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It’s the morning after the U.S. election and Daniel Craig, the humble actor who plays cocksure James Bond, is basking in the knowledge that Barack Obama is still America’s president.
“I’m very inspired,” Craig says from Los Angeles.
“He’s the right man for the job. I’m not American, but I live here and I think he’s a really decent human being. I’m very relieved that he’s in power.”
It seems odd somehow that the Briton who plays the most lethally loyal defender of Her Majesty’s people would have an opinion about American politics. Aren’t MI6 agents supposed to stay mum about such things?
But Craig isn’t 007 when the cameras are turned off. He’s not bound by any protocol, even if millions of people now identify him as the world’s most popular spy. He’s adamant about this.
“I’m not James Bond. There’s your headline! It’s very clear to me that he’s the furthest from my character that it’s possible to be. It’s somebody I play.
“He’s a great role and it’s really fascinating to play around with it, but it’s not me and it never will be. And never would I want it to be. That doesn’t mean that it’s not incredibly satisfying to stick a tuxedo on and mess around with it occasionally.”
Craig chuckles when told that there’s currently an exhibit at TIFF Bell Lightbox called Designing Bond: 50 Years of Bond Style. The Lightbox lobby has a display case that includes the baby blue swim trunks he wore in Casino Royale in 2005. The film marked his debut as 007, the sixth man to hold Bond’s licence to kill in the franchise’s half-century run, which continues with the newly opened Skyfall.
Another pair of the same trunks recently sold for an astounding $72,000 at a charity auction in London. The sale was introduced by Judi Dench, who plays M, Bond’s MI6 boss, and who has an expanded role in the new film.
“It’s kind of an accident,” Craig says of the charity auction, sounding mildly embarrassed by it.
“We didn’t plan it, it just happened. But look, we raised some money. It got a result out of it. Whatever.”
He resists any suggestion of being a style icon. Now 44, he had a life long before Bond, and a career, too: highlights of his 20 years in film have seen him variously playing thugs, scholars and lovers in the likes of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Road to Perdition, Layer Cake, Sylvia, Infamous and Munich.
At no point prior to his essaying James Bond would anyone have singled out Craig as a clothes horse. Given the chance, he’ll happily wear blue jeans wherever he goes, even recklessly as part of a three-piece suit. The latter fashion lapse brings tut-tuts from GQ magazine in its current issue.
“I love good tailoring,” Craig says, rising to his own sartorial defense more through duty than conviction.
“I love suits. I’ve been spoiled rotten by Tom Ford. He makes suits for me and I really appreciate it. It’s something very special. I don’t wear suits all the time but I enjoy it when I get the chance to do it. It’s not something I give too much of my life over to.”
The continuing appeal of James Bond shows no sign of abating, a half century after Sean Connery enjoyed 007’s first shaken-not-stirred martini in Dr. No.
Skyfall, the 23rd official 007 adventure, opened to record box office in the U.K. last weekend. The Sam Mendes-directed film earned $287 million in Britain and most of the rest of the world prior to its North American release Thursday, putting it almost halfway to the $594 million Casino Royale earned in its complete run. More records are expected to fall, and the film has also earned many critical kudos.
Craig isn’t keen to explain either Bond’s eternal attraction or his own success in the role, the latter of which he attributes to the franchise producer’s decision to remake original Bond story Casino Royale with him in the lead role.
“It’s a difficult thing,” Craig says, measuring his words.
“Not to deconstruct it too much, but when I was given the job, I was lucky enough to be given Casino Royale. The conceit was that we would begin again. We start, we find out where (Bond) comes from. I don’t think I could have done it unless that was the case. I couldn’t have come in and copied what had been before . . . That would be just aping the other guys, who did it so well, and so individually.
“What I was given a chance to do was to rediscover it. And it’s always easy to say it now that I’ve done three (007 movies), but I’ve always had a plan in my head. I wanted to wipe the slate clean and rediscover Bond and all that coolness under fire and all that sort of attitude, where that comes from. Because that’s just the kind of actor I am. I wanted it to feel real and right.”
Casino Royale was very well received, rebooting a franchise that had devolved into self-parody by the end of Pierce Brosnan’s four-film reign as Bond.
But Craig’s second 007 outing, the Casino Royale follow-up Quantum of Solace, was less successful. It still made bags of money, but critical response was muted and it raised the question of whether Craig was in it for the long run. His fondness for Obama and the man’s re-election may have a little to do with recognizing the virtue of giving a guy another chance to prove his worth.
