I just found an interesting and funny interview with Daniel about Layer Cake. I searched for a thread to put it in, but I couldn't really find one.
So I decided to open this one to post all written interviews without any videos.
So Here we go:
Part 1
April 28, 2005 - Producer Matthew Vaughn takes a seat in the director’s chair for the indie thriller, “Layer Cake,” starring Daniel Craig, Colm Meaney, Kenneth Cranham, George Harris, Jamie Foreman, Sienna Miller and Michael Gambon. Centering on Craig’s character (who is never referred to by name), the film delves into the drug world with Craig starring as a successful businessman whose plans are thwarted when he tries to retire from the drug trade.
Director Vaughn acknowledges that selecting the right actor for the lead role wasn’t easy. "It’s a hard character to play as an actor. The whole point about XXXX is that he's a poker player. It doesn’t matter what’s going on around him, you never know what he’s thinking which means you’ve got to be a very good actor, a very subtle actor to play him,” said Vaughn.
J J Connolly, author of the book the film’s based on, adapted the story for the big screen. Connolly couldn’t be happier about getting Daniel Craig to play the lead in his multi-layered story. “Casting the untitled central character was always going to be hard. A lot of very good actors really wanted it but when Daniel Craig was suggested it was a done-deal. We wanted to get as far away as possible from jolly-ups and banter, guys trying to look too cool throughout the movie. We needed an actor who was prepared to go to the depths of emotion without anchors - not wanting to remain too cool for school,” explained Connolly.
Immensely popular in England and only now catching on in America, award-winning actor Daniel Craig’s name has been floating around a lot lately in connection with the role of Bond, James Bond. Known for his roles in serious British films, it’s not a huge leap to picture the talented, sexy actor filling the shoes recently vacated by Pierce Brosnan.
In this one-on-one interview, Craig discusses his role in “Layer Cake,” working with first-timer Matthew Vaughn, and those pesky Bond rumors:
INTERVIEW WITH DANIEL CRAIG:
You’ve described “Laker Cake” as a crime film, not a gangster movie. What’s the difference between the two?
I think gangster movies involve the behavior of gangsters and how despicable they are or how they control people. This is much more a movie which has a strong story line based upon the rise and the fall of characters, with a crime setting. Hopefully it’s more sophisticated than your average gangster movie. I believe it is. You have to think more. There [are] very complicated plot twists, which will all work out, but you have to sort of sit and concentrate if you want to follow the movie. Which, as far as I’m concerned, that’s more the type of movie that I enjoy watching.
What did Matthew Vaughn say to you to convince you “Layer Cake” wasn’t just another “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels?”
Well, he just said that. But we also clicked early on. We share a lot of our favorite films, especially from the late 60s and early 70s that came out of the UK, but also out of the US. Sort of the classic crime films. And that this movie had to look as cinematic as possible, and that it had to have a grand scale and make London look like as cinematic as possible. And to steer away from being ‘tricksy’. Not using the camera as another character, but the camera just tells the story.
The audience never learns your character’s name in “Layer Cake.” When you were preparing to play him, how did you refer to him? Did you come up with your own name?
Only a joking name. I always called him ‘Cynthia.’ No, the point about it is that he’s someone who doesn’t have an identity. He doesn’t have an identity for a very good reason because he doesn’t want to sort of allow too much of himself to be known. So it kind of just played into the character.
So when you were working on the film, you’d tell your friends you were just playing ‘this guy’?
Yeah, just a guy. I mean, really, people call him “Four X” or “Quadruple X.’ I was talking to someone today who called him “Deleted.” And that’s probably the best name for him.
http://movies.about.com/od/layercake/a/ ... 042705.htm
Interview Collection
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Daniel Craig 007
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Daniel Craig 007
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Part 2
How did you get into this character? You couldn’t really create a backstory, could you?
You need a good script and that’s what we had. Most of the character and most of his traits are on the page. And then I just wanted to instill this sort of sense of mystery about him and make sure that we’re not… You know, you can’t get too close to him. But actually what I liked, what really attracted me to the movie, is that you get closer to him because of, to put it bluntly, the s**t he gets into (laughing).
Had you read the book before reading the script?
I read the script and then I read the book.
How do the two compare?
They’re quite close. The script, obviously because it’s a film, has to be sort of pared down. Quite a few of the characters become one character, and situations obviously had to get cut because it would be difficult to film the whole book. But actually it adheres quite closely to the book.
Was there anything in the book that wasn’t in the script that helped you with the character?
There might have been but to tell you the truth, I can’t remember now because once you stop filming it it sort of goes out the window (laughing).
Did you do any research on drug dealers or the drug culture?
No. All I wanted to do was make a character that you would pass on the streets and not notice. I think that’s closer to reality than having someone drive past in a car with spinning wheels and having someone wear gold chains and things. I think that these people are, as I say, businessman and they like to keep a low profile. JJ Connolly who wrote the book, although he says he hasn’t had contact with that world, seems to know an awful lot about it.
Did you use Connolly as a resource when getting into character?
Oh yeah, definitely.
Did he give you any specific input on playing this guy?
I think he was happy with the way I was going with the character. He was just very good for stories and he was very insightful as far as me asking, “Do you think this is a good behavior at this particular moment?,” and that sort of thing. He always had very good advice for me.
What will sell “Layer Cake” to an American audience? How would you describe it to get people interesting in checking it out?
Go in expecting something. If you’ve seen “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” go along because you won’t be disappointed on so many levels. It’s a very classy British movie and if you’re into British movies at all, I think you’re going to get a thrill out of it. If you’re not and it’s the first time, the first time you’ve been to see a British movie, you’re going to be entertained. I think this movie entertains on lots of levels but it also sort of makes you think. I think it’s quite a feel-good movie because a lot goes on. It will stimulate your brain (laughing).
Working with a producer who takes on director duties is different than working with a first time director who has either been an actor or a screenwriter. Did you find it a challenge?
Well you think there’d be a problem but Matthew’s experience in movies is quite large so he did all the right things - most of the time. He’s sitting in front of me so I have to be careful (laughing). He planned the movie incredibly well. He storyboarded the movie shot for shot and we basically did that. We shot the script and we shot his ideas. And he had a very, very, very clear vision about what he wanted to do which, thankfully, I agreed with.
He employed a great [director of photography] in Ben Davis so visually that was all very clear as far as how as he wanted to make London look, and how he wanted to make the movie look. I mean, I can’t say enough about it really. He did it brilliantly.
Does working with a first-time director make you more aware of what’s going on behind the camera?
I’m thinking about everything all the time. You have to, that’s part of the job. You can’t not think about it. For me it’s very important because of the whole process. The whole creative process is about making movies and making movies is part technical, part artistic, part emotion, part communication. You have to have an eye on all of these things when you’re making it. And hopefully when you come to do a scene, that’s just about the scene. A scene rarely goes longer than three, four, five minutes at the most, unless you’re shooting very, very long shots. It’s all part of the job.
Everyone else seems to be doing it. Do you have any desire to direct?
No! I’d rather stick needles in my eye.
http://movies.about.com/od/layercake/a/ ... 2705_2.htm
How did you get into this character? You couldn’t really create a backstory, could you?
You need a good script and that’s what we had. Most of the character and most of his traits are on the page. And then I just wanted to instill this sort of sense of mystery about him and make sure that we’re not… You know, you can’t get too close to him. But actually what I liked, what really attracted me to the movie, is that you get closer to him because of, to put it bluntly, the s**t he gets into (laughing).
Had you read the book before reading the script?
I read the script and then I read the book.
How do the two compare?
They’re quite close. The script, obviously because it’s a film, has to be sort of pared down. Quite a few of the characters become one character, and situations obviously had to get cut because it would be difficult to film the whole book. But actually it adheres quite closely to the book.
Was there anything in the book that wasn’t in the script that helped you with the character?
There might have been but to tell you the truth, I can’t remember now because once you stop filming it it sort of goes out the window (laughing).
Did you do any research on drug dealers or the drug culture?
No. All I wanted to do was make a character that you would pass on the streets and not notice. I think that’s closer to reality than having someone drive past in a car with spinning wheels and having someone wear gold chains and things. I think that these people are, as I say, businessman and they like to keep a low profile. JJ Connolly who wrote the book, although he says he hasn’t had contact with that world, seems to know an awful lot about it.
Did you use Connolly as a resource when getting into character?
Oh yeah, definitely.
Did he give you any specific input on playing this guy?
I think he was happy with the way I was going with the character. He was just very good for stories and he was very insightful as far as me asking, “Do you think this is a good behavior at this particular moment?,” and that sort of thing. He always had very good advice for me.
What will sell “Layer Cake” to an American audience? How would you describe it to get people interesting in checking it out?
Go in expecting something. If you’ve seen “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” go along because you won’t be disappointed on so many levels. It’s a very classy British movie and if you’re into British movies at all, I think you’re going to get a thrill out of it. If you’re not and it’s the first time, the first time you’ve been to see a British movie, you’re going to be entertained. I think this movie entertains on lots of levels but it also sort of makes you think. I think it’s quite a feel-good movie because a lot goes on. It will stimulate your brain (laughing).
Working with a producer who takes on director duties is different than working with a first time director who has either been an actor or a screenwriter. Did you find it a challenge?
Well you think there’d be a problem but Matthew’s experience in movies is quite large so he did all the right things - most of the time. He’s sitting in front of me so I have to be careful (laughing). He planned the movie incredibly well. He storyboarded the movie shot for shot and we basically did that. We shot the script and we shot his ideas. And he had a very, very, very clear vision about what he wanted to do which, thankfully, I agreed with.
He employed a great [director of photography] in Ben Davis so visually that was all very clear as far as how as he wanted to make London look, and how he wanted to make the movie look. I mean, I can’t say enough about it really. He did it brilliantly.
Does working with a first-time director make you more aware of what’s going on behind the camera?
I’m thinking about everything all the time. You have to, that’s part of the job. You can’t not think about it. For me it’s very important because of the whole process. The whole creative process is about making movies and making movies is part technical, part artistic, part emotion, part communication. You have to have an eye on all of these things when you’re making it. And hopefully when you come to do a scene, that’s just about the scene. A scene rarely goes longer than three, four, five minutes at the most, unless you’re shooting very, very long shots. It’s all part of the job.
Everyone else seems to be doing it. Do you have any desire to direct?
No! I’d rather stick needles in my eye.
http://movies.about.com/od/layercake/a/ ... 2705_2.htm
Last edited by Daniel Craig 007 on Wed Aug 12, 2009 11:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Part 3
The "Layer Cake" cast is loaded with top-notch actors. What’s it like working opposite actors such as Colm Meaney, Michael Gambon, and Kenneth Cranham?
