” and the underseen “Stay,” the filmmaker admits he wasn’t the most likely candidate for such a big-budget franchise film, but gathers that’s exactly why he was hired.
Q: This is, obviously, quite a departure for you. How did you become even remotely attached to a Bond film and what interested you about doing one?
MARC: I basically got a phone call one day from my agent saying “Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, the producers of Bond, want to meet you and offer you the movie, they want to sit down with you” and I said, “Look, I really don’t want to do it, so why don’t you just tell them thank you, I’m very honored.” And then he called back and said “they really want to meet you, out of respect you should just go and take the meeting,” so I said okay. I thought, you can always learn something new when you meet people, Bond is part of film history, I’m sure it’ll be interesting. So then basically I went to meet them, we had a lovely conversation, I thought they were really charming, and I actually liked their ideas. And I asked them, because it wasn’t clear, why me, but they felt like they didn’t want to hire an action director, and they wanted more of an emotional storyteller. I listened to everything and I said, “Look, thank you, I don’t think I’m interested, let me process all this.” And then, I went home and I told my DP and my editor, and they said “Bond?! Bond is part of history, are you crazy?! You can’t turn down Bond!” And then I thought I lost it, I thought ‘what’s wrong with me?’ So then I started talking to other people and everybody kind of went crazy, and thought I’d be out of my mind [to turn it down]. Then, at home, I was reading an old interview article with Orson Welles, and a journalist asked him – and it was very serendipitous – “so what is your biggest regret in life?” and he said, “I never made a commercial movie” or a mainstream movie, or something like that. I thought, ‘huh, that’s an interesting quote’ and it was so coincidental after what my editor and DP said. So I called back my agent and said “Maybe I should meet with them again.” So, I went back a few days later and I said, “Look, let’s say hypothetically I would do the movie, what is my freedom?” Because I don’t want to be in a situation where they’re keeper of the flame, and I’m constantly having conflict with what their vision of Bond is and what my vision of Bond is; that really wouldn’t work out. I don’t want to be someone who is managing a production; If I do it, I want to direct it and put my vision and stamp on it, and bring my crew along, and if that’s unacceptable to them, then they should hire someone else. Then they said that’s why they came to me, and that sort of started a creative discussion, and then after, I met Danny Craig, I sort of decided ‘yes, this man really inspires me,’ and he’s creative and interesting as an actor and multilayered, and decided yes, I want to do it.
Q: Were you initially not interested because of the fact of trying to follow the other films?
MARC: No, I mean, I was not interested because I felt like living a year and a half with that pressure would be intense, and I thought, what’s the upside for me if the film fails? At that point, there was no script, so the chance that it would fail was enormous, and it would really hurt my career with the smaller movies. And if it succeeds, the only upside would be that I can make other big Hollywood blockbusters, which is not necessarily my goal. It would be fun once in a while to do a big movie like this, but I’m really completely happy doing smaller films. So I felt like I was really risking a lot because if it doesn’t work out, it’s the 22nd film in a franchise that has been so successful, you’re the one who.. . like, Will Ferrell sent me an e-mail after I told him I was doing this, and he said “I bet you know how you’re going to sink that boat.”
Q: Was Olga your choice or was she already on board?
MARC: Pretty much, except for the cast I inherited from the last movie, I cast everyone: the villain, the girls.
Q: How did you find her?
MARC: I basically looked at hundreds of tapes, out of those I chose about twenty girls to read for me, and out of those twenty, I chose four or five to read with Danny. And basically, they came in and played out a scene, and I shot it on film and saw how comfortable they were, and out of those, I thought she the best.
Q: Part of what kind of defines a Bond film is, obviously, adherence to a certain formula and recurring elements. How does one make a cog in this franchise their own and not just another interchangeable Bond film?
