Watch the Defiance
trailer
You wonder where he finds the stamina. Just a couple of weeks after finishing
the punishing worldwide promotional circus for Quantum of Solace, Daniel
Craig is back in another hotel room, this time in Beverly Hills, banging the
drum for his next film, Defiance. But stamina is not his problem.
As soon as you meet him, it’s blindingly obvious why he was selected to be the
new Bond, the different Bond who would reinvigorate a tired franchise: his
raw energy. Past Bonds were notable for their nonchalance, their irony.
Craig has a kinetic, masculine vitality that, unlike with most actors, is
even more palpable in the flesh than it is on screen. What I find more
surprising, though, is his forceful, if untutored, intelligence, tempered by
a self-deprecating wit.
In Defiance, Craig is transformed from the relentless, even humourless, action
hero Bond has become into Tuvia Bielski, a real-life, flesh-and-blood action
hero: hard-drinking, hard-loving, the leader of a band of Jewish partisans
who held their own against the Germans in the forests of Belarus during the
second world war. The film, based on an extraordinary true story, co-stars
Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell as two of the other Bielski brothers, who were
farmers before the war. By refusing to surrender and by waging an often
brutal three-year guerrilla campaign against the Nazis, the Bielskis managed
to keep more than 1,200 Jews alive deep in the forests of Belarus. It was as
astonishing a feat of endurance as anything that happened during the war,
yet it remained essentially unknown until 1993, when the book Defiance: The
Bielski Partisans, written by Nechama Tec, was published. Only now, with the
release of the film version, directed by Ed Zwick (Blood Diamond, The Last
Samurai), is the story becoming widely known.
“Well, the big story is the obvious one: that there was total annihilation of
the Jewish population in Europe,” Craig says, explaining why it took so long
for the facts behind Defiance to come to light, mainly because of the
reluctance of those who took part in it to talk until many years later. “So,
in a way, this is a small story about a relatively small number of people
who resisted. But there was also survivor guilt. And they did bad things to
survive – though that makes for an interesting moral argument.”
The film highlights the intense differences between Tuvia, the leader of the
Bielskiotriad, and his brother Zus, played by Schreiber, over tactics and
morality. Zus favoured retribution, not only against the Nazis, but against
the locals who sided with them. Tuvia believed they needed to survive with
their morality intact. “We may be hunted like animals,” he declares in the
film, “but we will not become like animals.”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Craig says. “What’s worth fighting for? What
I find fascinating was that this normal man, a farmer, was thrust into the
role of leadership and somehow figured out these great moral questions. That
really made the story interesting for me.”
I ask whether Craig decided to do Defiance because the part offered the
opportunity to show a more sympathetic side of himself than Bond has become.
“No, it’s always, ‘Does this story work?’ Everything falls into place around
that. And, really, I try to keep it as instinctual as possible, because if
you start thinking, ‘I must do a romantic comedy now, because I’ve just done
a psychotic’, you’re stuffed. It would seem the antithesis of art.”
At the same time, from quite early in his career, Craig, who has played
everything from a gangster, in Layer Cake, to a poet, in Sylvia, has tried
to make sure he isn’t typecast. “The first time I came to LA, in the early
1990s, all the jobs I seemed to be going up for were the Nazi or the thug,
the bad guy,” he says. “And I remember sitting in a casting and looking
around at these actors, all of whom were there to play the bad guy, and I
thought, ‘I don’t want to be here. This is not who I want to play.’ You
know, on paper, that it’s a career, you’ll make a living, but I knew I
didn’t want to be typecast then. I wanted to be able to play anything.”
Even though Bond has made Craig, at 40, the most famous Englishman after David
Beckham, and he’s on the way to becoming a very rich man, he says he tries
not to think of what he does as a business, but to keep in mind what
inspired him to become an actor: “I can remember wanting to act as far back
as I can remember.” His mother, an art teacher, used to take him to the
theatre in Liverpool, where they lived. “I was just amazed that one minute
people were on stage, then they would come off and be completely different,”
he says. “It was magic. And it obviously had a deep, deep effect on me.
“I was always impressed by loud people, too, which is a bad thing to be
impressed by, because most actors are drunks, and, as the evening goes on,
they get louder and more entertaining - well, hopefully more entertaining.”