It’s easy, to tell you the truth. That’s the simple answer. When you’ve got great actors in front of you, it cuts my job in half. It’s actually easy because when you know they’re going to be great, then you have to step up to the plate.
Does that elevate your game?
Sure. It’s like they say, you’ve got to aim for the stars and you might hit the treetops.
Photos of a scene featuring you and Sienna Miller seem to indicate there was an alternate ending.
There was. I don’t want to give the ending away but we shot two endings. We shot the ending that Sony wanted and we shot the ending that we wanted. And then we told Sony, or Matthew told Sony, that he’d shot the ending that they wanted and then he edited his ending into the movie. Then they [screened] the movie with Matthew’s ending and they liked it so it was kept.
And now to the Bond rumors…
And they are just that…
Definitely publications have you already cast in the role, some say you said no thanks, and others just report you’re in the running. Do you get tired of reading and addressing all the different rumors?
I’m not tired of it. Look, it’s a high class problem to have. But there’s an awful lot of smoke and very little fire at the moment. There’s a lot of names in the pot and I happen to be one of them. And you know I’ve said to people that I’d be very silly not to give it very careful consideration. But we’re not that far down the line yet. They’ve got a lot of working out to do, what they want to do. And if the call comes, then obviously we’ll think about it very carefully. But it’s… You know, the British press…I love them but they’ve decided that they wanted to call it and they’ve called it (laughing).
They’ve already got you cast as James Bond.
And trying on the suit.
It’s such a double-edged sword. It’s a role you could feel trapped in.
There is that, so that would have to come into it. It is and that’s why you have to think about these things very carefully.
What are you looking for in a role?
I’m looking for something that changes. I mean, as far as I’m concerned every piece of art or whatever you do should have some sort of political import. By politic I mean the wider meaning of politics. Something that has something to say and hopeful engages a little debate when you walk out of the cinema.
Is that why you took a supporting role in “The Jacket?”
I did that because [director] John Maybury’s a friend of mine. I did his movie “Love is the Devil” with him and he asked me to do it. It was a week’s filming in Glasgow and I was quite happy to go out there and shoot it for him. And who wouldn’t want to play a mental patient in a hospital? It’s fun.
Did you come up with your own dialogue?
That had a pretty tight script. I did little bits, but I always do.
”The Jacket” was advertised in the States as a horror film, which really hurt its chances of attracting the right audience.
Which is a shame. What I hope is that it’ll have some legs and that people will see it. Once it gets on DVD people will watch it for what it is. It’s not a horror film. It’s a psychological thriller and it’s also a bit of a fairy story, to tell you the truth.
And a romance.
Exactly. That’s what I mean. That’s the strongest part of the movie is the romantic aspect of it.
Speaking of romance, will we ever see you in lighter fare? A romantic comedy maybe?
No (laughing). I don’t know, we’ll see. It depends on the script. I never say never because I always said I’d never do a gangster movie but this one came along and this one was too difficult to resist.
But “Layer Cake’s” not a gangster movie…
Right. So I might do a romantic comedy that’s not a romantic comedy.
http://movies.about.com/od/layercake/a/ ... 2705_3.htm
The "Layer Cake" cast is loaded with top-notch actors. What’s it like working opposite actors such as Colm Meaney, Michael Gambon, and Kenneth Cranham?
It’s easy, to tell you the truth. That’s the simple answer. When you’ve got great actors in front of you, it cuts my job in half. It’s actually easy because when you know they’re going to be great, then you have to step up to the plate.
Does that elevate your game?
Sure. It’s like they say, you’ve got to aim for the stars and you might hit the treetops.
Photos of a scene featuring you and Sienna Miller seem to indicate there was an alternate ending.
There was. I don’t want to give the ending away but we shot two endings. We shot the ending that Sony wanted and we shot the ending that we wanted. And then we told Sony, or Matthew told Sony, that he’d shot the ending that they wanted and then he edited his ending into the movie. Then they [screened] the movie with Matthew’s ending and they liked it so it was kept.
And now to the Bond rumors…
And they are just that…
Definitely publications have you already cast in the role, some say you said no thanks, and others just report you’re in the running. Do you get tired of reading and addressing all the different rumors?
I’m not tired of it. Look, it’s a high class problem to have. But there’s an awful lot of smoke and very little fire at the moment. There’s a lot of names in the pot and I happen to be one of them. And you know I’ve said to people that I’d be very silly not to give it very careful consideration. But we’re not that far down the line yet. They’ve got a lot of working out to do, what they want to do. And if the call comes, then obviously we’ll think about it very carefully. But it’s… You know, the British press…I love them but they’ve decided that they wanted to call it and they’ve called it (laughing).
They’ve already got you cast as James Bond.
And trying on the suit.
It’s such a double-edged sword. It’s a role you could feel trapped in.
There is that, so that would have to come into it. It is and that’s why you have to think about these things very carefully.
What are you looking for in a role?
I’m looking for something that changes. I mean, as far as I’m concerned every piece of art or whatever you do should have some sort of political import. By politic I mean the wider meaning of politics. Something that has something to say and hopeful engages a little debate when you walk out of the cinema.
Is that why you took a supporting role in “The Jacket?”
I did that because [director] John Maybury’s a friend of mine. I did his movie “Love is the Devil” with him and he asked me to do it. It was a week’s filming in Glasgow and I was quite happy to go out there and shoot it for him. And who wouldn’t want to play a mental patient in a hospital? It’s fun.
Did you come up with your own dialogue?
That had a pretty tight script. I did little bits, but I always do.
”The Jacket” was advertised in the States as a horror film, which really hurt its chances of attracting the right audience.
Which is a shame. What I hope is that it’ll have some legs and that people will see it. Once it gets on DVD people will watch it for what it is. It’s not a horror film. It’s a psychological thriller and it’s also a bit of a fairy story, to tell you the truth.
And a romance.
Exactly. That’s what I mean. That’s the strongest part of the movie is the romantic aspect of it.
Speaking of romance, will we ever see you in lighter fare? A romantic comedy maybe?
No (laughing). I don’t know, we’ll see. It depends on the script. I never say never because I always said I’d never do a gangster movie but this one came along and this one was too difficult to resist.
But “Layer Cake’s” not a gangster movie…
Right. So I might do a romantic comedy that’s not a romantic comedy.
http://movies.about.com/od/layercake/a/ ... 2705_3.htm
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Thought and Action:
An Interview with Daniel Craig,
Star of Layer Cake
Though he may not be a household name yet, British stage, television and film star Daniel Craig has a presence that one doesn't easily forget. Whether in meaty roles in small films-- a burglar turned gay consort in Love is the Devil, a womanizing handyman in The Mother - or supporting roles in big films - Paul Newman's murderous son in Road to Perdition, a wily treasure hunter in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - Craig infuses each performance with authority. There are no false notes in the repertoire of this actor who recently was at the center of a media frenzy over who will be the next James Bond. But Craig is too level-headed to be distracted by all that; instead he channels his considerable energies and intelligence into creating intriguing characters, like XXXX, the never named drug-dealing, capitalist anti-hero of Matthew Vaughn's directorial debut, Layer Cake. In person, Craig conveys the same intensity he brings to the screen; during a recent conversation his words and ideas tumbled and swirled so quickly the room around us was practically humming.
ANDREA GRONVALL: You're not even 38 yet, right, and yet you've had quite a career. Do you go by instinct? How much do you rely on the advice of your managers, your agents, friends and family in choosing roles?
DANIEL CRAIG: All of them, really. A lot of it's instinct, but I read scripts, and as I read, I want to know that something's going to change me and affect me and make me do something that I haven't necessarily done before. It genuinely has never really been about the money; I've earned a living, which for an actor to say is usually quite rare. I've had a lot of luck, and I've made some mistakes in my time, but I really believe you've got to keep yourself as busy and as interested as possible in what you do because then you can maintain it. I think as soon as you do decide to take [big] money, that's fine, but you've got to get your priorities right. If it stops you doing other things, then you have to think very carefully about which way you need to go. I suppose what I'm saying is, I just give it as much thought as I can. And it takes me a long time to decide whether I want to do something or not. Or if I do need to make a decision very quickly, I just apply the same rule, namely, will it change me?
AG: What do you mean by mistakes? Projects that turned out to be a waste of your time?
DC: I've done a lot of work to earn money, because I've had to, because I need to pay the rent, and I need to do those things. So they're not mistakes, it's just sometimes I wish they'd disappear. I've been lucky enough that with some success, I've been able to have more choices, so [more often] I do the things I know I should be doing. There's another side to that, which is that if you're in a job, and it's not working in the right way, it's part of your job to make it work in the right way. It would worry me, getting to a stage where you just do job after job after job; you tend to get jaded, and you tend to get lazy. Because some jobs take an effort, and I don't mean effort as in acting, they take effort in management, in encouraging people to do better. I just sort of put a flame under it. You can either lay back and say, well, I'm an actor, I turn up to do my job and go away, or I can get involved, which means you have to go shout, or you're going to have to sit down and have meetings. And I believe that's part of your job, but that's exhausting, and I don't want to do that all the time, because I'm not a producer.
AG: Why did you decide to do Layer Cake?
DC: First and foremost, the script, I promise you, it was in great shape, due to Matthew Vaughn - and obviously J.J. Connolly, who wrote both the book and the script - but Matthew worked with him for a whole year on the script to get it to a shooting state. I'd been offered, and been talked to about doing gangster films, or let's say, crime movies-because I'd say this is more of a crime film than it is a gangster movie-and none of them appealed to me, movie scripts with huge amounts of violence in them, with supposedly scary people, but whom I don't find scary. Yes, what they do is horrible-they shoot three people in the first scene, then you're going to start having to pull people's ears off in the sixth scene, or whatever it is, because the escalating violence is sort of what that kind of film is about. What I like about Layer Cake is its intelligent through-line. First of all, I think it's very close to the truth; I think this is what successful drug dealers are like. They don't drive around in flashy cars, they don't show off, they behave very quietly, they get on with their job and they earn lots of money. And it goes up and up and up and up the scale. Secondly - and selfishly - I like the moral aspect of the movie, which is that the violence has consequences, and you feel emotionally involved with the violence. It's not that deep-it's still a piece of entertainment-but you feel that, and so consequently you enjoy the movie more, because that adds to the sense of drama. It grabs you.
AG: It does. The film's conceit of viewing these tiers of criminals as layers on a cake is marvelous; and the food metaphor is apt because the movie is also about the food chain of scary underworld predators. You go through layers in the film to reach Eddie Temple, the Michael Gambon character who's a rich, respectable businessman -- yet he is in a way more evil than anyone else, even though he never pulls a trigger. In a very interesting duality, your character is sort of the mirror image of him. XXXX is someone moving up but trying to get clean, but here's Temple at the top, getting dirtier than before.
