Daniel Craig is a sensational actor and we appreciated him taking time out of his busy schedule to sit down with us and talk about the challenge of becoming the new Bond, working opposite
Eva Green, and his plans for 007’s future. Here's what he had to say:
Q: So, did you let yourself go after you wrapped production?
DC: You mean physically let myself go or mentally let myself go? I did a little bit of both after it. I went on holiday and let myself go in lots of ways. But that was just because we were in France and eating good food and drinking lots of wine. And I have kept up going to the gym, but not quite as intensely as I was doing it during the film.
Q: Have you had time to breathe yet?
DC: It wasn’t like that because we went straight into long-lead press, a junket for a week, where I actually had to go talk about the movie just as we finished it. And it was one of the most bizarre experiences because I hadn’t given it any thought. I’d been just working. People were going, ‘What’s it like to be Bond?’ And I didn’t know. I still don’t really know. And then we went on holiday. So it’s kind of never stopped. As much as I went away on holiday, the phone was ringing every day and we were discussing stuff about how we were going to do this and how we’re going to do that and what the next stage is. It’s a full-time job. It’s a good job, though.
Q: We heard you indulged in several vodka martinis when you got the role. Were you a fan of the drink?
DC: No, no. Believe me, a good one; nothing is like it. I’m not bad at mixing them, either. I used to do that in pubs, in bars. I’m quite particular about them.
Q: You had to go through a lot to get the role and you’ve had to deal with the press and internet since getting it. Why did you want it?
DC: There are simple answers and there’s no kind of bullsh*t attached to it. The script was great. I got it and I read it and I thought, ‘I’d be a fool not to have a go at this.’ Hindsight is a very easy thing to say, but I was going, ‘If I don’t do this, you’re going to regret not having a go at this,’ because he is one of the biggest, iconographic [characters] in movie history. And I’m an actor. This is what I do for a living. If I don’t take on challenges like this, then what’s the point? Work was going well. It’d been going very well for me and I’ve been very happy with what I’ve been doing. And I so didn’t
expect it to happen. I had other kinds of plans in my mind, maybe, what I wanted to do and how I wanted to carry on, but this came along and Barbara Broccoli is very persuasive. She made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
Q: How different at the end of the day is something like Bond vs. The Mother?
DC: It is and it isn’t. You’d be surprised, really. The biggest difference on a movie set like that is when you walk on and you’re doing a huge stunt sequence. Then you get an understanding of how big the scale is. You see many more people on set. But when you’re [doing a] dialogue sequence, when I’m doing it with Eva or I’m doing it with Mads, it’s scaled down. You’re trying to do the same thing as I was doing in The Mother. You’re just telling a story and you’re acting with other people. I don’t differentiate between the two, and that was important when we were doing the film. I didn’t want us to shoot two movies. I didn’t want to shoot an action movie and a love story, or whatever the story (part of it) was. I wanted it to be absolutely seamless. I wanted it to be so that I could see the storytelling going on in this.
Q: What was your most grueling stunt?
DC: They were all pretty grueling, but I think the Madagascar sequence at the beginning, because of all the running involved. I picked up injuries, strained muscles. I wouldn’t classify myself as a professional athlete in any way, but I understand now a little bit more about how professional athletes are constantly working through pain. And painkillers go a long way.
Q: How pleased were you that this is a low-tech Bond adventure, light on the gadgets?
DC: It was not a debatable issue, and that was from all of us. That was from Martin. That was from Gary Powell, the stunt coordinator, and Barbara and Michael. It was NOT a debatable issue. We are making a movie here which is that any gadget, any kind of effect that happens, is part of the storytelling. You see at Miami Airport there are a lot of planes landing. They were there to sort of say, ‘We’re in Miami. Here are the planes.’ We couldn’t have planes landing in the back of shots, so we had CGI to give us that. But nothing that you see in the movie, stunt-wise, is not happening. It’s all happening. And if it’s not me doing, it’s someone else doing it, and they’re getting hurt. You also find out what it’s like falling down a flight of stairs. It feels like you’re falling down a f*cking flight of stairs. And that’s what we wanted to feel. We wanted to feel the pain, the pain in it.