Craig candidly admits the writing wasn’t up to snuff on Quantum of Solace — the film went to camera with a half-finished script during a writers’ strike — and he was determined to redress this for Skyfall.
This was a priority during his pre-production discussions with Mendes, who had previously directed him in Road to Perdition and whom Craig had persuaded to try his hand at a Bond movie. Skyfall checks all the boxes that people expect from a 007 movie, but it also delves deeper into Bond’s psyche and past life than any previous film has ever done.
“No one told Sam and me that you couldn’t make a Bond movie or an action movie without a good plot!” Craig says, laughing.
“In fact, I think it’s essential. You can’t give an audience just some explosions and a bit of dialogue. It’s got to gel together. I’m not saying we make great art here, but I do think we’ve provided something that an audience can just get their teeth into.”
Craig doesn’t write any of his lines — Skyfall has three credited screenwriters — but he has a lot to say about them.
“I mean, I do what’s written and I do what’s there, but I discuss at length with Sam and we continue the conversation, not just before shooting — all the way through shooting. I bother him at night on the phone. I’m constantly trying to find the way to make it work, but it’s in the parameters of what we’re doing.
“And I’m surrounded by actors like Judi Dench and Javier Bardem and Ben Whishaw. I’ve got to raise my game!”
When Craig was introduced as the new James Bond in 2005, CasinoRoyale director Martin Campbell described him as “the Bond who bleeds,” because of the actor’s muscular physique and his willingness to take a real punch.
Now three films in, Craig might also be described as “the Bond who broods.” His 007 takes things personally, especially when lovers and friends are involved, and he’s not above seeking vengeance.
“I’ll take that!” he agrees. “I do two things: I bleed and I brood. Is there no end to this character? Ha ha!”
But Craig doesn’t bring the character home, and that includes the $11.5-million abode he recently purchased in New York’s SoHo district, where he lives with his actress wife Rachel Weisz.
He may have to deal with public expectations, not to mention pesky paparazzi, but nobody who is close to Craig expects him to act like James Bond when he’s off duty.
“My family and my friends don’t do that. That’s the reason they’re the closest people to me, because they don’t have any expectations.”
He still loves playing Bond, despite occasional tabloid headlines suggesting otherwise (“If you ever believe anything in the Daily Mail, you’re a fool”) and he’s signed on to do at least two more 007 movies.
Craig intends to avoid at all costs the inevitable tendency of Bond films to tilt towards self-parody, as the martini sipper with the Walther PPK gets too used to the role.
This doesn’t mean, however, that he’s against sending up Bond’s distinctly British mystique. He did just this before a global audience in August, when he participated in a James Bond spoof for the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, starring Queen Elizabeth as a scene-stealing royal paratrooper.
Just how weird was that for Craig? It was all in day’s work for the man who wears James Bond’s tuxedo seriously but also lightly.
“She really was a great sport,” he recalls of his co-starring role with Her Maj.
“It was very surreal, but it was very quick and easy and everybody was on the same page. She was incredibly prompt, as she always is. And I was out the door!”
“I’m very inspired,” Craig says from Los Angeles.
“He’s the right man for the job. I’m not American, but I live here and I think he’s a really decent human being. I’m very relieved that he’s in power.”
It seems odd somehow that the Briton who plays the most lethally loyal defender of Her Majesty’s people would have an opinion about American politics. Aren’t MI6 agents supposed to stay mum about such things?
But Craig isn’t 007 when the cameras are turned off. He’s not bound by any protocol, even if millions of people now identify him as the world’s most popular spy. He’s adamant about this.
“I’m not James Bond. There’s your headline! It’s very clear to me that he’s the furthest from my character that it’s possible to be. It’s somebody I play.
“He’s a great role and it’s really fascinating to play around with it, but it’s not me and it never will be. And never would I want it to be. That doesn’t mean that it’s not incredibly satisfying to stick a tuxedo on and mess around with it occasionally.”
Craig chuckles when told that there’s currently an exhibit at TIFF Bell Lightbox called Designing Bond: 50 Years of Bond Style. The Lightbox lobby has a display case that includes the baby blue swim trunks he wore in Casino Royale in 2005. The film marked his debut as 007, the sixth man to hold Bond’s licence to kill in the franchise’s half-century run, which continues with the newly opened Skyfall.
Another pair of the same trunks recently sold for an astounding $72,000 at a charity auction in London. The sale was introduced by Judi Dench, who plays M, Bond’s MI6 boss, and who has an expanded role in the new film.
“It’s kind of an accident,” Craig says of the charity auction, sounding mildly embarrassed by it.
“We didn’t plan it, it just happened. But look, we raised some money. It got a result out of it. Whatever.”
