Daniel Craig: “On Quantum, we were f*cked.”

Looks like you can add Daniel Craig to the list of people who thought Quantum of Solace sucked, meaning he must’ve seen it.

From a recent interview in Time Out London:

It seems that the script is sometimes an after-thought on huge productions.

‘Yes and you swear that you’ll never get involved with sh*t like that, and it happens. On “Quantum”, we were f*cked. We had the bare bones of a script and then there was a writers’ strike and there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, “Never again”, but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes – and a writer I am not.’

You had to rewrite scenes yourself?

‘Me and the director [Marc Forster] were the ones allowed to do it. The rules were that you couldn’t employ anyone as a writer, but the actor and director could work on scenes together. We were stuffed. We got away with it, but only just. It was never meant to be as much of a sequel as it was, but it ended up being a sequel, starting where the last one finished.’

I tend to find it refreshing when actors admit certain movies they were in sucked, but the last time someone blamed the writer’s strike for a movie sucking it was Michael Bay on Transformers 2, and then he followed it up Transformers 3, which was just as sucky except for one scene with wingsuits, which doesn’t exactly seem like something you need Charlie Kaufman for. But it’s a lot easier to believe a movie will be better than its predecessor when the director is Oscar-winner Sam Mendes than it is when it’s Michael Bay, who won’t eat pancakes unless his personal chef makes them in the shape of explosions.

[on Mendes]

‘He’s English, he’s Cambridge-educated, he’s smart. He’s lived with Bond all his life, he grew up with Bond the way I did. We grew up at exactly the same time, and I said to him, “We have to do this together, we have exactly the same reference points, we both like the same Bond movies and we both like the same bits in the same Bond movies we like.” We sat down and we just rabbited for hours about “Live and Let Die” or “From Russia with Love”, and talked about little scenes that we knew from them. That’s how we started talking about it. That’s what we tried to instill in the script. He’s been working his arse off to tie all these things together so they make sense – in a Bond way.’

I don’t know what the hell “rabbited” means, and out of context, my first instinct would be “had sex really fast,” like rabbits and I do. I looked it up on Urban Dictionary, and the first definition was for the rabbit vibrator. Either way, Daniel Craig and Sam Mendes “rabbiting for hours” is a funny image.

Speaking of Brit slang, here’s what Craig had to say about the accents in Dragon Tattoo:

Your character is Swedish, it’s set in Sweden, but you speak English with no accent. Was there a debate behind that?

Some people in the film have accents and some don’t. I don’t. I had a long conversation with David about it and said that a lot of Scandinavians speak English perfectly. I’m one of those guys. We’ve got Danish people, Swedish people, English people, American people. The only thing that matters, as far as I’m concerned, is that no one sounds American. We sound as European as possible. We’re all speaking one common language and that happens to be English. I didn’t want an accent to get in the way, and for me it would. Salander has no formal education and she has a street accent, it’s quite specific.

Yeah, God forbid anyone sound American, when you just said half a sentence ago that there were Americans in it. Also, it must be convenient for you Brits to just decide to be ‘European’ whenever it suits you. You’re making an American movie with an American director for the American market because Americans are too dumb to read subtitles, don’t act like you not deigning to speak coarse American-talk was borne out of some kind of artistic integrity. You know, if you ask me, these dirty limeys and their weird mouths can go rabbit themselves.

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