DC: Totally. And again, I think that in spite of the fact that it's just a movie, and that's what it is, I do believe it's an accurate portrayal. Temple is a businessman; he owns skyscrapers, he probably has politicians who are friends. He will deal in anything-anything-as long as he makes money.
AG: Because something is a popular entertainment doesn't mean it isn't art, and Layer Cake is very artful-from beginning to end, it's riveting.
DC: I really appreciate that, because I believe in it. I'm very proud of it, strangely enough-because one of your first questions is what makes me choose my jobs - well, I believe this is an art form, and every piece of work you do is political. Whether it's a big blockbuster, or a smaller movie like this, whatever it is, it has a political message to put across. And you should understand that political message, but it shouldn't get in the way of being entertaining, because that's what we do. We entertain, as well as inform. That's the crux of all this, that's the crux of what I get out of it.
AG: What are the press like in your country?
DC: [Smiling] They're wonderful.
AG: The reason I ask is, I want to know how batty the British press has gone in the last few weeks over all this speculation about the new James Bond. Have they made your life miserable?
DC: Well, I've been here [in America], you see. In a way, it's been fortuitous, and I can't knock it, because [the flurry in the press] came out just before I started doing tours around the country with this. And it came out at quite a good time, because of course that meant that probably more people wanted to talk to me than otherwise would have, so at least I can talk about Layer Cake and get that going. There's very little truth in what was said, but I'm down on the list with two or three others who are being considered, but that's as much as I know. It's nice to be on that list, but it's a decision to make down the line; I haven't really given it a great deal of thought. I think - and this is just my opinion - I think the powers that be, whoever they are, have put my name out there, because Pierce [Brosnan] is being mentioned again, just to get a debate going. And I think it's as cynical as that, because people are coming up to me saying, it's on the radio, it's on television, listing my name with other names, sort of asking people to vote.
AG: I do think planting those items in the press is a business decision on a number of levels, including starting a dialogue out there with the public. I also think it's interesting that it happened so soon after MGM was sold to Sony and its consortium. You wonder, is someone trying to prove he or she is being proactive-
DC: Yeah, for sure.
AG: Or is it one of those alpha-dog things, someone trying to show who's in charge?
DC: All of those things. You have to believe that all of those things can happen, because they do. But anyway, Sony couldn't legally get involved in anything with MGM until the sale was tied up a few weeks ago, which is when all this press shit hit the fan. "Ah!" said Doctor Watson.
AG: You're a very intense and physical actor; these two qualities, along with your intelligence, have made your rise in the industry rapid. But you haven't done much comedy. Why not? The scene in Layer Cake where after a violent confrontation with Gene (Colm Meaney) you bounce like a rubber ball before hitting the floor is hilarious.
DC: I thought I was such a tart doing that, because it's upstaging, which is just awful. See, they're talking in the foreground and I'm just screwing around in the background.
AG: It made the scene.
DC: Well, romantic comedies don't appeal to me, it's as simple as that. My comedic favorites are the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen. The Marx Brothers do something, which Woody Allen did mainly in his earlier movies, which is set the camera, and it stays set, and you have a stage. Because that's how comedy works; the camera doesn't move in for a close-up of an eyebrow arching, because that's bad comedy. Great comedy is what the Marx Brothers did, because they rehearsed, and they rehearsed, and they rehearsed, and they rehearsed, and they rehearsed. And then they just turned on the camera. I couldn't do that.
AG: Well, rehearsal in film is a luxury.
DC: That's a real luxury. But the Marx Brothers had done their routines on the road, and Woody Allen I think rehearses.
AG: I can picture you in a Woody Allen film.
DC: From your lips to God's ears. I'd love to work with him. I've just worked with Douglas McGrath, doing his film Every Word is True, about Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood, and he knows Woody very well.
AG: So, that film is wrapped now.
DC: It's over, yes. Next I'm on to the Steven Spielberg film that's starting at the end of June. It's set around '72, the Munich Olympics.
AG: When you create a character from scratch-as opposed to a character that already exists in a work being adapted to the screen -- what steps do you take to find the door into that character, to make him true?
DC: Reading it, over and over and over again. Discussing it-rehearsals, as you say, are a rarity in film, but if you get the chance to have rehearsals then grab it. It's never usually about nailing things down; it's about discussing and breaking the ice with the other actors. You know, there's still an element on the first day of filming where you have to stand up in front of thirty people and make a fool of yourself-as does everybody else, by the way, because we're all on show in a movie, it's just in the nature of how you make a film. If I do a back story [for my character], then I will make it up and think about it, write a few things down as I go through the script. Some actors plot their scripts--and I don't say that you shouldn't plot your script-but they'll say, "Here at this point, I should be feeling like this" because they look at the overall picture, and they think, what's the emotional arc of this? And I'm like-oooh, emotional arcs just terrify me, because I kind of want to do all of the work before we start shooting, and then once we start shooting, forget it, just forget it and get on with it. If I don't know my lines by then, if I don't know who I am by then, then I'm never going to know who I am. That's the fear you hold at the beginning [of a project], but hopefully when you're filming, you've done enough work and you've had enough discussion, that when you get to a scene, it's condensed. You're only doing a two- or three-minute scene, and at that point you ask, what are we trying to achieve with this scene? What are we trying to say? Let's get that said, and see if we can get somewhere else with that as well. And that's kind of the magic, that's where I like to be, so that we can do exactly what's written, do what we want in shooting, and then do a couple of takes for the sheer hell of it to see what happens, with changing some lines around, or moving or improvising. I kind of want to keep it as loose as that, because then the magic can happen sometimes.
AG: That's why your performances have a sense of flow.
DC: Maybe.
AG: That's how you avoid them feeling canned. You're serious about your work, you're not glib about it.
DC: I'm serious about it, but I'm not that serious about it. It's very, very, very important to me, but like my friend [and Enduring Love costar] Rhys Ifans said--when he was asked what do you take to every set--said, "My sense of humor." And he's absolutely right, because you can lose the bigger picture so easily. Because making a film, basically, is a collective sense of panic controlled, because who knows where the money's going to go, who knows who's going to be spending the money. I love film sets, which are like borderline hysteria, because then sparks fly.
AG: Are you an adrenaline junkie?
DC: Completely. There's no point in turning up unless you're ready to rock and roll.
http://images.google.de/imgres?imgurl=h ... 0%26um%3D1
An Interview with Daniel Craig,
Star of Layer Cake
Though he may not be a household name yet, British stage, television and film star Daniel Craig has a presence that one doesn't easily forget. Whether in meaty roles in small films-- a burglar turned gay consort in Love is the Devil, a womanizing handyman in The Mother - or supporting roles in big films - Paul Newman's murderous son in Road to Perdition, a wily treasure hunter in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - Craig infuses each performance with authority. There are no false notes in the repertoire of this actor who recently was at the center of a media frenzy over who will be the next James Bond. But Craig is too level-headed to be distracted by all that; instead he channels his considerable energies and intelligence into creating intriguing characters, like XXXX, the never named drug-dealing, capitalist anti-hero of Matthew Vaughn's directorial debut, Layer Cake. In person, Craig conveys the same intensity he brings to the screen; during a recent conversation his words and ideas tumbled and swirled so quickly the room around us was practically humming.
ANDREA GRONVALL: You're not even 38 yet, right, and yet you've had quite a career. Do you go by instinct? How much do you rely on the advice of your managers, your agents, friends and family in choosing roles?
DANIEL CRAIG: All of them, really. A lot of it's instinct, but I read scripts, and as I read, I want to know that something's going to change me and affect me and make me do something that I haven't necessarily done before. It genuinely has never really been about the money; I've earned a living, which for an actor to say is usually quite rare. I've had a lot of luck, and I've made some mistakes in my time, but I really believe you've got to keep yourself as busy and as interested as possible in what you do because then you can maintain it. I think as soon as you do decide to take [big] money, that's fine, but you've got to get your priorities right. If it stops you doing other things, then you have to think very carefully about which way you need to go. I suppose what I'm saying is, I just give it as much thought as I can. And it takes me a long time to decide whether I want to do something or not. Or if I do need to make a decision very quickly, I just apply the same rule, namely, will it change me?
AG: What do you mean by mistakes? Projects that turned out to be a waste of your time?
DC: I've done a lot of work to earn money, because I've had to, because I need to pay the rent, and I need to do those things. So they're not mistakes, it's just sometimes I wish they'd disappear. I've been lucky enough that with some success, I've been able to have more choices, so [more often] I do the things I know I should be doing. There's another side to that, which is that if you're in a job, and it's not working in the right way, it's part of your job to make it work in the right way. It would worry me, getting to a stage where you just do job after job after job; you tend to get jaded, and you tend to get lazy. Because some jobs take an effort, and I don't mean effort as in acting, they take effort in management, in encouraging people to do better. I just sort of put a flame under it. You can either lay back and say, well, I'm an actor, I turn up to do my job and go away, or I can get involved, which means you have to go shout, or you're going to have to sit down and have meetings. And I believe that's part of your job, but that's exhausting, and I don't want to do that all the time, because I'm not a producer.
AG: Why did you decide to do Layer Cake?
DC: First and foremost, the script, I promise you, it was in great shape, due to Matthew Vaughn - and obviously J.J. Connolly, who wrote both the book and the script - but Matthew worked with him for a whole year on the script to get it to a shooting state. I'd been offered, and been talked to about doing gangster films, or let's say, crime movies-because I'd say this is more of a crime film than it is a gangster movie-and none of them appealed to me, movie scripts with huge amounts of violence in them, with supposedly scary people, but whom I don't find scary. Yes, what they do is horrible-they shoot three people in the first scene, then you're going to start having to pull people's ears off in the sixth scene, or whatever it is, because the escalating violence is sort of what that kind of film is about. What I like about Layer Cake is its intelligent through-line. First of all, I think it's very close to the truth; I think this is what successful drug dealers are like. They don't drive around in flashy cars, they don't show off, they behave very quietly, they get on with their job and they earn lots of money. And it goes up and up and up and up the scale. Secondly - and selfishly - I like the moral aspect of the movie, which is that the violence has consequences, and you feel emotionally involved with the violence. It's not that deep-it's still a piece of entertainment-but you feel that, and so consequently you enjoy the movie more, because that adds to the sense of drama. It grabs you.
AG: It does. The film's conceit of viewing these tiers of criminals as layers on a cake is marvelous; and the food metaphor is apt because the movie is also about the food chain of scary underworld predators. You go through layers in the film to reach Eddie Temple, the Michael Gambon character who's a rich, respectable businessman -- yet he is in a way more evil than anyone else, even though he never pulls a trigger. In a very interesting duality, your character is sort of the mirror image of him. XXXX is someone moving up but trying to get clean, but here's Temple at the top, getting dirtier than before.