Q: How likable or not did you want your Bond to be?
DC: I didn’t go out to make him likable. I didn’t go out, going, ‘Please like him.’ I wanted him to be somebody who changed. I did not want him to be the same person at the beginning of the movie as he was at the end. And, for whatever reason, and I wasn’t thinking beyond this movie at the time, I was thinking that if we ever do do another we need to have somewhere to go. I wanted to see a fallible human being, somebody that made mistakes, somebody who an audience watches and goes, ‘This might not turn out good. This might turn out really bad.’ And sometimes it did.
Q: How many are you signed to do?
DC: Three.
Q: How tough was the torture scene to shoot?
DC: It was the simplest, easiest scene in the movie to shoot. I hate to say it, but it took a day. It took a day of shooting. It was on the page. Mads is a fantastic actor. We figured it out together. I sat in a corner and listened to some music and got myself into the idea. We both had a discussion. I said to myself, ‘The one thing I don’t want to do, even though he is in this position he’s in, is have him lose.’ He cannot lose. Even though he knows he’s going to die, he must never let it go. Martins, Mads and I just sat down, talked about it, thought how we were going to do it and just got on with it and shot it. It was remarkably easy, apart from one [incident]. We had a hard bottom on the chair, obviously, because I wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise. And it cracked at one point. I left the room rather [hastily]. I just like [jumped] eight feet in the air [and yelled] ‘Stop!!’
Q: What were you listening to?
DC: I was listening to the Clash and to the Foo Fighters. Vivaldi? No. The Four Seasons? No. It was just some good guitar music.
Q: Was there a point where, hearing the negative Internet and tabloid buzz, you took those comments to heart?
DC: Look, I will not lie to you about it. It affected me. It affected me and I went, ‘You know what? What can I do? I can’t answer it.’ I can’t start getting on Internet sites and go (he makes whining noises). I get it. I get the passion that people feel for this, and I understand it. But I make films. Normally, when I make a film, we wait until we get to the premiere or we wait to the time when the press screening happens, and I start getting reviews. So it was like, ‘See the f*cking movie. Watch the movie and then you can say what you like about it. But just watch the movie.’ That’s my answer. There’s no point in getting into t*t for tat arguments about the way I look.
Q: Women at the screening gasped at your body, in a good way.
DC: Thank you.
Q: Can you talk about the James Bond workout you did?
DC: It was just nothing special. I went to the gym, I pushed weights and I ran about. It was intense. I mean, I had to do it every day. I was doing an hour and a half, maybe, every day. We increased the weight quite rapidly because that was the only way I was going to build up. I had a high-protein diet. And at the end of the workout I’d do 20 minutes on the bike to try and keep the fat down. There’s no real secret to it. You can find it in any heath magazine. I had a good trainer, which helped, someone encouraging me.
Q: You’re signed for two more and you just said you want this to be a beginning for Bond. So what are the next steps?
DC: I think we’ve set up the idea now that there’s an organization out there that needs to be sorted out, and he’s sort of got a sense of revenge. He wants to go and get them, so that’s his spur. Everybody has sort of said, ‘This is how he becomes Bond.’ I think the process is still happening. That idea that we have the finished article? We haven’t yet. We’ve got somebody who’s still maybe too headstrong and doesn’t always make the right decision. I want to take on what we’ve set up and I think we’ve made a good movie here, and I want to make another good movie. I don’t want to let the ball drop.
Q: Why does it work more for you that he’s fallible?
DC: Because I think it’s dramatically much more interesting. If I play any character I want to see a weakness within them, because I want to see how they cope with that, how they dealt with it. I don’t want to watch two-dimensional characters when I go to the cinema. I want to watch rounded people make decisions, and I can’t believe that they’d make a decision that they’re Teflon-coated. That doesn’t interest me.
Q: How do you think the action-adventure landscape has changed since the last film?
