From the Sony / Russian side

[Elaine_Figgis]

This part was interesting. He is admitting to misbehaving. Was he with Satsuki then or was he on his own and getting into trouble?

'Infamous' was 2006 and 'The Jacket' 2005, where they met.

[Cyanaurora]

This part was interesting. He is admitting to misbehaving. Was he with Satsuki then or was he on his own and getting into trouble?

'Infamous' was 2006 and 'The Jacket' 2005, where they met.

I wonder if she was with him there though?

[Elaine_Figgis]

This part was interesting. He is admitting to misbehaving. Was he with Satsuki then or was he on his own and getting into trouble?

'Infamous' was 2006 and 'The Jacket' 2005, where they met.

I wonder if she was with him there though?

Maybe they weren't serious enough at that point and he was still living the bachelor life.

[Germangirl]

On Bond 22 and Mark Forster

From commanderbond:

You can catch the Kite Runner (from Mark Forster) trailer at http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809765419/trailer

It looks to be a contention for Oscars this season. Does this look like the man who will direct Bond 22?

Cheers, Ry. Was wondering when this would be up.
Looks fantastic. I'm going to stick my neck out now and predict that this film will be in the running for Best Picture.
Looking at the IMDb, I was fascinated to see that THE KITE RUNNER was shot partly in China, particularly in the Xinjiang region (surely the first time it's been used as a shooting location for a Hollywood film?), which doubles for neighbouring Afghanistan.
Would it be too over-the-top and fanboyish to already declare BOND 22 the greatest Bond film ever? Seriously, with Craig, Haggis and now Forster onboard, and all at their creative peak, it seems like the 007 equivalent of one of those "they're playing together in heaven now" supergroups involving Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon! Erm, except that they're all living film people instead of dead musicians, but you get the idea.


think it is a bit over the top, if only because CR was so good, I can't fathom how a Bond film could be any better. I did previously post something similar to your "supergroup" comment that Forster, Haggis, and Craig are the most talented and prestigious director/writer/actor combination that have ever worked on a Bond film, so standards, and expectations, are high indeed. Which makes it all the more possible that it could be a crushing disappointment, I suppose. Now, it would be something if EON suddenly found themselves with 2008's Best Director Oscar winner running their show, wouldn't it?

Perhaps declaring it already is a bit crazy but goodness me it certainly has a shot at it.
I don't believe any of this "funny Bond" crap... Bond 22 has a real chance at being the "Empire Strikes Back" to Casino Royale's "Star Wars".
Very good trailer I thought.. Definitely looks like Oscar material.

[agrippina]

Good grief, this talk about supergroup really scares me - the ones formed in music have usually produced just mediocre results IMHO... Not to mention the fact that in any team sport the presence of just star players is not a good sign, well, unless they can play together...

The surprise element of all the changes to the Bond tradition in CR has now been played, so it'll be very interesting to see what new can this group of people come up with!

Agrippina

[Germangirl]

Good grief, this talk about supergroup really scares me - the ones formed in music have usually produced just mediocre results IMHO... Not to mention the fact that in any team sport the presence of just star players is not a good sign, well, unless they can play together...

The surprise element of all the changes to the Bond tradition in CR has now been played, so it'll be very interesting to see what new can this group of people come up with!

Agrippina

I am not sure, if it has necessarely to be new compared to CR - most people seem to want a continuation of the CR style, means no gadgets, no cheesy jokes and that sort. My favourite imaginary scene at the moment is a mountain climbing chase rather than a skiing sequence.

[sharmaine]

Q: Anything stuck on your fridge door?
A: Yes, sadly, one of those poetry things, with the different words for making poems.

BIG SIGH...... I.....AM.....DREAMING HAPPY DREAMS

[sharmaine]

And, yes, DC deserves more that that guy getting $25 mil for Rush Hour three. But that is the market and, of course and on top of that, there's no accounting for taste when it comes to what the kids want to watch (or when it comes to what the Hollywood suits want to feed the kids in urban America).

Chris Tucker got $25 million for Rush Hour 3, so this is not even close to a ridiclous sum of money. Pretty fair contract for Craig.

I am astonished! I was scanning and read this little bit - coincidental because I just saw Rush Hour 2 the other day and posted something about Jackie & Chris somewhere. OMG - Gotta spend some time here - so much to read!

[cornell01]

...and some tidbits from the magazine scans on the DtD home page for those, who don´t have the time to read through it all.

Chris Corbould – Special effects on working with Daniel Craig.