DC: Totally. And again, I think that in spite of the fact that it's just a movie, and that's what it is, I do believe it's an accurate portrayal. Temple is a businessman; he owns skyscrapers, he probably has politicians who are friends. He will deal in anything-anything-as long as he makes money.
AG: Because something is a popular entertainment doesn't mean it isn't art, and Layer Cake is very artful-from beginning to end, it's riveting.
DC: I really appreciate that, because I believe in it. I'm very proud of it, strangely enough-because one of your first questions is what makes me choose my jobs - well, I believe this is an art form, and every piece of work you do is political. Whether it's a big blockbuster, or a smaller movie like this, whatever it is, it has a political message to put across. And you should understand that political message, but it shouldn't get in the way of being entertaining, because that's what we do. We entertain, as well as inform. That's the crux of all this, that's the crux of what I get out of it.
AG: What are the press like in your country?
DC: [Smiling] They're wonderful.
AG: The reason I ask is, I want to know how batty the British press has gone in the last few weeks over all this speculation about the new James Bond. Have they made your life miserable?
DC: Well, I've been here [in America], you see. In a way, it's been fortuitous, and I can't knock it, because [the flurry in the press] came out just before I started doing tours around the country with this. And it came out at quite a good time, because of course that meant that probably more people wanted to talk to me than otherwise would have, so at least I can talk about Layer Cake and get that going. There's very little truth in what was said, but I'm down on the list with two or three others who are being considered, but that's as much as I know. It's nice to be on that list, but it's a decision to make down the line; I haven't really given it a great deal of thought. I think - and this is just my opinion - I think the powers that be, whoever they are, have put my name out there, because Pierce [Brosnan] is being mentioned again, just to get a debate going. And I think it's as cynical as that, because people are coming up to me saying, it's on the radio, it's on television, listing my name with other names, sort of asking people to vote.
AG: I do think planting those items in the press is a business decision on a number of levels, including starting a dialogue out there with the public. I also think it's interesting that it happened so soon after MGM was sold to Sony and its consortium. You wonder, is someone trying to prove he or she is being proactive-
DC: Yeah, for sure.
AG: Or is it one of those alpha-dog things, someone trying to show who's in charge?
DC: All of those things. You have to believe that all of those things can happen, because they do. But anyway, Sony couldn't legally get involved in anything with MGM until the sale was tied up a few weeks ago, which is when all this press shit hit the fan. "Ah!" said Doctor Watson.
AG: You're a very intense and physical actor; these two qualities, along with your intelligence, have made your rise in the industry rapid. But you haven't done much comedy. Why not? The scene in Layer Cake where after a violent confrontation with Gene (Colm Meaney) you bounce like a rubber ball before hitting the floor is hilarious.
DC: I thought I was such a tart doing that, because it's upstaging, which is just awful. See, they're talking in the foreground and I'm just screwing around in the background.
AG: It made the scene.
DC: Well, romantic comedies don't appeal to me, it's as simple as that. My comedic favorites are the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen. The Marx Brothers do something, which Woody Allen did mainly in his earlier movies, which is set the camera, and it stays set, and you have a stage. Because that's how comedy works; the camera doesn't move in for a close-up of an eyebrow arching, because that's bad comedy. Great comedy is what the Marx Brothers did, because they rehearsed, and they rehearsed, and they rehearsed, and they rehearsed, and they rehearsed. And then they just turned on the camera. I couldn't do that.
AG: Well, rehearsal in film is a luxury.
DC: That's a real luxury. But the Marx Brothers had done their routines on the road, and Woody Allen I think rehearses.
AG: I can picture you in a Woody Allen film.
DC: From your lips to God's ears. I'd love to work with him. I've just worked with Douglas McGrath, doing his film Every Word is True, about Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood, and he knows Woody very well.
AG: So, that film is wrapped now.
DC: It's over, yes. Next I'm on to the Steven Spielberg film that's starting at the end of June. It's set around '72, the Munich Olympics.
AG: When you create a character from scratch-as opposed to a character that already exists in a work being adapted to the screen -- what steps do you take to find the door into that character, to make him true?
DC: Reading it, over and over and over again. Discussing it-rehearsals, as you say, are a rarity in film, but if you get the chance to have rehearsals then grab it. It's never usually about nailing things down; it's about discussing and breaking the ice with the other actors. You know, there's still an element on the first day of filming where you have to stand up in front of thirty people and make a fool of yourself-as does everybody else, by the way, because we're all on show in a movie, it's just in the nature of how you make a film. If I do a back story [for my character], then I will make it up and think about it, write a few things down as I go through the script. Some actors plot their scripts--and I don't say that you shouldn't plot your script-but they'll say, "Here at this point, I should be feeling like this" because they look at the overall picture, and they think, what's the emotional arc of this? And I'm like-oooh, emotional arcs just terrify me, because I kind of want to do all of the work before we start shooting, and then once we start shooting, forget it, just forget it and get on with it. If I don't know my lines by then, if I don't know who I am by then, then I'm never going to know who I am. That's the fear you hold at the beginning [of a project], but hopefully when you're filming, you've done enough work and you've had enough discussion, that when you get to a scene, it's condensed. You're only doing a two- or three-minute scene, and at that point you ask, what are we trying to achieve with this scene? What are we trying to say? Let's get that said, and see if we can get somewhere else with that as well. And that's kind of the magic, that's where I like to be, so that we can do exactly what's written, do what we want in shooting, and then do a couple of takes for the sheer hell of it to see what happens, with changing some lines around, or moving or improvising. I kind of want to keep it as loose as that, because then the magic can happen sometimes.
AG: That's why your performances have a sense of flow.
DC: Maybe.
AG: That's how you avoid them feeling canned. You're serious about your work, you're not glib about it.
DC: I'm serious about it, but I'm not that serious about it. It's very, very, very important to me, but like my friend [and Enduring Love costar] Rhys Ifans said--when he was asked what do you take to every set--said, "My sense of humor." And he's absolutely right, because you can lose the bigger picture so easily. Because making a film, basically, is a collective sense of panic controlled, because who knows where the money's going to go, who knows who's going to be spending the money. I love film sets, which are like borderline hysteria, because then sparks fly.
AG: Are you an adrenaline junkie?
DC: Completely. There's no point in turning up unless you're ready to rock and roll.
http://images.google.de/imgres?imgurl=h ... 0%26um%3D1
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PhoenixMagicBondGirl
- Posts: 530
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LOL!! too true!bumblebee wrote:Sowed his seeds and waited for them to grow!Laredo wrote:Thats interesting , didn't he meet Sats during filming The Jacket ? He was only there a week ? Someone is a fast worker ...
"I go through life thinking it's all going to end tomorrow."
Charlie Crews: "People live through a lot of things you never thought they could."
House: "Everybody lies"
Charlie Crews: "People live through a lot of things you never thought they could."
House: "Everybody lies"
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Sylvia's girl
- Posts: 11961
- Joined: Thu Oct 08, 2009 11:57 am
Sword of Honour interview
Ah, Brideshead Revisited, that monument of British TV. An icon of ITV's better days, source of style tips for Thatcherite fops everywhere, and great comfort of Anglophile Americans to this day. And, presumably, an inspiration to anyone considering appearing in a TV adaptation of an Evelyn Waugh book. Someone like Daniel Craig, star of Sword Of Honour.
"When I went to meet the director I said 'If this is anything like Brideshead, fuck off. I can't be bothered with it.' He just went, 'No, we're not going to do that.'" The casting alone is enough to tell you that Sword Of Honour isn't Brideshead Revisited revisited. Rather than Jeremy Irons, we have Craig, still best known as Geordie - the one who learns the dark ways of Soho from Malcolm McDowell - in Our Friends In The North. Mike Leigh favourite Katrin Cartlidge plays a scheming expat, and Leslie Phillips is the central character's father. William Boyd has boiled the whole thing down from Waugh's autobiographical trilogy about the Second World War, a disillusioned and bitterly funny series of books that is a world away from the social-climbing nostalgia of Brideshead Revisited. In Sword Of Honour, middle-aged posh failure, Guy Crouchback, joins up in search of redemption through glory, and finds that the British army only values cowards and liars. Boyd likes to think of it as an English Catch-22. The best bits of this TV adaptation, showing the sick comedy of the disastrous British operations in Crete, are exactly that.
"If we got a page in the Daily Mail saying 'This is not Evelyn Waugh!' I'd be very happy," says Craig. He knows that Crouchback isn't an obviously sympathetic character. "That's what makes him interesting. The fact is that he's a bit of a screwup. That either endears you to him, or you wish he'd get on with things. But I related to that, that's quite a modern feeling, that feeling that life ends up passing you by if you don't stop and think about it. And he forces himself to think about it, but he forces himself in the wrong way: he thinks he's going to find it by going to war."
At 32, Craig is a bit younger than Crouchback, but he has one of those faces that is neither transparently young nor old. It helped him in the long timespan of Our Friends In The North, and has allowed him to play a series of wildly different characters, perhaps, most memorably, Francis Bacon's lover, George Dyer, in Love Is The Devil. But he is easily recognisable because of his striking blue eyes.
This is the Daniel Craig story, as he tells it: "Grew up on the Wirral, left home at 16 or 17, came down to London, did the National Youth Theatre, managed to stay in London somehow, went to drama school, became an actor. There is some other stuff, but really that's it."
His performances suggest someone gruff, insular and hard, but he turns out to be affable and talkative, even on the subject of Tomb Raider. He is in the middle of shooting the film version - his first blockbuster - and all sorts of dire warnings have been issued about plot secrecy.
"The deal is: I know about the game, I find out that this guy Simon West is directing it, I get an interview to meet the guy and I really like him. I don't want to be screwed around and I think I'm going to play the poor English cousin in this big old movie. But my profile had been raised because of Love Is The Devil, and they were going 'We WANT YOU to do this movie' and for an actor that's 'Oh, you do? Really?' It was shit-or-get-off-the-pot time. I mean, I want to make smaller-budget movies, much more character-based, with more of a message. But if I can do this movie and it can raise my profile enough..."
As Kate Winslet did with Titanic? (Incidentally, a younger Winslet and Craig once played a couple in A Kid In King Arthur's Court.) "That's my ideal. She's doing it right. Now she can go to do a movie that is short of half a million quid, and that half a million quid will then appear, and that film will get made, and she'll have some artistic control and, on the back of her name, she'll be putting something back into the business. And that seems to be the right move."