He resists any suggestion of being a style icon. Now 44, he had a life long before Bond, and a career, too: highlights of his 20 years in film have seen him variously playing thugs, scholars and lovers in the likes of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Road to Perdition, Layer Cake, Sylvia, Infamous and Munich.
At no point prior to his essaying James Bond would anyone have singled out Craig as a clothes horse. Given the chance, he’ll happily wear blue jeans wherever he goes, even recklessly as part of a three-piece suit. The latter fashion lapse brings tut-tuts from GQ magazine in its current issue.
“I love good tailoring,” Craig says, rising to his own sartorial defense more through duty than conviction.
“I love suits. I’ve been spoiled rotten by Tom Ford. He makes suits for me and I really appreciate it. It’s something very special. I don’t wear suits all the time but I enjoy it when I get the chance to do it. It’s not something I give too much of my life over to.”
The continuing appeal of James Bond shows no sign of abating, a half century after Sean Connery enjoyed 007’s first shaken-not-stirred martini in Dr. No.
Skyfall, the 23rd official 007 adventure, opened to record box office in the U.K. last weekend. The Sam Mendes-directed film earned $287 million in Britain and most of the rest of the world prior to its North American release Thursday, putting it almost halfway to the $594 million Casino Royale earned in its complete run. More records are expected to fall, and the film has also earned many critical kudos.
Craig isn’t keen to explain either Bond’s eternal attraction or his own success in the role, the latter of which he attributes to the franchise producer’s decision to remake original Bond story Casino Royale with him in the lead role.
“It’s a difficult thing,” Craig says, measuring his words.
“Not to deconstruct it too much, but when I was given the job, I was lucky enough to be given Casino Royale. The conceit was that we would begin again. We start, we find out where (Bond) comes from. I don’t think I could have done it unless that was the case. I couldn’t have come in and copied what had been before . . . That would be just aping the other guys, who did it so well, and so individually.
“What I was given a chance to do was to rediscover it. And it’s always easy to say it now that I’ve done three (007 movies), but I’ve always had a plan in my head. I wanted to wipe the slate clean and rediscover Bond and all that coolness under fire and all that sort of attitude, where that comes from. Because that’s just the kind of actor I am. I wanted it to feel real and right.”
Casino Royale was very well received, rebooting a franchise that had devolved into self-parody by the end of Pierce Brosnan’s four-film reign as Bond.
But Craig’s second 007 outing, the Casino Royale follow-up Quantum of Solace, was less successful. It still made bags of money, but critical response was muted and it raised the question of whether Craig was in it for the long run. His fondness for Obama and the man’s re-election may have a little to do with recognizing the virtue of giving a guy another chance to prove his worth.
Craig candidly admits the writing wasn’t up to snuff on Quantum of Solace — the film went to camera with a half-finished script during a writers’ strike — and he was determined to redress this for Skyfall.
This was a priority during his pre-production discussions with Mendes, who had previously directed him in Road to Perdition and whom Craig had persuaded to try his hand at a Bond movie. Skyfall checks all the boxes that people expect from a 007 movie, but it also delves deeper into Bond’s psyche and past life than any previous film has ever done.
“No one told Sam and me that you couldn’t make a Bond movie or an action movie without a good plot!” Craig says, laughing.
“In fact, I think it’s essential. You can’t give an audience just some explosions and a bit of dialogue. It’s got to gel together. I’m not saying we make great art here, but I do think we’ve provided something that an audience can just get their teeth into.”
Craig doesn’t write any of his lines — Skyfall has three credited screenwriters — but he has a lot to say about them.
“I mean, I do what’s written and I do what’s there, but I discuss at length with Sam and we continue the conversation, not just before shooting — all the way through shooting. I bother him at night on the phone. I’m constantly trying to find the way to make it work, but it’s in the parameters of what we’re doing.
“And I’m surrounded by actors like Judi Dench and Javier Bardem and Ben Whishaw. I’ve got to raise my game!”
When Craig was introduced as the new James Bond in 2005, CasinoRoyale director Martin Campbell described him as “the Bond who bleeds,” because of the actor’s muscular physique and his willingness to take a real punch.
Now three films in, Craig might also be described as “the Bond who broods.” His 007 takes things personally, especially when lovers and friends are involved, and he’s not above seeking vengeance.
“I’ll take that!” he agrees. “I do two things: I bleed and I brood. Is there no end to this character? Ha ha!”
But Craig doesn’t bring the character home, and that includes the $11.5-million abode he recently purchased in New York’s SoHo district, where he lives with his actress wife Rachel Weisz.
