Quantum Leap

The protagonist, a renegade agent out to avenge the death of his girlfriend, is on the run from the authorities and his former employers. Unsure of who to trust, he relies on his wits to criss-cross various continents. Hmmm. If you had trouble telling James Bond apart from Jason Bourne during Casino Royale, the plot details of Quantum of Solace will only add to your confusion. Certainly, Bond 23, like its immediate predecessor and a certain franchise inspired by Robert Ludlum, features a good deal of running around and anti-heroism.

There are, however, three crucial differences between this latest 007 film and everything else. First of all, Quantum of Solace features an old-school Bond super villain. Secondly, Daniel Craig makes you think that the secret agent is as mad as a bag of hammers. And last but by no means least, the vast powerful network behind the Bond empire have done the decent thing and hired Mark Forster, a proper name director.
“I really wanted to get away from the Bourne thing,” Forster tells me. “It had to be its own film. I wanted to move the whole look more toward The Parallax View and The Conversation and all those classic post-Watergate conspiracy thrillers from the 70s.”
To this end, Quantum of Solace grooves along on corporate evil and nefarious public relations. Bond’s primary target is not a pussy-stroking maniac but Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric channelling Tony Blair), a Big Business man whose environmental interests mask an attempt to control the earth’s resources.
“We decided to blur the distinction between hero and villain,” says the director. “Greene is an environmentalist but he uses green politics to enrich himself. Bond is just the same. He is motivated by selfish reasons. We made the film so you couldn’t tell the difference between the good guy and the bad guy.”
We have, of course, heard this sort of thing before. Even the weediest sequels – Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer, anyone? – claim to be bigger, edgier, darker, now with greater ambiguity. And isn’t there something inherently conservative about presenting an environmentalist as a crackpot?
“I honestly think there’s an important message there,” says Forster. “You see companies like Shell claiming to be green. They’ve decided there’s a way to make money out of it so that’s how they present themselves to consumers who, in turn, think, ‘Oh, they’re not that bad.' And I do think there is a more general sense of not knowing who to trust right now. The world is falling apart economically, there are wars, there is starvation, the polar ice caps are melting. The world is a mess. I wanted that in the film.”
Certainly, Forster has worked hard to ensure that Quantum of Solace is more like a movie and less like something churned out of a conveyor belt and approved by a committee.
It is, nevertheless, an odd career move for the German-born director. Though he only started watching films relatively late in his teens – threats against his wealthy architect father from the Baader Meinhof group saw the family move into the Swiss mountains, far away from potential kidnappers, TV and cinema theatres – Marc Forster’s rise through the ranks has been nothing short of meteoric. Less than six years ago, the filmmaker was still working the Slamdance/Sundance circuit with no-budget creations.
He has, in the intervening period, become Mr. Prestige and a permanent fixture during awards season. Films from the Forster imprint, Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland and, most recently, The Kite Runner have scored multiple nominations and several wins at the Oscars, Golden Globes and BAFTAs.
James Bond, for all its prominence, does seem a little like a step down into genre pictures. Forster insists however, that he retained creative control and was allowed to make Quantum of Solace into the film he wanted.
“It was much easier than I expected,” he says. “It was a lot easier than making The Kite Runner for instance. I found that Barbara Broccoli was very supportive and allowed me to bring my own people. But you have such great production support generally. You are spoiled really.”
That may well be but Forster’s character-driven, quality drama does seem at odds with the Bond-iverse.
“Right,” he smiles. “But I just added more characters. The women get to say more in this film. I mean Judi Dench is one of the greatest actresses in the world and her relationship with Bond is fascinating. So we played with that. It was also very important that the Bond girls (Gemma Arterton, Olga Kurylenko) weren’t just objects of beauty. They are three dimensional characters. They are nothing like the objects they were in the 60s.”
He admits, however, that he initially turned the Bond empire down when they offered him a chance to direct. It took Daniel Craig to talk him around.
“He came to see me and that was that,” says Forster. “He’s such a terrific, interesting actor and when you meet him there’s no bullshit. Anyone would want to work with him.”
Still, with all this characterisation and talking female parts, one wonders if Forster’s Bond shares any DNA with the relentless eating, drinking, fucking machine at the heart of the novels by Ian Fleming. One could also cite that Bond’s racist, sexist tendencies, service to colonialism, preservation of the status quo and a host of other not-cool traits.
“But you see I actually liked that about Bond,” laughs Forster. “He’s a dark force, an anti-hero. What makes him human is his isolation and his loneliness. He’s a hard shell but part of him is just really, really fucked up.”