Acting offered Craig, who left school at 16, a way out - out of Liverpool and
out of the low expectations a lot of people, perhaps even he, had of him.
“Liverpool at that time was going through a depression: it was just
horrendous,” he recalls. “I was failing miserably at school, and my mother
said, ‘Well, I know you want to act, so get out and do it.’ It was a gentle
but firm push. She also said, ‘If you want to act, go to London.’ ” Craig
studied first at the National Youth Theatre, then at the Guildhall School of
Music & Drama, at the same time as Ewan McGregor and Joseph Fiennes,
graduating in 1991. “And it all kind of worked out,” he says wryly. “My
mother is very, very relieved.”
Part of the reason for his ebullience when I meet him may be that he has just
been told Quantum of Solace has topped $500m in worldwide box-office sales.
“Although I wouldn’t know $500m if it sat on my face,” he says. “But it
would probably be quite nice if it sat on my face. I know that, when it
comes down to it, these films are about box office, but the moment I start
thinking about the figures, I’ll be stuffed – though maybe I won’t be saying
that in a year’s time, when I’ve spent everything.”
Craig hardly needs reminding about the vitriolic reaction of die-hard fans to
the news that he had been chosen as the sixth actor to play Bond. “My God,
don’t the producers have any brains?” one fan asked in a typical internet
posting. “Bond must be tall, dark and handsome, or at least two of the
three, and he isn’t even one.” Craig admits it got to him at the time, but,
after all the doubts, he says the success of Quantum is even more satisfying
than Casino Royale’s was. That is mainly because he was more involved than
he has acknowledged in the development of the character and story. With
Quantum, he took full ownership of Bond.
“The first film was a huge punt, although I think if it had failed miserably,
I could have walked away with my head held high and said, ‘Well, I gave it a
go.’ But the fact was that it wasn’t. It was a success, and in a way that
nobody could have predicted. Quantum was about keeping it interesting,
relevant, and the only way I could think about doing that was just to throw
myself headlong into it. So I know the work we put in. We didn’t have a
complete script, so Marc [the director, Marc Forster] and I had to batter it
into shape, to find the story we wanted to tell.”
Craig isn’t bothered that Quantum has been criticised for being too dark.
“Well, I nicked a lot of the ideas about who Bond is from Ian Fleming,” he
says. “But the point is, we did the movie we had to do to finish the story
off, and comedy and lightness weren’t relevant. This was a story about
loyalty, about friendship, about who you can trust. Gag-writing wasn’t at
the top of the list.” Looking forward, he says that having finished the
story they began with Casino Royale, everything will be up for grabs in the
next film - although nobody has started working on it yet - and the tone
could be completely different.
“I love the idea of putting Moneypenny in the film,” he says, to my surprise.
“I’m dead keen to do it. And Q.” Moneypenny, to those few who may not have
seen earlier Bond films, is the secretary who is always flirting with Bond,
Q the Secret Service boffin who equips him with the latest spy gadgets. “But
I work from the premise that there are millions and millions of people out
there who never saw one of the earlier Bond movies. So they don’t understand
the martini gag. Or the Moneypenny gag, which is a gag - it had ceased to be
a character. So, let’s find out who she is. We can have fun doing that. And,
don’t get me wrong, I’m up for a submarine base, as long as the gag works.
The problem is that Austin Powers screwed everything up. He exploded the
genre. Did I just say that? I did.”
As satisfying as the success is, Craig admits he still hasn’t fully come to
terms with how much Bond has changed his life, although he insists that the
people closest to him, including his long-term girlfriend, the producer
Satsuki Mitchell, and Ella, his 16-year-old daughter, treat him as they ever
did.
“I’m in denial about it, but it has changed everything for me,” he says. “Life
just got flipped on its head. All of a sudden, everybody recognised me. I
can’t go out without being recognised. Simply put, it’s a pain in the ass.
You can’t have the sort of spontaneity of saying, ‘Let’s go to the pub.’
People say, ‘You’re an actor. Isn’t that what you do?’ But I don’t do it to
be recognised. I do it because I get a kick out of doing it. I’m not
moaning, but I have had to reassess the way I look at the world, the way I
live my life. I knew I would, I just didn’t have a plan for it.”
Defiance opens on Friday
