Bond means business SPECTRE
"the point is to make it better than skyfall"
“all i wanted to do was treat this like an acting job”
daniel craig
had huge expectation and a punishing turnaround date placed on it. After the disappointment of Quantum Of Solace, 2012’s
Skyfall was something of a stealth hit, both critically (it won two Oscars, two BAFTAs and was adored by reviewers) and commercially (breaking box-office records for Bond). It globally reiginited fans’ passion for 007 and set the bar sky-high for the 50-year-old franchise.
It’s 9 July and the premiere of SPECTRE has been announced for 26 October, leaving just 16 weeks to get the picture in the can. But what’s in that can? Is Craig downing drinking to celebrate? Does he know he’s got another Skyfall?
“Hubris is the enemy of filmmaking. To say ‘yeah, we’ve got a movie’ would just be stupid of me,” says Craig, those famous blue eyes growing serious. “We did everything we could. I think we put the money in the right place. We just tried to make it better – not better than Skyfall, but every day we tried to make it better.” But surely, there must have been a certain amount of pressure to repeat Skyfall’s success? “At the beginning, but then after a while, you’re just like: what do you do? You can’t kind of say, ‘Ooh, you’ve got to make it better than the other one.’ I think if you think about that all the time, then… All I wanted to do was treat this like an acting job.”
Being wary of promising too much or indeed giving anything away (more of which later) is a code of honour among the SPECTRE team – seemingly fully aware of the build ’em up, knock ’em down school of audience reaction. Only producer Michael G. Wilson will be drawn to declare that we can expect “an excellent film”. For director Sam Mendes, holed up in his London editing suite in Soho a few weeks later, there’s more cautionary optimism.
“I’m excited. I feel a real sense of achievement,” he ponders over a well-deserved cup of tea while taking a break. Though right in the belly of the beast of editing his film and exhausted (“I’m in the horror stage, as you put it”), Mendes is centred and eloquent. “We’ve done what we set out to do,” he says. “That’s not to say everyone will love it or it will succeed on every level, but we came away feeling good. The only point of doing a movie – this next movie – is to try to make it better than the last one.” Bigger and better then… “‘Big’ is a dangerous word,” he caveats. “You get very easily caught up with talking about things just in terms of scale. To me, it’s not about scale. It’s entirely about involvement in character. You can see the biggest action you’ve ever seen, but if you’re not engaged, it’s like nothing’s happened.”
Which was exactly what Mendes brought to Skyfall when he took one of the series’ most beloved characters, Judi Dench’s ‘M’, and spectacularly killed her off. Having enjoyed the new vulnerability seen in Bond in Craig’s game-changer debut, 2006’s Casino Royale, Mendes was keen to keep the emotional stakes high for 007. Though he admits his appointment as director was received with some scepticism (“I detected an ambivalence about, ‘Well, can he do it? Can he do action? Is he going to make