MARC: I said [to myself] maybe I just have to imagine that I’m a filmmaker working under political censorship. And under political censorship, filmmakers [have] subversively pushed their ideas through, and made what they wanted to say. I thought, okay, what’s the Bond film I always wanted to see? Well, I loved the elements of the early ‘60s, I thought of the Ken Adams design elements in those movies. So I wanted to include them look-wise, and then I felt location-wise, [since] those are always so iconic, let’s find locations I would love to shoot at. The script wasn’t finished, so I started scouting. The opera sequence was [initially] in a U.N. setting, and I felt it was so boring to have it in a U.N. setting, so I thought this opera was visually much more interesting – you have this eye, which is so Bond, and him spying – and I just started making the film my own. Like with the intercutting techniques, I just started slowly visually making sure it was the film I sort of saw, and more measured it [against] ‘70s conspiracy thrillers, and keeping it very short, sort of like a bullet starts and keeps you at the edge of your seat till the last frame.
Q: This is a more action-driven, kinetic Bond film than “Casino Royale,” and you’re not necessarily thought of as that kind of director. What was the challenge of making those scenes work for you, and planning them out and how it was processed?
MARC: Basically, because the script wasn’t done, I often went to locations and sort of reinvented things and decided what worked visually. So, I got on the phone with Haggis and sent him the locations, and said “look, this is what I want to do, and this will be the setting…” and step by step, I wrote him out what I was thinking I’d like to do and sequences I’d like to happen. Like in Siena, it originally was written as they come into the safe house and then he escapes on the roof, and then they enter the cathedral from the bottom and fight up scaffolding. When I was in Siena visiting, they showed me these underground water systems, which were built by the Romans, and I thought ‘this is amazing,’ so I thought, let’s put the safe house at the bottom and then sort of start building the sequence [from there], then intercut it with the chase on top, him coming up to the middle of the square and then we end up on the roof and crash through the top because it’s more visual. So it just happened mainly with scouting; it was interesting, I guess, but when you read up on Hitchcock, he always felt that you first find a location and then build the script around it. And I felt like that technique worked very well, since I didn’t have a script, so a lot of it just came through locations and we just sort of worked the ideas around it.
Q: Bond in this movie is very much a wounded animal. He’s in mourning, and he’s just going crazy, and one of the staples of any Bond film is its humor. What was it like balancing that humor with the emotionalism that you had to have in this film?
MARC: What sparked my interest was where we left Bond off in “Casino Royale” that he lost the love of his life, and there was this pain and emotional tissue, which I thought should be the texture of this movie, and I thought would give us more of a glimpse who Bond is. But I felt it was important to have a bit of that dry humor in it, and take ourselves too seriously, especially with the relationship with M, and that she be funny and witty, and with Mathis, the Italian actor [Giancarlo Giannini], and then I thought Gemma [Arterton], the other Bond girl, Strawberry Fields, that that was sort of humorous. So I felt the only place with the least amount of humor was Olga, because I felt the two of them were mirror images, they both have pain and want revenge. But I tried to bring as much dry humor in as possible, because I knew the film was going to be so intense and so fast, I thought there wouldn’t be much room for it, so I thought wherever there was an opportunity, to inject it.
Q: How important is the plot to you?
MARC: In a sense, it is… let’s put it this way, in some of the Bond films, I never get the plot. I’m watching them and going “what’s going on here? I just lost all sense of plot here.” So I felt like the important thing to me was that there be clarity, like moving on from “Casino Royale” from beginning to end. I think someone who wasn’t seen “Casino Royale” might be slightly confused in the beginning about who is who, but I think they can stitch it together anyway. But if you have seen it, I think it’s very clear. In a sense, I feel like the plot is always a little bit secondary in these movies, but I felt it was very important to have sort of a reference to reality today, in regards to politics and the environment and natural resources, and to have an understanding that if someone’s “green,” that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily good. That’s why Mr. Greene is the villain. I’m walking around seeing posters saying “Chevron is Green Now” and “Shell is Green,” and, like, big corporations are “green” now, and it’s totally absurd that, like, the big oil companies are becoming green. That Green has become fashionable so everyone wants to do it. At the same time, with natural resources, I think water will become the next big crisis in the world. I think in this part of the world, we don’t really feel it, but when one travels, it’s interesting to discover how few people have access to drinking water in places like Africa and South America, and it’s a real crisis. I think it’s essential, and so many people try to make money off of it, which I thought would be a good backdrop to give sort of a political reality to the movie and make Bond more real, even if it’s not a really big plot element.