He is fully versed in the Tomb Raider worldwide-phenomenon statistics, which he recites with a laugh. Usefully, before he ever got the role, he'd wasted enough hours sending Lara Croft down secret passageways himself. But he has a more pertinent argument about why the film might just work: "This guy Simon West...Con Air [directed by West] is a very funny movie, its tongue is placed firmly in its cheek, but with style. I think he's bright. And Angelina Jolie is a piece of classic casting." Of course, Tomb Raider could be the hit of the summer and international superstardom could still pass Daniel Craig by. After all, The Mummy hasn't turned John Hannah into someone who makes people faint in the streets. But that doesn't seem to be what Daniel Craig is after, anyway. He's not interested in making it too easy for himself, or the audience. Which is why you should give Sword Of Honour a go, even - no, especially - if the decaying aristos of Brideshead made you feel nauseous.
"If you stick with it, there is a sort of pay-off, but what I like about it is that it's not an obvious pay-off. It's not like everything joins up and is happy. Waugh was a bitter and twisted old man by the time he died, and that's what Sword Of Honour is about. It is a bit inconclusive. The audience has to work a bit, and I think that's a good thing."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2001/ja ... elevision1
Ah, Brideshead Revisited, that monument of British TV. An icon of ITV's better days, source of style tips for Thatcherite fops everywhere, and great comfort of Anglophile Americans to this day. And, presumably, an inspiration to anyone considering appearing in a TV adaptation of an Evelyn Waugh book. Someone like Daniel Craig, star of Sword Of Honour.
"When I went to meet the director I said 'If this is anything like Brideshead, fuck off. I can't be bothered with it.' He just went, 'No, we're not going to do that.'" The casting alone is enough to tell you that Sword Of Honour isn't Brideshead Revisited revisited. Rather than Jeremy Irons, we have Craig, still best known as Geordie - the one who learns the dark ways of Soho from Malcolm McDowell - in Our Friends In The North. Mike Leigh favourite Katrin Cartlidge plays a scheming expat, and Leslie Phillips is the central character's father. William Boyd has boiled the whole thing down from Waugh's autobiographical trilogy about the Second World War, a disillusioned and bitterly funny series of books that is a world away from the social-climbing nostalgia of Brideshead Revisited. In Sword Of Honour, middle-aged posh failure, Guy Crouchback, joins up in search of redemption through glory, and finds that the British army only values cowards and liars. Boyd likes to think of it as an English Catch-22. The best bits of this TV adaptation, showing the sick comedy of the disastrous British operations in Crete, are exactly that.
"If we got a page in the Daily Mail saying 'This is not Evelyn Waugh!' I'd be very happy," says Craig. He knows that Crouchback isn't an obviously sympathetic character. "That's what makes him interesting. The fact is that he's a bit of a screwup. That either endears you to him, or you wish he'd get on with things. But I related to that, that's quite a modern feeling, that feeling that life ends up passing you by if you don't stop and think about it. And he forces himself to think about it, but he forces himself in the wrong way: he thinks he's going to find it by going to war."
At 32, Craig is a bit younger than Crouchback, but he has one of those faces that is neither transparently young nor old. It helped him in the long timespan of Our Friends In The North, and has allowed him to play a series of wildly different characters, perhaps, most memorably, Francis Bacon's lover, George Dyer, in Love Is The Devil. But he is easily recognisable because of his striking blue eyes.
This is the Daniel Craig story, as he tells it: "Grew up on the Wirral, left home at 16 or 17, came down to London, did the National Youth Theatre, managed to stay in London somehow, went to drama school, became an actor. There is some other stuff, but really that's it."
His performances suggest someone gruff, insular and hard, but he turns out to be affable and talkative, even on the subject of Tomb Raider. He is in the middle of shooting the film version - his first blockbuster - and all sorts of dire warnings have been issued about plot secrecy.
"The deal is: I know about the game, I find out that this guy Simon West is directing it, I get an interview to meet the guy and I really like him. I don't want to be screwed around and I think I'm going to play the poor English cousin in this big old movie. But my profile had been raised because of Love Is The Devil, and they were going 'We WANT YOU to do this movie' and for an actor that's 'Oh, you do? Really?' It was shit-or-get-off-the-pot time. I mean, I want to make smaller-budget movies, much more character-based, with more of a message. But if I can do this movie and it can raise my profile enough..."
As Kate Winslet did with Titanic? (Incidentally, a younger Winslet and Craig once played a couple in A Kid In King Arthur's Court.) "That's my ideal. She's doing it right. Now she can go to do a movie that is short of half a million quid, and that half a million quid will then appear, and that film will get made, and she'll have some artistic control and, on the back of her name, she'll be putting something back into the business. And that seems to be the right move."
He is fully versed in the Tomb Raider worldwide-phenomenon statistics, which he recites with a laugh. Usefully, before he ever got the role, he'd wasted enough hours sending Lara Croft down secret passageways himself. But he has a more pertinent argument about why the film might just work: "This guy Simon West...Con Air [directed by West] is a very funny movie, its tongue is placed firmly in its cheek, but with style. I think he's bright. And Angelina Jolie is a piece of classic casting." Of course, Tomb Raider could be the hit of the summer and international superstardom could still pass Daniel Craig by. After all, The Mummy hasn't turned John Hannah into someone who makes people faint in the streets. But that doesn't seem to be what Daniel Craig is after, anyway. He's not interested in making it too easy for himself, or the audience. Which is why you should give Sword Of Honour a go, even - no, especially - if the decaying aristos of Brideshead made you feel nauseous.
"If you stick with it, there is a sort of pay-off, but what I like about it is that it's not an obvious pay-off. It's not like everything joins up and is happy. Waugh was a bitter and twisted old man by the time he died, and that's what Sword Of Honour is about. It is a bit inconclusive. The audience has to work a bit, and I think that's a good thing."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2001/ja ... elevision1
Daniel Craig Is a Movie Star From England. Any Questions?
The cowboy in Cowboys & Aliens is hard to get to know. Even if you witnessed the encounter our writer had with him in London, you'd be left wondering about a few things. We imagined what those things might be.
By Tom Chiarella
Published in the August 2011 issue
So, where is this?
It is a room. Though you wouldn't call it a room, since technically there is no ceiling.
What, then?
A courtyard then, many tables. This is London. The neighborhood of Camden, specifically. Just north of Regent's Park. Nice part of town — urban, once hip, not dripping with money. Midday sun needles through the arbors.
Who are we looking at?
In the corner, by the walkway to the kitchen, in a threadbare T-shirt, torso gripped by a misbuttoned gray cardigan, sits Daniel Craig, forty-three, eyes properly aviatored against the light, spinning something in his hand — an unclasped watch or a set of house keys.
Nervous? Or bored?
Maybe he likes to keep occupied while he talks. He lives near the courtyard. Could be a form of simple impatience, or anxiety about all of the reasons he's sitting here in this courtyard. There are many. This year alone, he will star in installments of three different movie franchises, one already massive, the others almost assuredly so too: the next Bond film, his third, which begins filming in November; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based on the Stieg Larsson book that everyone on the planet read, directed by David Fincher; and director Jon Favreau's Cowboys & Aliens, which also stars Harrison Ford and which is about cowboys and aliens, plus some Indians. Craig also will finish shooting the drama Dream House, long in the works, and he's in Steven Spielberg's first cartoon movie, The Adventures of Tintin. And there's the new romance, with an actress. Plus, he lives close by.
What did you think when you sat down across the table?
Daniel Craig looks like sandpaper.
What's he talking about just now?
Where he was born, where's he's from: "Kind of a small town. Chester. It's a city in the northwest of England. Famous, I suppose, for being a Roman city." His eyes focus on a corner of the courtyard to the left, then hold there.
What is he looking at?
Nothing in particular. There's a house cat necking its way around a planter. A table full of forgotten stemware. It's just a corner of a courtyard. His eyes narrow, then return to center for eye contact. There's a little head tilt, then he winches the gaze down again. The impression: Daniel Craig is always telling you something he ought not tell or ought not have to tell, so it's either confidential or obvious.
It's like a bit then, this thing with his eyes?
Maybe. He works his eyes, sure. Those blue pegs are his moneymakers. He's made a good decade's worth of movies behind them. Flashed them as an assassin in Munich, as a freedom fighter in Defiance. He pretty much trademarked the stare as a drug dealer in director Matthew Vaughn's Layer Cake, in 2004, though at the time it was hard to tell whether it meant he was cool or heavily opiated. (Perhaps that was the point.) Then he found a role to define the smoldering gaze and locked it down on the last two Bond posters. Surely he'll use it again on the next one. In fact, it's jarring when he goes wide-eyed or shows a bit of vulnerability, as he did in strong but largely unseen movies like Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon in 1998 or Flashbacks of a Fool, ten years later.
That's what he's doing here in London — courtyard: the flock of tables and chairs — just as he tips into the next part of the story, this tale of his hometown: squinting, which leads him to yet another sidelong. "It's also famous because the Duke of Westminster — the richest man in the country, as he owns Westminster, including the American embassy — um, he owns Chester as well. It's his seat, it's where he ..."
What, besides the eyes?
Well, look at the guy. That is some rough business right there, right? All scuffed and creased, lips overdry and at the same time overripe, the space between the eyes too wide, looks like he always has a headache. Maybe he's hungover, or maybe he's growling through a primer on English land stewardship to get to a better point. Or perhaps the mantle weight of being appointed to carry three separate movie franchises is making him show signs of strain — maybe the next four years has him a little bedraggled.
And again — just as he's about to go on, the little tick, the pause, that thing with the eyes. What the hell is he looking at in the corner of the courtyard? Nothing can hurt him. Not here. But Daniel Craig is wary, though he's pressing on about this land thing.
"It still applies," he says, "that you never own the piece of land you live on, you just lease it from the landowner. You can get a 99-year lease, or you can get a 199-year lease, but it's not your house. It doesn't stay in your family; it reverts back to the earl or whatever. That's just this country. England. But it's what American land laws were structured on."
Where did Daniel Craig come from?
He has a house nearby. On a ninety-nine-year lease. Or a flat maybe. He is evasive. When asked if this is his home now, he hooks a back-there thumb over his shoulder, then twirls the air with one finger. "Yes," he says. "Hereabouts."
No, no. Before he was Bond.
He wants to contest this, the widely accepted assertion that he arrived when he became Bond. He waits for the full formation of the question, takes a measuring breath. When he's told that no one ever needs to read another word about his first pass as Bond in Casino Royale — the objections to his blond hair, the doubts surrounding his out-of-the-blue inheritance of the ballyhooed Bond legacy — he is curt in acceding.
"Good," he says. "Neither do I."
So not one word about the next installment of Bond, which he refers to simply as Bond 23?
"No-no-no, Sam's gonna do it, Sam Mendes, and I'm really fucking really lookin' forward to the fact that he's gonna do it," he says, snapping to. Mendes directed him in the gloomy thriller Road to Perdition in 2002. Craig tricks out a little smirk then. A concession, a comfort maybe.
