HOWZAT

Quantum has a tenuous link to the canon, inspired by a short story in Fleming’s 1960 compendium For Your Eyes Only. Unrelated to the world of espionage, it refers to a dinner-party conversation Bond has, reflecting on relationships. The quantum is a mathematical formula for love. “There’s this beautiful excerpt,” Forster says, rummaging around on his desk before realising he’s left it at home. “When you think about Ian Fleming, you don’t really think of him in a literary sense, but he was such a good writer.”

For a film based around a character who has bedded two women per picture for the past 46 years (and the first one always dies — will they never learn?), this seems a remarkably sentimental appraisal. Forster also suggests that in these times of single-parent families and broken homes, Bond can be some sort of heroic role model. He’s a cold-blooded assassin, I say. “I think there are so many abstract things about human existence,” he ponders. But then Forster is inclined towards the touchy-feely — a fan of the oft-maligned On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the only one in which 007 ever blubs, after Diana Rigg takes a bullet. “In Casino Royale, Bond lost someone he loves [Vesper Lynd], but at the same time he kills people,” Forster says. “That’s very interesting psychologically, because someone like that can’t be at ease with themselves. They must constantly be haunted.”

Forster has had something of a Bondian youth himself. He was born in Germany, but his family fled to Switzerland after threats from the Baader-Meinhof group in the mid-1970s. (“How do you know that?” he asks.) His father’s pharmaceutical company, he explains, was bought out by Pfizer, and when the value of his father’s stock option was published — “It was an enormous amount of money” — the self-styled communist guerrillas issued kidnap threats against the Forster children. “I was very little at the time,” he recalls. “My two older brothers were brought to school with a police escort.”

Though Forster Sr later lost his money, the family “grew up very spoilt and wealthy”. But that replacement of parental love with material possession gives Forster a unique handle on Bond, he says — the man denied love as a child and who now can’t quite fathom it. “That’s why he always sleeps with women, but can’t find a relationship, because he doesn’t love himself,” Forster says. “And you can’t love yourself, because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to kill without a conscience.”

In Bond’s sights this time is another Doctor Evil, but the villains have changed, Forster says: “It’s not like it was during the cold war, good and bad. The lines are much more blurred.” In any case, Greene isn’t the real enemy. Neither was the terrorist banker in Casino Royale. For, in the final hours of Pierce Brosnan’s watch, a new nemesis was looming — a fugitive CIA operative with a case of amnesia who seemed intent on dragging the espionage thriller into the post-9/11 world. His name was Bourne, Jason Bourne, and it is the phenomenal success of this rival series that has largely been responsible for Bond being retooled as down and dirty.

Mention Bourne to the Bond people and it gives them the jitters. They are paranoid about a possible fourth Bourne outing.

“It always comes up, this comparison,” Forster prickles. “I feel there’s a huge difference — it’s like apples and oranges.” Fortunately, he’s not one to go too far down that road. “Stylistically alone, Bond should never be in the Bourne vein.” For, while he has seen off all comers, from Harry Palmer to Austin Powers, the great tragedy of Bond is that when he does try to get “realistic”, bothering himself with quotidian security matters, he’s nothing more than an episode of Spooks or, worse, The Living Daylights. “Bond has a different kind of quality,” Forster agrees. “He can still transport you.”

You can argue until your tears turn to blood about Bond’s relevance. You can mull over his role post-cold war. But that misses the point. For Bond never fought the Soviets, and will never tackle Al-Qaeda. His real enemies are fantasy proxies, Smersh and Spectre; evil scientists in nifty subaquatic domains or with death factories at the bottom of volcanoes. He kept the British end up against lesbo-sadists with blades in their shoes and bowler-hatted butlers — all but a short step to undoing dress zips with his magnetic watch or “attempting re-entry” with a woman named Dr Goodhead...

Don’t worry, it’ll all Roger up again. As Forster says, each new Bond film has to out-spectacle the previous one, “because you get used to the character, and the actor becomes more familiar and you have to take more risks. It’s hard for any artist or sportsman to keep that same focus, the same grittiness”. Which is why, one day, some idiot in a food hall will be sticking up a toupéed, superannuated Danny Craig.

Forster must get back to his editing.

“I had to get accustomed to the whole product-placement idea, because I never had that on my previous films,” he adds. “But the film turned out really good, and I’m really happy.” Hitchcock, he says, became a pale imitation of himself, ploughing the same furrow, while a variety maestro such as Billy Wilder had greater depth. “That’s why I jump from genre to genre, because I always feel I’m doing something new and fresh. I can always fail, but I don’t try to repeat myself. I felt, with Bond, doing something so completely different after Kite Runner would be refreshing and challenging. That’s how I try not to fall into parody myself.”

Quantum of Solace opens on October 31

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