Oh, I can´t say enough good things about him, beams C. Daniel is a real special effects and stunt department dream. He thrives on it and he´s a real pleasure to work with. Our biggest thing is the safety element and Daniel was very up for being in amongst the action – more so than any actor I´ve ever worked with. He was absolutely obsessed with it and he wanted his face in there. I´m a great believer in that, for me that´s value for money with the actors on screen, as long as its safe. And we did a lot of stuff.

Gary Powell on the action and DC

…so you want an actor who is going to take that physical side of it on and not get precious about taking a knock or getting a cut or scrapes. And Daniel was just so up for it, I must say. For a shoot as physically demanding and complex as CR one might suspect, that Craig was given good six month rehearsals and fight training – after all- that´s what they did ion the Matrix. At a push we might imagine that he crammed it all in during 3 month, but the truth is sobering.
We actually got him quite late, because he was finishing another film. We got him about two weeks before filming started, so he was straight in at the deep end doing rehearsals for the embassy sequence.
He was 110% committed to it. He came in prepared to work hard and his mind was in the right place. His attitude was fantastic which is good for us, because we worked with him long and hard and we did put him through some pain. He was a very good pupil. Actors can be difficult at time, especially when you are asking for their time at the weekend. Whereas Daniels attitude was that he would do whatever it took to get it nailed. He was there whenever we needed him.

…in the fight on the stairwell, he is banging up against the wall and down the stairs and he did take the odd knock and a bruise, but he never complained, never moaned. He just got in with it and smiled as he gave 110%.

Did he improve?
Oh yes, by the end, when we shoed him a fight he was like “Great” and was straight into it right away. On the next one we can take him a step further, I´m sure of that.

I am developing a thing about Stunt Coordinator Gary Powell (He seems so self-effacing and nice). And in the process of searching the posts, I found this great series of posts by Germangirl about DC and Casino Royale from last August 2007.

Nice to read about DC's work ethic.

Are these articles still available on DtD's home page?

[cornell01]

Here´s one tha is totally new to me and very Danielish

The Reluctant Man of War
ELIZABETH GRICE
The Daily Telegraph
December 28, 2000
Actor Daniel Craig talks to Elizabeth Grice about Waugh, TV conflict and the problems of playing it posh