"This has become my way, it's as simple as that," he says. "I mean, since I've just become James Bond. And I think, you know, that means being something that people feel they own. And all of the sudden I'm getting magazine covers, when I got nothing for ten years before that. I say it's just pure luck. And doing covers, people interviewing me, and they want to know everything and I'm going, I'm not gonna fucking tell you!"
Craig settles once more into the clutch of his muscular recline. "Well, you know," he says, sliding the Ray-Bans from his nose. "I mean this is actually very nice. We can talk about anything else, and hopefully it can be made interesting."
Okay, then. What does he want to talk about?
First, it should be said: He's right about this. He can talk about nearly anything and it is pleasant, informed, normal. Mostly the jabber of the everyday: children, politics, regret. His daughter comes up, a student in a college on the East Coast of the United States.
"I don't really talk about her, because — well, she can't defend herself. But she's fantastic. Fantastic, and she's — you know, she's doing something." A certain lightness comes over him then, a loosening of the features, a squaring of the hips to the table edge. The sun angles along the courtyard wall, and on his face: the shine of a pride not often allowed out for a walk. "I mean, she's finishing her education, in the States. I said, 'Look, there's an opportunity here, you should take it.' I'm in that position, and I guess that's something that feels more than lucky. It feels essential."
For him as a boy, he says, it was more luck. "I'd left home at sixteen, so I was independent and I could apply. I got a full grant. But I got full grant and full maintenance, which is fuck-all, but I mean, it made the difference. I got through college," he says. It is strangely difficult to imagine Daniel Craig as a twenty-year-old college student.
There is advice, too, woven in. It springs from him, dry and recognizably earnest, then athletic in its grumpy practicality, and none of it bad. To the father of an indecisive high school kid: "I think you have to put your foot down. You just say, 'Look, I'm gonna have to break my balls here to do this, so therefore you need to make a decision so I can plan the rest of my fucking life.' I mean, it's like, you're eighteen — let's get on with this. I mean, that's easy for me to say to you. Oh, fuck, I'm doing it to you now, aren't I? On kids, it's a different thing. But I do think there's a — okay, ultimately at eighteen, I remember ... you just don't really know. And actually they kinda need someone to say, 'Fuck it, just do what I tell you!' And then, you know, for fuck's sake, if he's there for a year and he's really fucking unhappy, he can change."
He mumbles then, about ten syllables, spoken as if into a cloth napkin gripped by a fist.
"He can move."
What did he say right before that?
He's just mumbling, the way men do.
What else moves him, aside from the frustrating idealism of youth?
Well, he did let loose a sort of foment of the moment. Libya. Capitalism. Facebook. Streets running red with rebellion against consumerism, apathy, what have you. He runs through a troublesome litany. He likes to ask after the opinions of others. He's the sort — educated, opinionated, a reader of newspapers — who hungers for an argument. "But it's all built around that, and, you know, you just hope a generation's gonna come who very soon is just gonna turn around and say, 'Hang on a second. I don't like being fucking manipulated like this. I don't like being told what to do, I don't like being told what to buy' — you kind of hope it's gonna happen. And there's gonna have to be a shift. I mean, the big companies will figure it out. They'll go, 'Oh, you don't want that anymore? You want this.' And they'll figure it out, but at least there'll be kind of a change in attitude towards it. I mean, I don't know. We've had student riots here. And whatever way you think about politics, the fact that students have — there's no such thing as free education anymore. That's kind of gone, and they're gonna put up a fight. But you know, there was a time when it was free, and education was paid for."
The conversational habit seems positively Continental, refined. And when he argues a point, his strings loosen. Everything about him is more straight-ahead. At one point he is discussing, or rather going off about, failing pension systems and lengthening life spans: "Not everybody's happy with their situation!" And here Daniel Craig pounds the table in front of him. There is rattling of glass. "There are some fucking seriously poor people, who are mixing with your diminishing middle class, and there's a sort of ever-growing fucking ruling class, and it's like, it's obvious."
His phone rings, vibrates, and this too rattles the glass. He excuses himself, stays seated, and takes the call.
Who is it?
There's no way to know, is there? Craig puts his sunglasses back on as he speaks — a curious gesture. He explains his schedule, looks at his watch, keeps his eyes low, his gaze downward. He tells the other person: what time he'll be leaving the courtyard, when he'll be home. It might be any of a number of familiars. A family member. His daughter, perhaps. Or it might be Academy Award winner Rachel Weisz. She is his costar in Dream House, and his new girlfriend, rumored to have left her longtime fiancé, Darren Aronofsky, the director, for Craig. Not that the tabloids have much on Craig. Even in the tabloidy UK, he tends to drift above the fray.
He listens for a moment, then says goodbye and I love you. Disconnected, he goes right back to it — foreign policy, social policy, and the familiar pratfalls of the West. "And if you can't afford to give them their fucking pension because you didn't figure it out ... you failed!" He's intellectually fluid, and curious. There's an engine behind his thinking.
Is he smart?
Obviously. He's astute. He thinks.
Nice guy?
Nice? How is that germane? He's fifteen minutes into a conversation here. What do you want, Dick Van Dyke? He's talking. He simply is. In fact, in the courtyard, this blank space, on the other side of the table, he generally acts like a living, breathing "to be" verb. Reserved, static, a limited expression of a state of being. This political stuff lights him up a mite.
Why, do you think?
This, this talker, may be closer to the kind of man he played before Bond. Talky, smart movies based on talky, smart novels or plays. Box-office blips like the exquisite Love Is the Devil, in which he plays a man who breaks into Francis Bacon's apartment and becomes his lover — gritty and hypersexual. And Enduring Love (2004), and even a BBC4 treatment of Copenhagen (2002), a play about the portentous meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941. Aspirational works. His descriptions of filming them muster up a kind of rhapsody in this otherwise music-free courtyard.
"We shot Copenhagen as conversations between the two guys. Heisenberg goes to visit Neils Bohr to ask him how to build the A-bomb. Bohr balks. Heisenberg is left going, 'Because we have to, because they're building the same bomb!' It's a moral issue, an arms race happening during the war. The weird thing: As it was written, the Germans were a lot clumsier than the cliché of the Nazi scientist student, though they did get us to the moon. Let's not get that wrong. But Hitler was spread so far and wide that, you know, releasing that amount of energy from nothing? I don't think he believed in it. Fucking hell, he was more into the occult."
You can hear it echoing in the courtyard. Rambling wonder in the ideas expressed in a nine-year-old made-for-TV adaptation of an intensely serious play. Although one can never be certain, it would seem there isn't much room for Octopussy within the Heisenberg Principle. What is certain, however, is that Daniel Craig wants to make movies for adults.
Did he actually say that?
Directly. Listen to him speak on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: "It's as adult as you can possibly make it. This is adult drama. I grew up, as we fucking all did, watching The Godfather and that, movies that were made for adults. And this is a $100 million R-rated movie. Nobody makes those anymore. And Fincher, he's not holding back. They've given him free rein. He showed me some scenes recently, and my hand was over my mouth, going, Are you fucking serious?"
He raises his eyes, looks upward to describe what he saw in a set of Fincher's dailies that startled him this way. You can imagine — the book contains sodomy and torture chambers and lighting people on fire. And yet, "it's not that he simply showed me footage that was horribly graphic," Craig says. "It was stuff that was happening, or had happened. And somehow you don't see it."
What's that mean?
This is the adult thing: to not be obvious about it. "There's more than one way to sense violence," he says. "Much more powerful ways than seeing it step-by-step."
So he's astute when it comes to the nature of violence onscreen. And he is drawn to somber subject matter — Francis Bacon, the A-bomb, the Holocaust, and, apparently, immolation: serious actor. But could he do a comedy? Does Daniel Craig have a sense of humor?
Sure. But the laughs come the same way the views appear when you're riding a train: a matter of what he happens by, all of it told through the lens of work. Consider this anecdote: On top of the three big franchise vehicles, he's got a part in Spielberg's animated version of Tintin, the 1930s French serial adventures of a trench-coated boy reporter, a terrier named Snowy, and various older nautical gentlemen. A churning tissue of subtext. Craig reports that he's pleased by the final product, though he says it's hard to remember what he expected, since they filmed his part two years before. "We shot it in mo-cap. Which is like: Fuck me, I'm literally in a leotard with a fucking helmet on, and a camera strapped to it. It's Steven Spielberg, so every fucker in the world comes to visit. Fincher comes to visit. Clint fucking Eastwood comes to visit. It was just like, are you kidding me? I'm gonna meet these people dressed like this? Playing a pirate, wearing a leotard and a camera? Really?"
In the courtyard, the sun cuts a path across the sky, the day passes. There are plenty of laughs. Still, it seems evident that Daniel Craig doesn't burn with the instinct to delight, to relate the dopey tragedy of life, the absurdity of the everyday. He doesn't aim for a punchline.
"It's hard to translate comedy from one country to another, you know?" says Jim Sheridan, the six-time Oscar nominee who directed Dream House, starring Craig (alongside Weisz and Naomi Watts), a thriller due this September. "Daniel has a kind of British reserve that stays up front."
The release of Dream House was delayed seven months largely by Craig's scheduling conflicts. Sheridan is sanguine about the trade-off that came with employing the world's most in-demand actor. "Ah, it took forever," he says. "Daniel just got very busy and we needed to do these reshoots. But I really think he's one of the very good British actors. They are not many, you know? I suppose you'd say Ralph Fiennes and a few others, but they always dwell in the area of being, you know, very good actors. But who was the last great British star, really? Was it Peter O'Toole? Daniel Day-Lewis? Is he a star or an actor? Ewan McGregor looked like he would be for a while. I don't think he is anymore. And what about Jude Law? He seems to have gone back a bit, yeah? I think Daniel is a star. Or he can be a star."
Before he hangs up, Sheridan says of Dream House: "Daniel is terrific in this. Very vulnerable, very damaged, very lovable. Great, great acting. Very accommodating man." He hums a little, pondering across the ocean's breadth of our phone connection. "I'm just trying to think of something funny that happened. If I thought about one, I'd come back to you."
Did he?
No. But Jon Favreau did call. Director of Cowboys & Aliens, the other installment of Daniel Craig's 2011 trilogy of blockbusters, in which the actor plays a skeletally thin frontier outlaw who is pressed into leading a ragtag assembly of cowboys against a marauding alien invasion. Presumably, another incarnation of The Godfather. Favreau says Craig was in on every choice in the movie, soup to nuts. "He's very smart. Very," Favreau says. "He has a quiet facade, comes across as reserved, but the minute you break bread with him he's full of observations and conversations." So Favreau has been to the courtyard.