Q: Mathieu Almaric was a really cool choice for the villain, what attracted you to him for the part, and what’d you ask him to do?
MARC: He first came to me and said, “So, can I have a scar or something?” I said, “No, we have seen that in all these Bond movies, I just want you to be plain,” and he said “Can’t I have a crutch? It will help, it’ll make me more evil.” Like a hook or a scar, I couldn’t believe it. I said, "no, let’s not make it easy on you, we have to try to find that evil side of you with just acting." It’s easier for an actor if you have a crutch, but I thought it would be better for him to play it plain. I also felt like it’s interesting because today, villains and good guys have sort of shifted; it used to be the Cold War and villains were very clear in those Bond movies, but now Bond and the villain are much more overlapped. I wanted the villain to just look like this normal guy, because it’s like, who can we really trust these days? And I thought trust was such a central theme. You meet these people and they appear to be totally nice and lovely, and they turn out to be exactly the opposite.
Q: Daniel, obviously, has his shirt off much more than any of the women in the movie. Did you make sure he maintained his physique or did he go into extra work on his own?
MARC: He definitely, because he did this movie “Defiance” before where had to lose a lot of weight, so after, he really had to work out to get back into shape. I didn’t want him as buff as in the last one, like in “Casino Royale,” when he comes out of the water. I also think in the early Bond films, the women were just objects of beauty, and I felt like it might be good to change the girls a little bit.
Q: This is one of the first Bond films to have a continuity with the previous one. I’m curious what kind of threads you set up for the next one or if there were kind of imposed story threads so that the story would continue to another movie?
MARC: No, I only cut one scene from the movie which was after where the movie ends now, but that scene would have set up… they would have had to make a trilogy out of it. But where the film ends right now, Bond gets his quantum of solace, and that storyline has ended, so they can either start fresh with the next one, or they can…
Q: What was the missing scene?
MARC: Let’s leave it for a DVD secret, but it included the line, the famous line, that was cut.
Q: You’re obviously working with a huge budget here; to what extent is that freeing, and to what extent is that suffocating?
MARC: I mean, it’s freeing because you get to play with all the toys you want. You know, whatever you want, you usually can get. I mean, there’s still budget constraints, you have to sometimes not get everything and find compromises, but at the same time, the constraint is basically if the movie doesn’t succeed, you’re basically not going to work for a while. You’ll be on a long term vacation. Basically, the film has to work commercially.
Q: What did you learn from this experience, when all was said and done?
MARC: I took away from it that ultimately it doesn’t matter what size a movie you do, it all depends on the character and connection with a character. It always goes back to that. You can add the most spectacular action sequences, and if you don’t connect with your main character in an emotional way, it still will feel empty.
Q: Will you be participating in the next film?
MARC: No. They asked me to, and really, it was a great experience doing this, but that amount of work and pressure for a year and a half is not really a lifestyle I’m desiring. I’d rather do smaller movies, stay at home, no pressure, nobody hears about them. I mean, [when making a Bond film] while you’re shooting, you’re under the microscope of the world media. Ultimately, I think you have to make decisions according to the lifestyle you want to live. Life is so short, and when I die, if I have 20 DVDs on my shelf or 10, it doesn’t really matter. It more matters the life I live, the people I love that love me back, the rest is not really relevant.
Q: So, since Bond 23 isn’t in your future, what’s next?
MARC: Probably a film with two people in a room talking.
"Quantum of Solace" opens in theaters November 14.