A funny thing happened on the way to Pinewood Studios. Stuck in traffic on a half-demolished section of suburbia, I noticed a man up a 12ft ladder slowly wielding a pasting brush. A flap of wet poster flopped over his hand. As he worked and the traffic stalled, the face of the man I was crawling along the A40 to see emerged on the billboard - the wide, lumpy, brooding features of Daniel Craig. Even from that distance you could see that this man has eyes of ice.
Craig is about to freeze our television screens as Guy Crouchback, the tortured hero of Evelyn Waugh's war trilogy, "Sword of Honour." You may remember him as Geordie Peacock, the hapless musician in the television saga "Our Friends in the North," or as Ray the schizophrenic in the film "Some Voices" or for his performance in William Boyd's First World War drama, "The Trench."
Or again, you may not. Craig, 32, is one of those idiosyncratic, slow-burn actors who don't appear to be going anywhere until the evidence racks up, role by role. A face and voice that have been taking shape somewhere else and now come looming out of the mist, logical and solid, like the soldier on the billboard.
There is a great deal of time to contemplate the phenomenon of Daniel Craig - his solid body of work, his solid body - while I am marooned in a dressing room at Pinewood at the mercy of his production schedule. He is cavorting with Angelina Jolie, the Lara Croft heroine, in Hollywood's adaptation of the video game Tomb Raider, so it is understandable that I am left to inspect the crumbs on the carpet and to wonder who last used the bathroom.
After about an hour and a half, there is a doomcrack knock at the door and Craig bursts in, full of apologies. He extends a damp hand. His hair is wet and spiky and he is wearing a blue towelling dressing gown with a hood. His see-through eyes are transfixing. He has to return to the set immediately, he blusters. "Maybe I'll get 10 minutes later. If anything changes, I'll send word." In a cloud of droplets, he is gone.
Word does not come. Craig reappears in person half an hour later, still looking as though he has just got out of the shower, still breathless and apologetic. He's finding this action-movie stuff "mindblowing" - worlds away from anything he has done before, from Guy Crouchback, from soldierly reticence and understatement.
"The big sets take 10 minutes to reset every time you do a take. You have to do them over and over and over again. You have to keep yourself sane."
I tell him about the man on the ladder, pasting his features on to a billboard the size of a double bed. Thousands of other men with long brushes are doing the same in locations all over the country. His giant face will confront him on the road home to the Wirral, reminding him he's on the cusp, as they say in the business, of something big. He's not impressed. "Weird, isn't it?" But not nearly so weird, he suggests, as rushing in and out of a dressing room in towels, talking about yourself and then having to read it in a newspaper. He reads stuff about himself "really quickly," shivers with distaste, and then throws it away.
Craig gives a snuffly, genuine sort of chuckle. It's a pity he can't relax with a cigarette and a drink and stop wondering whether he's going to sound like an actorly brat. At one point, he catches himself using the phrase "emotionally vulnerable" and withdraws it with a shudder.
He says he jibbed at playing Guy Crouchback, "because I'd never really played posh before. I didn't know if I could do it justice. If I could bring a reality to this person without putting on a silly accent." So although he talks "commarndo" instead of "commando" and "barth" instead of "bath", this is no plum-eating role of the Brideshead type.
Craig was brought up on Merseyside. His mother is a teacher, so he supposes that must make him middle class. Although there is hardly any trace of Liverpool in his voice, he doesn't trust himself as a posho. "I'm not scared of it, but Evelyn Waugh was very particular about his class system. That's what he lived for. The joke was that he was middle class himself, aspiring to be upper class. When I read that, I thought: well, that's quite cool; that's OK."
Although he has done his bit to project the madness of war (with his friend William Boyd in "The Trench," now in "Sword of Honour"), Craig sounds fed up with the British obsession with reliving this century's two great bloodbaths. "I wish we'd get over it," he says. "I really do. We do seem to fight it every night on television."
The story of Crouchback's gradually corroding ideals suits Craig's sceptical cast of mind rather well. With great delicacy and remarkably few words, he portrays an Englishman's search for honour through joining a just war against the forces of evil. "But there's no honour in war or death. His ideals are completely compromised, shattered by the end."
Craig hates to be thought too studious. He didn't want to put an accent on "because it would be a study of something" and he doesn't think much of my tidy suggestion that his character is redeemed at the end. "I don't care if there's no redemption," he says. "That's not why I do something, to make him look good at the end."
Compliments make him prickly and are best left unsaid. There's a typical Waugh scene early on where Crouchback's wayward ex-wife (Megan Dodds) accuses him of trying to seduce her only because in the eyes of the Roman Catholic church they are still married and she is the one woman with whom he can have conscience-free sex. Craig's wounded response is almost entirely done with his facial muscles. It is powerful stuff.
"God, I don't know, really," he says, running his hands despairingly through his hair as if he's just heard bad news. "I don't think about making something powerful. I'm just trying to get at the reality of it - if there is a reality."
Craig left school at 16 and came to London to join the National Youth Theatre. Acting was all he ever wanted to do, from the age of six, but romanticise his story at your peril. He had a happy childhood: it wasn't teenage rebellion; he wasn't driven. "My parents just wanted me to be happy, like parents do. It was no big deal. It wasn't: Oh my God, he's going to become an actor."
He responds irritably to imagined cliches. "Driven at 17? Some 17-year-olds may be driven but I certainly wasn't. I was just like everybody else, living day to day, getting on with it."
Until he got into drama school, he worked in restaurant kitchens and slept on friends' floors. He's never had a career plan, just a series of small lucky breaks leading to bigger lucky breaks, leading to the sudden realisation, after "Our Friends," that he had the power to say no to things. "And that's what you've got to do. You've got to hang on and wait."
Basic questions about his background and family life are treated like hand grenades. "I can't particularly trust myself about what I'll say so I don't say much. There's no reason for my mother or my father [long separated] to be involved in any way." So the details remain sketchy: a failure at school; an early marriage; the birth of a daughter, now eight, who lives with his ex-wife in west London; a German girlfriend - actress Heike Makatsch; a rented flat; a certain hopelessness with money. "The money I was making at 22 disappeared - and it's still disappearing. The more you have, the more you spend. I have no idea where it goes."
He wishes his education had been deeper but must realise it no longer matters. "I can't really write and that bothers me. I didn't acquire that essay thing. I just cannot sit down and write even half a page."
At school, he approached Shakespeare as if reading a foreign language, with fear and loathing, and prefers not to think about acting it. "I would probably, deep down inside, egowise, love to do it. But with Shakespeare, you've got to leave your ego at the door and that's sort of scary."
He's so distrustful of the normal credentials and trappings of actorliness ("poncing around on stage" as the people he grew up with called it) that you wonder if this isn't an act in itself. But accuse him of not caring and it all falls away. "I'm not at all scathing really," he says, "because I love it. It's my life. Maybe it's too much of my life, but that's the way it is. I just love doing it." Why couldn't he say that before?
Источник: Bluematia

I agree with GG. This writer Elizabeth Grice seems to have ferreted out the basic Daniel Craig - the real DC. And if this is DC at age 32, he is the same now - maybe more polished and wiser from the past 3 years' experiences, especially - but basically the same man, don't you think?