He calls Craig a partner. He calls him an "athlete." "He likes to laugh," Favreau says to the question of the moment. "He's not dour by any stretch. His persona onscreen tends to be reserved and calculated, but he's a good host. Gracious." Then, in answering a question about sense of humor, he uses that word again, the same one Sheridan used: "Accommodating."
Wait, so he's funny, then. But funny how? Like a clown? Does he amuse you? Funny how?
You know, he's funny. Favreau acknowledges as much: "He's very funny. Though a lot of the things said about Daniel might be viewed as boilerplate answers for anybody that's just trying to give a positive response — 'Daniel's not a guy just trying to get through the day, he definitely has fire in his belly, his dance card is full, he works to give you his all' — in Daniel's case, that checks out really well. He's a really exceptional guy.
"I think it's in your DNA, it's in your bones, the measure of what you're going to be when you finally get to be yourself," he says. "I think he's there. Daniel Craig's getting to be himself."
Where does that leave us with Daniel Craig?
Still in the courtyard, he's on another ramble. This time describing how he came to the opportunity, the chance to play an archetypal role in a movie hip-deep in summer popcorn — with the prospect of sequels down the line. He's saying what appealed to him. Does the movie have a political heart, or what?
"No," he says, "it can't, I don't think. Because it's got cowboys and aliens. And we team up with the Indians and there's an alien force coming in that's gonna ..."
He pauses then and smiles. The first smile the courtyard has seen from him. He looks different then, looser, leaning forward, telling the story of the movie with a title so simple, it's silly. "You know, in fact, let's not fucking get too crazy about it, but Stephen Hawking just said recently, 'Let's hope aliens don't land, 'cause I think it'll be pretty much like the Europeans landing in the Americas.' You know, it's gonna have that much of a devastating effect. That's kind of ... that's the only political angle. And you can't help but have that. But it's, really — it's called Cowboys & Aliens. Let's ... just ..."
About then, two women on the other side of the courtyard pull their chairs around to the same side of a table and sit side by side, so they can watch him from behind the dark saucers of their sunglasses. He gives them a version of the eye thing, again featuring a tilt of his head. But they don't back down. Why would they? He is a movie star, full-blown and handsome, on a sunny day in London. That's a rare enough thing for a long look.
"Yeah, let's just leave it at that," he says. And Daniel Craig laughs.
http://www.esquire.com/features/daniel- ... rview-0811
The cowboy in Cowboys & Aliens is hard to get to know. Even if you witnessed the encounter our writer had with him in London, you'd be left wondering about a few things. We imagined what those things might be.
By Tom Chiarella
Published in the August 2011 issue
So, where is this?
It is a room. Though you wouldn't call it a room, since technically there is no ceiling.
What, then?
A courtyard then, many tables. This is London. The neighborhood of Camden, specifically. Just north of Regent's Park. Nice part of town — urban, once hip, not dripping with money. Midday sun needles through the arbors.
Who are we looking at?
In the corner, by the walkway to the kitchen, in a threadbare T-shirt, torso gripped by a misbuttoned gray cardigan, sits Daniel Craig, forty-three, eyes properly aviatored against the light, spinning something in his hand — an unclasped watch or a set of house keys.
Nervous? Or bored?
Maybe he likes to keep occupied while he talks. He lives near the courtyard. Could be a form of simple impatience, or anxiety about all of the reasons he's sitting here in this courtyard. There are many. This year alone, he will star in installments of three different movie franchises, one already massive, the others almost assuredly so too: the next Bond film, his third, which begins filming in November; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based on the Stieg Larsson book that everyone on the planet read, directed by David Fincher; and director Jon Favreau's Cowboys & Aliens, which also stars Harrison Ford and which is about cowboys and aliens, plus some Indians. Craig also will finish shooting the drama Dream House, long in the works, and he's in Steven Spielberg's first cartoon movie, The Adventures of Tintin. And there's the new romance, with an actress. Plus, he lives close by.
What did you think when you sat down across the table?
Daniel Craig looks like sandpaper.
What's he talking about just now?
Where he was born, where's he's from: "Kind of a small town. Chester. It's a city in the northwest of England. Famous, I suppose, for being a Roman city." His eyes focus on a corner of the courtyard to the left, then hold there.
What is he looking at?
Nothing in particular. There's a house cat necking its way around a planter. A table full of forgotten stemware. It's just a corner of a courtyard. His eyes narrow, then return to center for eye contact. There's a little head tilt, then he winches the gaze down again. The impression: Daniel Craig is always telling you something he ought not tell or ought not have to tell, so it's either confidential or obvious.
It's like a bit then, this thing with his eyes?
Maybe. He works his eyes, sure. Those blue pegs are his moneymakers. He's made a good decade's worth of movies behind them. Flashed them as an assassin in Munich, as a freedom fighter in Defiance. He pretty much trademarked the stare as a drug dealer in director Matthew Vaughn's Layer Cake, in 2004, though at the time it was hard to tell whether it meant he was cool or heavily opiated. (Perhaps that was the point.) Then he found a role to define the smoldering gaze and locked it down on the last two Bond posters. Surely he'll use it again on the next one. In fact, it's jarring when he goes wide-eyed or shows a bit of vulnerability, as he did in strong but largely unseen movies like Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon in 1998 or Flashbacks of a Fool, ten years later.
That's what he's doing here in London — courtyard: the flock of tables and chairs — just as he tips into the next part of the story, this tale of his hometown: squinting, which leads him to yet another sidelong. "It's also famous because the Duke of Westminster — the richest man in the country, as he owns Westminster, including the American embassy — um, he owns Chester as well. It's his seat, it's where he ..."
What, besides the eyes?
Well, look at the guy. That is some rough business right there, right? All scuffed and creased, lips overdry and at the same time overripe, the space between the eyes too wide, looks like he always has a headache. Maybe he's hungover, or maybe he's growling through a primer on English land stewardship to get to a better point. Or perhaps the mantle weight of being appointed to carry three separate movie franchises is making him show signs of strain — maybe the next four years has him a little bedraggled.
And again — just as he's about to go on, the little tick, the pause, that thing with the eyes. What the hell is he looking at in the corner of the courtyard? Nothing can hurt him. Not here. But Daniel Craig is wary, though he's pressing on about this land thing.
"It still applies," he says, "that you never own the piece of land you live on, you just lease it from the landowner. You can get a 99-year lease, or you can get a 199-year lease, but it's not your house. It doesn't stay in your family; it reverts back to the earl or whatever. That's just this country. England. But it's what American land laws were structured on."
Where did Daniel Craig come from?
He has a house nearby. On a ninety-nine-year lease. Or a flat maybe. He is evasive. When asked if this is his home now, he hooks a back-there thumb over his shoulder, then twirls the air with one finger. "Yes," he says. "Hereabouts."
No, no. Before he was Bond.
He wants to contest this, the widely accepted assertion that he arrived when he became Bond. He waits for the full formation of the question, takes a measuring breath. When he's told that no one ever needs to read another word about his first pass as Bond in Casino Royale — the objections to his blond hair, the doubts surrounding his out-of-the-blue inheritance of the ballyhooed Bond legacy — he is curt in acceding.
"Good," he says. "Neither do I."
So not one word about the next installment of Bond, which he refers to simply as Bond 23?
"No-no-no, Sam's gonna do it, Sam Mendes, and I'm really fucking really lookin' forward to the fact that he's gonna do it," he says, snapping to. Mendes directed him in the gloomy thriller Road to Perdition in 2002. Craig tricks out a little smirk then. A concession, a comfort maybe.
"This has become my way, it's as simple as that," he says. "I mean, since I've just become James Bond. And I think, you know, that means being something that people feel they own. And all of the sudden I'm getting magazine covers, when I got nothing for ten years before that. I say it's just pure luck. And doing covers, people interviewing me, and they want to know everything and I'm going, I'm not gonna fucking tell you!"
Craig settles once more into the clutch of his muscular recline. "Well, you know," he says, sliding the Ray-Bans from his nose. "I mean this is actually very nice. We can talk about anything else, and hopefully it can be made interesting."
Okay, then. What does he want to talk about?
First, it should be said: He's right about this. He can talk about nearly anything and it is pleasant, informed, normal. Mostly the jabber of the everyday: children, politics, regret. His daughter comes up, a student in a college on the East Coast of the United States.
"I don't really talk about her, because — well, she can't defend herself. But she's fantastic. Fantastic, and she's — you know, she's doing something." A certain lightness comes over him then, a loosening of the features, a squaring of the hips to the table edge. The sun angles along the courtyard wall, and on his face: the shine of a pride not often allowed out for a walk. "I mean, she's finishing her education, in the States. I said, 'Look, there's an opportunity here, you should take it.' I'm in that position, and I guess that's something that feels more than lucky. It feels essential."
For him as a boy, he says, it was more luck. "I'd left home at sixteen, so I was independent and I could apply. I got a full grant. But I got full grant and full maintenance, which is fuck-all, but I mean, it made the difference. I got through college," he says. It is strangely difficult to imagine Daniel Craig as a twenty-year-old college student.
There is advice, too, woven in. It springs from him, dry and recognizably earnest, then athletic in its grumpy practicality, and none of it bad. To the father of an indecisive high school kid: "I think you have to put your foot down. You just say, 'Look, I'm gonna have to break my balls here to do this, so therefore you need to make a decision so I can plan the rest of my fucking life.' I mean, it's like, you're eighteen — let's get on with this. I mean, that's easy for me to say to you. Oh, fuck, I'm doing it to you now, aren't I? On kids, it's a different thing. But I do think there's a — okay, ultimately at eighteen, I remember ... you just don't really know. And actually they kinda need someone to say, 'Fuck it, just do what I tell you!' And then, you know, for fuck's sake, if he's there for a year and he's really fucking unhappy, he can change."
He mumbles then, about ten syllables, spoken as if into a cloth napkin gripped by a fist.
"He can move."
What did he say right before that?
He's just mumbling, the way men do.
What else moves him, aside from the frustrating idealism of youth?
Well, he did let loose a sort of foment of the moment. Libya. Capitalism. Facebook. Streets running red with rebellion against consumerism, apathy, what have you. He runs through a troublesome litany. He likes to ask after the opinions of others. He's the sort — educated, opinionated, a reader of newspapers — who hungers for an argument. "But it's all built around that, and, you know, you just hope a generation's gonna come who very soon is just gonna turn around and say, 'Hang on a second. I don't like being fucking manipulated like this. I don't like being told what to do, I don't like being told what to buy' — you kind of hope it's gonna happen. And there's gonna have to be a shift. I mean, the big companies will figure it out. They'll go, 'Oh, you don't want that anymore? You want this.' And they'll figure it out, but at least there'll be kind of a change in attitude towards it. I mean, I don't know. We've had student riots here. And whatever way you think about politics, the fact that students have — there's no such thing as free education anymore. That's kind of gone, and they're gonna put up a fight. But you know, there was a time when it was free, and education was paid for."
