New James Bond Movie In The Making
The new James Bond movie – “Quantum of Solace” picks up only an hour after the “Casino Royale” movie left off. It is the first James Bond movie to become a direct sequel. The movie began filming in January and so far they have been to Britain and Panama. But for now they have stopped in Chile for a few shots.
It’s a place that director Marc Forster said evokes Bond’s “isolation and loneliness.” “He is an assassin, he is a secret agent, and that reflects a certain lifestyle, which is lonely,” said Forster. Indeed, the big news on the set is that one of the two Bond girls, Olga Kurylenko, doesn’t get in even a single kiss with star Daniel Craig. Craig says not to worry too much. “We’re not making a kitchen sink drama here. We are making a Bond movie,” he said.
“What Marc wanted and the producers and what I wanted is to bring back a visual flair to the movie, so that every frame in every shot that we see is beautiful. And there may be things exploding, but they’re good to look at.” Still, Forster, the youngest-ever Bond director at 39, was hired on by longtime producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson because of his emotionally intense films like “Monster’s Ball” and “The Kite Runner.”
Despite the heightened realism of the last Bond film, not to mention its commercial success (over $500 million worldwide), the German-born Swiss director was wary of joining the bombastic franchise. Forster negotiated with producers to ensure he had as much creative control as possible on the $200 million-plus production. Nevertheless, he’s still squeezed into the “framework of Bond.”
“But I like it because you feel like it can make you very creative,” he said. “And a lot of interesting things come out of that. Because, if you look at filmmakers that worked under politically repressive regimes, (they) made sometimes really interesting movies.”
Filming is about halfway done on “Quantum,” which is the name of the organization Bond is going up against. Craig said the emotional tone is lighter than “Casino Royale,” in which Bond’s lover Vesper Lynd betrayed him and then died but only a smidgen so.
“It’s kind of Bond’s journey into, at first we think it’s vengeance, but it goes somewhere else,” Craig said. “They’ve killed the love of his life, this organization, and we don’t know who this organization are, and he needs to find out who they are. And it’s for personal reasons but also professional reasons.”
Craig said that aside from some communications equipment, “Quantum” puts little emphasis on gee-whiz electronics. “The Aston Martin’s there, and that’s still the best gadget we have,” he said.