Before cameras even started rolling, “Quantum Of Solace” already had a big hill to climb, following Daniel Craig‘s first (and arguably still best) outing as James Bond in “Casino Royale.” However, the job was made doubly difficult for director Marc Forster with the 2007/2008 Writers Guild strike, which left the movie without a finished script.
“On ‘Quantum,’ we were fucked,” Craig stated quite candidly in 2011. “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….There was me trying to rewrite scenes – and a writer I am not.’ ”
Now, in a new interview with Collider, Forster shares his experience making the movie, one that was so frazzled, and so strapped for time, that he wanted to bail out.
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“It was tricky because we didn’t have a finished script… Ultimately at that time I wanted to pull out. Ron Howard pulled out of ‘Angels & Demons‘ which Sony was about to do and they sort of shut down, and at the time I thought, ‘Okay maybe I should pull out’ because we didn’t have a finished script. But everybody said, ‘No we need to make a movie, the strike will be over shortly so you can start shooting what we have and then we’ll finish everything else.’ I said ‘Yeah but the time crunch’…,” the director revealed.
Seemingly cornered into making the movie, Forster did his best with the situation saying,“….ultimately I felt like, ‘Okay worst case scenario the strike goes on, I’ll just make it sort of like a ’70s revenge movie; very action driven, lots of cuts to hide that there’s a lot of action and a little less story (laughs). To disguise it.”
However, Forster says that time was stacked against him, and pretty much every part of the production was strained. “….you have a follow-up [to ‘Casino Royale’] with an incomplete script based on no book and you have to deliver. At the same time, we only had five or six weeks to cut the movie once we finished principal photography. You have six weeks to edit before the movie actually then goes into sound and comes out,” he said.
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The result? Well, “Quantum Of Solace” is certainly not the most fondly remembered of the Craig era Bond movies, but given what everyone involved was faced with, Forster is okay with how it all turned out. “But in the end I’m pretty happy with the film, and I must say now eight years after it seems like people have been embracing it more and more. When it came out it was very successful and people seemed to like it, but I think it gained more momentum as time went by,” he said.
Following “Quantum Of Solace,” Forster would make the little-seen “Machine Gun Preacher,” which was then followed by “World War Z.” And that production was so fraught with problems that, in retrospect, ‘Solace’ probably seemed like a breeze….