From all that we've read written about him, the insightful tidbits add up to what Elizabeth Grice expresses here. Or, maybe it's my wishful thinking that he's this down-to-earth and honest about himself, to himself.

[redluna]

Thanks so much Cornell for bringing this back....never read it before. It is really realy great!!!!

[Lu]

Wow, GG and everyone, thanks so much for all this. Amazing things I have not seen before. I too was fascinated to hear him talking about writing, about scripts and the hand he has in making movies into what they are. I too was flabbergasted to hear him say he can't write but he does so many other things so well, we'll forgive him

So much to read, but well worth the time!!

Here is the one thing though that I just always struggle with...

How do you feel being a sex symbol?
Daniel Craig: As far as I'm concerned, the sexiness, the sex symbol, it's not a consideration. I didn't go out to play sexy in this film. It's nice...I don't know, I'm embarrassed, I don't know what to say...

It is so strange how he swears up and down that he's NOT a sex symbol, he DOESN'T think about it, he's embarrassed by the attention, blah blah blah...and yet he so clearly flaunts it in his films. He admits himself that he takes off his clothes in all his films, he says this...
(laughs) have you seen my other movies? Self-conscious doesn't really come into it. No.

Even recently he said (bragged) to Ann Curry about getting naked in all his movies also...

so he's really almost an exhibitionist I think, and clearly sets himself forward as a very sexy person just from the roles he chooses if nothing else...so WHY does he constantly shy away and act pained when people say, Oh, you're sexy????? It's almost like, disingenuous in a way. Why does he do that? Anyone have any theories?

[cornell01]

Here is the one thing though that I just always struggle with...

How do you feel being a sex symbol?
Daniel Craig: As far as I'm concerned, the sexiness, the sex symbol, it's not a consideration. I didn't go out to play sexy in this film. It's nice...I don't know, I'm embarrassed, I don't know what to say...

It is so strange how he swears up and down that he's NOT a sex symbol, he DOESN'T think about it, he's embarrassed by the attention, blah blah blah...and yet he so clearly flaunts it in his films. He admits himself that he takes off his clothes in all his films, he says this...
(laughs) have you seen my other movies? Self-conscious doesn't really come into it. No.

Even recently he said (bragged) to Ann Curry about getting naked in all his movies also...

so he's really almost an exhibitionist I think, and clearly sets himself forward as a very sexy person just from the roles he chooses if nothing else...so WHY does he constantly shy away and act pained when people say, Oh, you're sexy????? It's almost like, disingenuous in a way. Why does he do that? Anyone have any theories?

I know what you mean. There seems to be a disconnect between what he does in films, like taking his "kit" off, and what he says about being embarrassed about the attention, etc.

Do you think it has something to do with what he also said to Ann Curry - something about "separating what I do from what I am."

Can an actor really lose himself, bury himself so deeply into a role that he can convincingly act, do, be - something he is not? Actually I do remember one writer saying something about not realizing that he had seen DC in movie roles because DC is such a chameleon.

[sharmaine]

I do not believe that he is embarassed by his sex scenes - more about the idea of having to talk about them. I think that he takes his craft so seriously and is intent on his portrayals - therefore his statement once about preparing for his scene with Ann Reid in The Mother - both of them admitted that they had to come to terms with it and Daniel basically convinced himself that as an actor - he shouldn't have a problem with it......this verifies that he enjoys these sort of challenges and what compels him to do what he does.

It would not be so surprising to find out that he's a pretty reserved person in real life and that his real skill is how he is able to change himself in front of a camera....separating who he really is to the character he is playing.

The only thing that I find even more interesting is how much sensuality he emits without even saying anything - simply from the look of his eyes or his gait. He is entirely aware of how he poses and probably snickers at all the controversy that follows, chuckling to himself - Ah....that's exactly what I expected them to do.

The man exudes charisma but doesn't spend time thinking about how or why and even less exhuberance in trying to explain it. Besides, what is a person to do when confronted with such a question? Oh yeah....I know I'm sexy, I can't help myself....blah blah blah.....Suffice it to say - his denial is as frustrating and marketable as much as it is attractive.

[StarryDannyFan]

Thanks for that article... it is a nice article... shows the old Daniel... not the new Daniel who is very protective....it even mentions Some Voices.. Thanks again!

StarryDannyFan xx