He may have to deal with public expectations, not to mention pesky paparazzi, but nobody who is close to Craig expects him to act like James Bond when he’s off duty.
“My family and my friends don’t do that. That’s the reason they’re the closest people to me, because they don’t have any expectations.”
He still loves playing Bond, despite occasional tabloid headlines suggesting otherwise (“If you ever believe anything in the Daily Mail, you’re a fool”) and he’s signed on to do at least two more 007 movies.
Craig intends to avoid at all costs the inevitable tendency of Bond films to tilt towards self-parody, as the martini sipper with the Walther PPK gets too used to the role.
This doesn’t mean, however, that he’s against sending up Bond’s distinctly British mystique. He did just this before a global audience in August, when he participated in a James Bond spoof for the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, starring Queen Elizabeth as a scene-stealing royal paratrooper.
Just how weird was that for Craig? It was all in day’s work for the man who wears James Bond’s tuxedo seriously but also lightly.
“She really was a great sport,” he recalls of his co-starring role with Her Maj.
“It was very surreal, but it was very quick and easy and everybody was on the same page. She was incredibly prompt, as she always is. And I was out the door!”
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Lincoln
(out of 4)
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Hal Holbrook and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Directed by Steven Spielberg. 150 minutes. Opens Nov. 9 at major theatres. PG
Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln serves history better than it does the multiplex, and that’s a brave and worthy thing in a time of slippery truths and splintered attention spans.
Neither the title-implied biopic of the 16th U.S. president nor a typical “Spielbergian” assault on the senses and tear ducts, the film eschews the foreground in favour of the background, possibly to its box-office detriment.
Lincoln mines rich drama in the hard politicking and outright vote-buying behind passage of the slavery-abolishing 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865, a feat that Lincoln, his fellow Republicans and supportive Democrats riskily accomplished while at the same time brokering an end to the country’s bloody Civil War.
Few grand scenes of battle or high emotion play before the unsentimental lens of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, a departure from the style Spielberg is known for and which he amply demonstrated just a year ago in War Horse.
An early moment sets the tone: instead of a flashback of Lincoln delivering the famed Gettysburg Address of 1863, Spielberg chooses to have the president listen quietly as two pairs of war-weary soldiers, one black and the other white, quote brief sections of it to him from memory.
Nor do we see much of the “Honest Abe” of storybook legend, the man whose towering physical stature, immense intellect, unimpeachable integrity and golden tongue combined to drag America out of the darkness of slavery and into the light of its own founding beliefs of human equality.
Daniel Day-Lewis’s vivid portrayal of Lincoln is instead grounded on the complex humanity of the man, one forced by circumstances to deal not only with epochal national concerns but also pressing family ones.
His strong resemblance to the president could have made this an easy assignment for Day-Lewis, but that would run counter to everything we know about this utterly devoted actor. He’s a cinch for a Best Actor nomination at the coming Oscars (which would be his fifth, with two wins to date) but he’s not inclined to curry favour either with audiences or Academy voters.
His Lincoln is grey of hair and beard, walks with a slight stoop and speaks in a higher register than our mind’s ear may wish to hear. He’s capable of thunder — we see glimpses — but he frequently comes across as timorous, in his dealings not only with political foes and allies but also with his high-strung wife Mary (Sally Field, impressive) and headstrong son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).
This portrait of Lincoln, which scripter Tony Kushner (TV’s Angels in America, Spielberg’s Munich) loosely adapts from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s non-fiction bestseller Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, finds its focus in the marrying of high principles with low politics.
This Lincoln is strong enough to push his anti-slavery amendment through a bitterly divided House of Representatives, despite warnings from his wife, his Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) and Republican Party patriarch Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook) that he’s risking his ample political capital and a Civil War solution by doing so.
Parallels with Barack Obama’s “Obamacare” battles are unmistakable but not overdone.
This Lincoln is pragmatic enough to make the “Honest Abe” label seem hilariously overstated. He allows three bumptious Republican bagmen (played with Shakespearean wit by James Spader, John Hawkes and Tim Blake Nelson) to buy amendment votes with promises of golden appointments. He brings a lawyer’s skillful bluffs to his dealings with Pennsylvania Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), a voluble abolitionist and financial scold, and with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant (Jared Harris), a military leader whose Civil War endgame is fraught with danger.
This Lincoln is also gentle enough to spend quality time with his young son, to bore people with his endless morality yarns (he even quotes the mathematician Euclid) and to bemoan his lack of genuine human contact: “I’m very keenly aware of my very aloneness.”
