Daniel Craig on "Quantum of Solace"
In the movies, James Bond is indestructible, but even the toughest new Bond, Daniel Craig, is only human. After filming the action-packed sequel Quantum of Solace, he had to have surgery on his right arm, even showing up to interviews with it slung in a cast.
"I got some surgery done six weeks ago to stitch me back up," Craig explained. "I got a rotator cuff or something. It’s just I have six pins, dissolvable pins put in, that tie the thing to the thing and it’s going to be okay."
It seemed to be the accumulation of exertion that did his arm in. Each stunt itself seems downright mild when Craig describes it.
"[I’m] never scared because we rehearse and rehearse. I don’t just go stand on the roof and jump off it. We rehearse it. Hard to believe, I know, but it is the truth. We rehearsed it. [I] worried that I might get it wrong and worried that I’m going to have to do it more than once. So some of them I only did once."
A More Vulnerable Bond?
James Bond’s latest mission has him jumping on moving busses and freefalling from crashing airplanes. "The bus jump was weird. The bus jump was a strange one. I jumped out of a window, the impact is somebody else I think although I did an impact. Then I do the stop and then I jump off and climb up the thing. That’s all me. Beats working for a living I suppose, jumping out of a window into an oncoming bus. We didn’t have the bus in rehearsals. We had an idea of where the bus would be in rehearsals. So your mind goes but actually the fourth time I did it actually I was putting in a flourish at the end as I was jumping out."
The free fall was actually shot in midair, thanks to a real wind tunnel and modern camera technology. "We set the bar on Casino so we had to try and achieve and try and make these different but as good. And things have moved on. Special effects have moved on. We certainly didn’t want to make this a more CGI based movie but the plane sequence which insists that we have CGI. I think the freefall sequence was incredible to do because we went and learned to freefall. We had a conversation about the freefall sequence. I was like, ’I’ve never seen a good one.’ I think they’re always kind of naff. There’s obviously people freefalling and then they have a close-up of somebody with a hair dryer. That always seemed to me the way, and they always last about five minutes longer than they should. So I said, ’It has to be quick. They have to look like they’re falling out of the plane.’ So Olga and I went and rehearsed for about a week on it and we stuck a camera, a guy cameraman with a small camera flying with a controller. We had 20 digital cameras around and I think just, you look at it, it was hell, but it looks like we’re falling out of an airplane."
For the first time in James Bond movie history, "Quantum of Solace" picks up exactly where the previous one left off. Bond has just found Mr. White and is about to interrogate him about his connection to Vesper Lynd.
"It just seemed to me when we came down to it, and we all agreed that to my mind, at the end of "Casino Royale," it was sort of the beginning of the story as opposed to the end of a story. He’d fallen in love, he’d had his heart broken, this organization that they’d discovered, they’d just sort of started peeling back the onion skins of. To do another movie and just sort of go, ’Oh, there was this chick once,’ seemed to be the wrong thing to do. So it just fit."
