Caveat Emptor Part V: Craig’s ‘kind of secret plan’

SPECTRE poster

The Telegraph, IN AN ESSAY BY ROBBIE COLLIN has some quotes from another interview with 007 star Daniel Craig where the actor describes the “kind of secret plan” he had for the film series after being cast in 2005.

Here’s an excerpt:

I spoke to Craig around three weeks after he’d completed work on SPECTRE, and we discussed the necessity, as he saw it, of harking back to Bond’s past in order to push the franchise forward. (The actor has taken an unusually hands-on approach to all four films to date – influencing characters, shaping plots, and even reworking half-finished dialogue on the Quantum of Solace set during the writers’ strike.)

“I always had a kind of secret plan when I started doing these movies,” he told me. And this was it: by starting with the “stripped-back” script of Casino Royale, he wanted to reintroduce the series’ more familiar elements gradually, in a way that would make sense in a modern-day context – and “do it in as smart a way as possible, so that they’re not obvious”.

Bond fans who recognised the references would be delighted that traditions were being upheld in unexpected ways, while newcomers to the series would just see them as part of the “rich tapestry” of the world of the films.

“And that’s a lot harder to do than people think it is,” he said. “To do it with subtlety and wit and all of those things takes solid, solid work.”

What role, if any, directors (including Casino Royale’s Martin Campbell) ,screenwriters (including Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who’ve worked on all four Craig films to date) or producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson had in the plan were not described in the essay.

Once more, let the buyer beware. Some fans argue Craig likes to have fun with the press. If that’s the case, it’s up to you to decide how much weight to give the actor’s words.

To read the entire essay, which covers quite a bit of ground about the evolution of the series from Pierce Brosnan to Craig, CLICK HERE.