All of these visions of Abraham Lincoln are brought together in Day-Lewis’s singular performance, and if the combination sometimes seems lacking in high drama — Spielberg has trained us all to expect it like Pavlov’s dogs — it never wants for the ring of historical accuracy.
Spielberg’s restraint, and that of composer John Williams, extends even to the assassination of Lincoln, all part of the early months of 1865 that defined the still-young American nation. The event is depicted mainly off camera.
Lincoln and its creators instead find inspiration in showing a fractious country and world that the American Revolution is forever a work in progress, one best judged by the wisdom of time and not by the noise of the moment.
Top Stories:
(out of 4)Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Hal Holbrook and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Directed by Steven Spielberg. 150 minutes. Opens Nov. 9 at major theatres. PG
Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln serves history better than it does the multiplex, and that’s a brave and worthy thing in a time of slippery truths and splintered attention spans.
Neither the title-implied biopic of the 16th U.S. president nor a typical “Spielbergian” assault on the senses and tear ducts, the film eschews the foreground in favour of the background, possibly to its box-office detriment.
Lincoln mines rich drama in the hard politicking and outright vote-buying behind passage of the slavery-abolishing 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865, a feat that Lincoln, his fellow Republicans and supportive Democrats riskily accomplished while at the same time brokering an end to the country’s bloody Civil War.
Few grand scenes of battle or high emotion play before the unsentimental lens of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, a departure from the style Spielberg is known for and which he amply demonstrated just a year ago in War Horse.
An early moment sets the tone: instead of a flashback of Lincoln delivering the famed Gettysburg Address of 1863, Spielberg chooses to have the president listen quietly as two pairs of war-weary soldiers, one black and the other white, quote brief sections of it to him from memory.
Nor do we see much of the “Honest Abe” of storybook legend, the man whose towering physical stature, immense intellect, unimpeachable integrity and golden tongue combined to drag America out of the darkness of slavery and into the light of its own founding beliefs of human equality.
Daniel Day-Lewis’s vivid portrayal of Lincoln is instead grounded on the complex humanity of the man, one forced by circumstances to deal not only with epochal national concerns but also pressing family ones.
His strong resemblance to the president could have made this an easy assignment for Day-Lewis, but that would run counter to everything we know about this utterly devoted actor. He’s a cinch for a Best Actor nomination at the coming Oscars (which would be his fifth, with two wins to date) but he’s not inclined to curry favour either with audiences or Academy voters.
His Lincoln is grey of hair and beard, walks with a slight stoop and speaks in a higher register than our mind’s ear may wish to hear. He’s capable of thunder — we see glimpses — but he frequently comes across as timorous, in his dealings not only with political foes and allies but also with his high-strung wife Mary (Sally Field, impressive) and headstrong son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).
This portrait of Lincoln, which scripter Tony Kushner (TV’s Angels in America, Spielberg’s Munich) loosely adapts from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s non-fiction bestseller Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, finds its focus in the marrying of high principles with low politics.
This Lincoln is strong enough to push his anti-slavery amendment through a bitterly divided House of Representatives, despite warnings from his wife, his Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) and Republican Party patriarch Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook) that he’s risking his ample political capital and a Civil War solution by doing so.
Parallels with Barack Obama’s “Obamacare” battles are unmistakable but not overdone.
This Lincoln is pragmatic enough to make the “Honest Abe” label seem hilariously overstated. He allows three bumptious Republican bagmen (played with Shakespearean wit by James Spader, John Hawkes and Tim Blake Nelson) to buy amendment votes with promises of golden appointments. He brings a lawyer’s skillful bluffs to his dealings with Pennsylvania Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), a voluble abolitionist and financial scold, and with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant (Jared Harris), a military leader whose Civil War endgame is fraught with danger.
This Lincoln is also gentle enough to spend quality time with his young son, to bore people with his endless morality yarns (he even quotes the mathematician Euclid) and to bemoan his lack of genuine human contact: “I’m very keenly aware of my very aloneness.”
All of these visions of Abraham Lincoln are brought together in Day-Lewis’s singular performance, and if the combination sometimes seems lacking in high drama — Spielberg has trained us all to expect it like Pavlov’s dogs — it never wants for the ring of historical accuracy.
Spielberg’s restraint, and that of composer John Williams, extends even to the assassination of Lincoln, all part of the early months of 1865 that defined the still-young American nation. The event is depicted mainly off camera.
Lincoln and its creators instead find inspiration in showing a fractious country and world that the American Revolution is forever a work in progress, one best judged by the wisdom of time and not by the noise of the moment.
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