DC: We’ve got a number of things. People have mentioned the Bourne series, which are superb movies. They’re pretty gritty. But we’ve had those kinds of movies for years. If you think about Get Carter and think about the Michael Caine spy movies that were done during the 1960s. Those have always interested me. I think Bond had a lot of that in the beginning, then it sort of was lost, and then it came back again with Timothy Dalton. A lot of influences from movies I put into the work I do. The landscape has changed in the world, politically, but I don’t know if we’re any less confused than we ever were. That’s what I think is enduring about the character is that he kind of seems to know the answer. At least he knows where the bad guy is and he goes and gets him. I think that, as a piece of escapism, that’s what I want to see in my Bond character. I want to see a guy who knows what he’s up to.
Q: How is His Dark Materials going?
DC: That’s fantastic. Those are three of my favorite books, the Philip Pullman trilogy. Just the timing worked out. New Line came and said, ‘Are you interested?’ And I was interested. I think they are fantastic children’s books. I think they’re about love and they’re about growing up and they’re about how, as adults, we should see the world, and how, for children, growing up is one of the biggest struggles, one of the toughest things you’ll ever do.
Q: What direction are you going with your character?
DC: A fine direction. He’s single-minded. He’s not unlike the one I’m playing at the moment. He’s singled-minded in trying to achieve something, because he believes that without a little change in the world then it won’t move on.
Q: Have you read the Fleming book?
DC: I read it. I read it. I read most of them. I read most of them and I watched all of the movies and then I kind of put it there. There’s a huge history, a huge lineage of the books and the films, and to ignore it to would be stupid. So I soaked it up and just got as much of it [as I could]. I had them in my trailer. I’d relax and stick on one and just check it out. I didn’t want to miss a trick.
Q: What does your daughter make of you being Bond?
DC: I don’t want to talk about my daughter, sorry. Her privacy is sacred. It’s absolutely sacred to me.
Q: What does your family make of it?
DC: It’s a huge deal. They’re very proud and seem to be very happy. I’ve been acting a long time now, so it’s not like I haven’t been doing things and they haven’t noticed things and I haven’t been getting a lot more press. This is a big deal, but this hasn’t come out of the blue.
Q: How was the sinking house sequence to shoot?
DC: Chris Corbould, who was the special effects supervisor/set designer, is a genius, just a genius. It was on the Bond stage. There was 20 feet of water and this house. And it sank five, six, seven times a day, like that into the water. It was like a roller coaster and it was all computer-driven. Then it would raise out, we’d dry it off a bit and we’d do the scene again. I think it's a great sequence. I’ve ever seen anything like that before. It’s not the submarine base. Maybe there will be a submarine base next time.
Q: How different is this from everything else you’ve done in terms of seeing it actually put together and sitting there in a theater?
DC: I don’t know, really, how to say it. I think the finished product is quite extraordinary. What’s interesting is that from the very beginning, ‘If you include me in everything that’s going on, everything that’s going on in the movie, I will feel confident enough to be able to walk on that set and play this man.’ And they, thankfully, as Martin did, involved me. Even though I’m certainly not responsible, I had a say in the look of the film, the feel of the film, the music. So I feel just immensely proud. That’s the simple way of looking at it, I think.
Q: Do you worry at all about being trapped in the role?
DC: It’s a high-class problem to have. It’s a very high-class problem to have. There are worse things. I count myself very blessed to be in a situation like this. I’m not looking for a way of countering it. I’m just going to enjoy it for the moment, as opposed to looking at the negative.
Q: What if you play a wimp in your next role?
DC: A wimp with a heart. Maybe you’ve got a good idea.
Q: Have you been in contact with past Bonds?
DC: Someone asked me the other day, ‘Is there a secret group?’ We were trying to decide whether I’d be kidnapped one night and get a bag pulled off my head and say, ‘Oh, hi guys.’ Pierce Brosnan has been very supportive. I met him last year at last year’s BAFTA’s and he’s just been great. He said, ‘Go for it. You’ve got to go for it.’ And I hear through the press that other (positive) things have been said. Whether they’re true or not, I don’t know, but it seems to me that there’s been some nice things said, which helps.
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