The conversational habit seems positively Continental, refined. And when he argues a point, his strings loosen. Everything about him is more straight-ahead. At one point he is discussing, or rather going off about, failing pension systems and lengthening life spans: "Not everybody's happy with their situation!" And here Daniel Craig pounds the table in front of him. There is rattling of glass. "There are some fucking seriously poor people, who are mixing with your diminishing middle class, and there's a sort of ever-growing fucking ruling class, and it's like, it's obvious."
His phone rings, vibrates, and this too rattles the glass. He excuses himself, stays seated, and takes the call.
Who is it?
There's no way to know, is there? Craig puts his sunglasses back on as he speaks — a curious gesture. He explains his schedule, looks at his watch, keeps his eyes low, his gaze downward. He tells the other person: what time he'll be leaving the courtyard, when he'll be home. It might be any of a number of familiars. A family member. His daughter, perhaps. Or it might be Academy Award winner Rachel Weisz. She is his costar in Dream House, and his new girlfriend, rumored to have left her longtime fiancé, Darren Aronofsky, the director, for Craig. Not that the tabloids have much on Craig. Even in the tabloidy UK, he tends to drift above the fray.
He listens for a moment, then says goodbye and I love you. Disconnected, he goes right back to it — foreign policy, social policy, and the familiar pratfalls of the West. "And if you can't afford to give them their fucking pension because you didn't figure it out ... you failed!" He's intellectually fluid, and curious. There's an engine behind his thinking.
Is he smart?
Obviously. He's astute. He thinks.
Nice guy?
Nice? How is that germane? He's fifteen minutes into a conversation here. What do you want, Dick Van Dyke? He's talking. He simply is. In fact, in the courtyard, this blank space, on the other side of the table, he generally acts like a living, breathing "to be" verb. Reserved, static, a limited expression of a state of being. This political stuff lights him up a mite.
Why, do you think?
This, this talker, may be closer to the kind of man he played before Bond. Talky, smart movies based on talky, smart novels or plays. Box-office blips like the exquisite Love Is the Devil, in which he plays a man who breaks into Francis Bacon's apartment and becomes his lover — gritty and hypersexual. And Enduring Love (2004), and even a BBC4 treatment of Copenhagen (2002), a play about the portentous meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941. Aspirational works. His descriptions of filming them muster up a kind of rhapsody in this otherwise music-free courtyard.
"We shot Copenhagen as conversations between the two guys. Heisenberg goes to visit Neils Bohr to ask him how to build the A-bomb. Bohr balks. Heisenberg is left going, 'Because we have to, because they're building the same bomb!' It's a moral issue, an arms race happening during the war. The weird thing: As it was written, the Germans were a lot clumsier than the cliché of the Nazi scientist student, though they did get us to the moon. Let's not get that wrong. But Hitler was spread so far and wide that, you know, releasing that amount of energy from nothing? I don't think he believed in it. Fucking hell, he was more into the occult."
You can hear it echoing in the courtyard. Rambling wonder in the ideas expressed in a nine-year-old made-for-TV adaptation of an intensely serious play. Although one can never be certain, it would seem there isn't much room for Octopussy within the Heisenberg Principle. What is certain, however, is that Daniel Craig wants to make movies for adults.
Did he actually say that?
Directly. Listen to him speak on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: "It's as adult as you can possibly make it. This is adult drama. I grew up, as we fucking all did, watching The Godfather and that, movies that were made for adults. And this is a $100 million R-rated movie. Nobody makes those anymore. And Fincher, he's not holding back. They've given him free rein. He showed me some scenes recently, and my hand was over my mouth, going, Are you fucking serious?"
He raises his eyes, looks upward to describe what he saw in a set of Fincher's dailies that startled him this way. You can imagine — the book contains sodomy and torture chambers and lighting people on fire. And yet, "it's not that he simply showed me footage that was horribly graphic," Craig says. "It was stuff that was happening, or had happened. And somehow you don't see it."
What's that mean?
This is the adult thing: to not be obvious about it. "There's more than one way to sense violence," he says. "Much more powerful ways than seeing it step-by-step."
So he's astute when it comes to the nature of violence onscreen. And he is drawn to somber subject matter — Francis Bacon, the A-bomb, the Holocaust, and, apparently, immolation: serious actor. But could he do a comedy? Does Daniel Craig have a sense of humor?
Sure. But the laughs come the same way the views appear when you're riding a train: a matter of what he happens by, all of it told through the lens of work. Consider this anecdote: On top of the three big franchise vehicles, he's got a part in Spielberg's animated version of Tintin, the 1930s French serial adventures of a trench-coated boy reporter, a terrier named Snowy, and various older nautical gentlemen. A churning tissue of subtext. Craig reports that he's pleased by the final product, though he says it's hard to remember what he expected, since they filmed his part two years before. "We shot it in mo-cap. Which is like: Fuck me, I'm literally in a leotard with a fucking helmet on, and a camera strapped to it. It's Steven Spielberg, so every fucker in the world comes to visit. Fincher comes to visit. Clint fucking Eastwood comes to visit. It was just like, are you kidding me? I'm gonna meet these people dressed like this? Playing a pirate, wearing a leotard and a camera? Really?"
In the courtyard, the sun cuts a path across the sky, the day passes. There are plenty of laughs. Still, it seems evident that Daniel Craig doesn't burn with the instinct to delight, to relate the dopey tragedy of life, the absurdity of the everyday. He doesn't aim for a punchline.
"It's hard to translate comedy from one country to another, you know?" says Jim Sheridan, the six-time Oscar nominee who directed Dream House, starring Craig (alongside Weisz and Naomi Watts), a thriller due this September. "Daniel has a kind of British reserve that stays up front."
The release of Dream House was delayed seven months largely by Craig's scheduling conflicts. Sheridan is sanguine about the trade-off that came with employing the world's most in-demand actor. "Ah, it took forever," he says. "Daniel just got very busy and we needed to do these reshoots. But I really think he's one of the very good British actors. They are not many, you know? I suppose you'd say Ralph Fiennes and a few others, but they always dwell in the area of being, you know, very good actors. But who was the last great British star, really? Was it Peter O'Toole? Daniel Day-Lewis? Is he a star or an actor? Ewan McGregor looked like he would be for a while. I don't think he is anymore. And what about Jude Law? He seems to have gone back a bit, yeah? I think Daniel is a star. Or he can be a star."
Before he hangs up, Sheridan says of Dream House: "Daniel is terrific in this. Very vulnerable, very damaged, very lovable. Great, great acting. Very accommodating man." He hums a little, pondering across the ocean's breadth of our phone connection. "I'm just trying to think of something funny that happened. If I thought about one, I'd come back to you."
Did he?
No. But Jon Favreau did call. Director of Cowboys & Aliens, the other installment of Daniel Craig's 2011 trilogy of blockbusters, in which the actor plays a skeletally thin frontier outlaw who is pressed into leading a ragtag assembly of cowboys against a marauding alien invasion. Presumably, another incarnation of The Godfather. Favreau says Craig was in on every choice in the movie, soup to nuts. "He's very smart. Very," Favreau says. "He has a quiet facade, comes across as reserved, but the minute you break bread with him he's full of observations and conversations." So Favreau has been to the courtyard.
He calls Craig a partner. He calls him an "athlete." "He likes to laugh," Favreau says to the question of the moment. "He's not dour by any stretch. His persona onscreen tends to be reserved and calculated, but he's a good host. Gracious." Then, in answering a question about sense of humor, he uses that word again, the same one Sheridan used: "Accommodating."
Wait, so he's funny, then. But funny how? Like a clown? Does he amuse you? Funny how?
You know, he's funny. Favreau acknowledges as much: "He's very funny. Though a lot of the things said about Daniel might be viewed as boilerplate answers for anybody that's just trying to give a positive response — 'Daniel's not a guy just trying to get through the day, he definitely has fire in his belly, his dance card is full, he works to give you his all' — in Daniel's case, that checks out really well. He's a really exceptional guy.
"I think it's in your DNA, it's in your bones, the measure of what you're going to be when you finally get to be yourself," he says. "I think he's there. Daniel Craig's getting to be himself."
Where does that leave us with Daniel Craig?
Still in the courtyard, he's on another ramble. This time describing how he came to the opportunity, the chance to play an archetypal role in a movie hip-deep in summer popcorn — with the prospect of sequels down the line. He's saying what appealed to him. Does the movie have a political heart, or what?
"No," he says, "it can't, I don't think. Because it's got cowboys and aliens. And we team up with the Indians and there's an alien force coming in that's gonna ..."
He pauses then and smiles. The first smile the courtyard has seen from him. He looks different then, looser, leaning forward, telling the story of the movie with a title so simple, it's silly. "You know, in fact, let's not fucking get too crazy about it, but Stephen Hawking just said recently, 'Let's hope aliens don't land, 'cause I think it'll be pretty much like the Europeans landing in the Americas.' You know, it's gonna have that much of a devastating effect. That's kind of ... that's the only political angle. And you can't help but have that. But it's, really — it's called Cowboys & Aliens. Let's ... just ..."
About then, two women on the other side of the courtyard pull their chairs around to the same side of a table and sit side by side, so they can watch him from behind the dark saucers of their sunglasses. He gives them a version of the eye thing, again featuring a tilt of his head. But they don't back down. Why would they? He is a movie star, full-blown and handsome, on a sunny day in London. That's a rare enough thing for a long look.
"Yeah, let's just leave it at that," he says. And Daniel Craig laughs.
http://www.esquire.com/features/daniel- ... rview-0811
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Germangirl
- Moderator
- Posts: 47069
- Joined: Sun Apr 29, 2007 5:05 pm
- Location: Germany
Interesting comments..
http://www.tomandlorenzo.com/2011/07/co ... gle+Reader
It's so refreshing to see an actor over 40 who hasn't capitulated to Botox. He wears his experience well.
http://www.tomandlorenzo.com/2011/07/co ... gle+Reader
It's so refreshing to see an actor over 40 who hasn't capitulated to Botox. He wears his experience well.
The top notch acting in the Weisz/Craig/Spall 'Betrayal' is emotionally true, often v funny and its beautifully staged with filmic qualities..
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dolphin100
- Posts: 137
- Joined: Wed Dec 06, 2006 6:45 pm
I hope he never does do anything to his face. I hate when women do it too! Much like Sean Bean they wear rugged well!Germangirl wrote:Interesting comments..
http://www.tomandlorenzo.com/2011/07/co ... gle+Reader
It's so refreshing to see an actor over 40 who hasn't capitulated to Botox. He wears his experience well.
