Why bother actually saying it when the press are going to write that anyway? It’ll be the first line of his obituary I’m sure.
After a day with 7th graders, I’d rather take a glass and slit my wrists than face another day with 7th graders, so I understand how Craig must feel after a long, physically grueling shoot. Unlike the press, I can let go of a line like that, give the speaker a well-deserved break and look forward to his next contribution.
If, on the other hand, he was determined to make several outrageous, controversial, contradictory, offensive, ignorant and dishonest statements all day every day, I wouldn’t feel he deserves a break.
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As far as one is able to judge from what little colleagues with actual experience let us know Craig seems to be a comparatively civil and easygoing character. In a comparatively demanding role as promoting assignments go. There’s a vast number of anecdotes from the business showing how it’s actually not so seldom people blow their fuses - only some cases stick more in our minds than others. It was after all a rather honest thing he said, and one generations of actors could heartily agree with, too.
Let’s face it, the usual promo talk is mindnumbingly trite, soundbites from the PR department which seldom come close to a real conversation about the work and its merits - or lack of.
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Honestly, I applaud him for his candour, dry wit, whatever prompted those words. It made me laugh when I first read it and I like even more as Bond for it.
Does anyone really take such things seriously? If so then with respect I suggest putting such things in perspective.
He’s a great Bond and until he turns in a poor performance then there’s really no reason to question his attitude. Leave a man something he can call his own!
There’s a bit of it left still: Blades, Graves being a national hero but secretly he’s an agent of an enemy foreign power; the giant space machine he’s constructed to help England/the world is actually a way of destroying it. And of course Frost was originally to be called Gala Brand. I think she was quite late in the day: there are props (medical reports etc.) with the Brand name on them.
If you thought that was an eyeopener, wait until someone points out that Licence To Kill is a partial adaptation of Man With the Golden Gun! 
[quote=“mtm, post:2414, topic:33”]
…wait until someone points out that Licence To Kill is a partial adaptation of Man With the Golden Gun! [/quote]
…and Othello.
With Bond as Iago, this occurred to me too.
That’s kind of the same bit of Golden Gun it uses: Bond as the right hand man to the villain putting the pigeons among his camp. It always strikes me that although I don’t rate it as one of the best Bond films, it does have probably one of the best (if not the best) story of all them. It’s written very well with incidents having real consequences later in the film: even the action scenes are actually there to drive the plot forward.
That doesn’t necessarily translate into a great film of course. I’d put Skyfall way above it, and of course the plot to that makes almost no sense at all! 
I always like MGW likening LTK to Yojimbo.
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“See my mule don’t like people laughing. He gets the crazy idea that you’re laughing at him. If you apologise like I know you’re going to, I might convince him that you really didn’t mean it.”
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Reading a new book on the making of “The Lord of the Rings” I find it very interesting that Peter Jackson freely gave second and third unit to other directors. Of course, such a massive endeavor was only possible to finish on time by spreading out the work and responsibilities.
But as I understand, Sam Mendes insisted on filming second unit stuff himself. Which always results in a protracted schedule for principal photography.
On previous Bond films, second unit was taken over by other directors. Granted, this might yield different results. But if it helps to keep the schedule compressed and offer more time for editing, I would hope Danny Boyle will not insist on filming everything. It all comes down to choosing the right second unit crew and communicating through pre-viz what you want.
Maybe Mendes couldn’t find (or was given) a 2nd unit he didn’t trust!?
Either way i applaud him for standing his ground and i’d always prefer to shoot everything/always prefer what i’m watching to have been shot entirely by the director.
Sure he’s gotta perhaps sacrifice elsewhere, but maybe his philosophy is what’s the point of more edit time if what was shot doesn’t work the way i need it to.
In a perfect world i’m sure you’d want it all shot by Mendes too, with plenty of edit time provided. I’m just being unrealistic. But then again if they want better directors this may well be the trend. Personally i’m ok with the director making that decision.
I’m sure they are too given the amount of their crew who work on Nolan’s films which take the same tact. I would’ve thought having a release date set before a single page is written would limit the level to which that could be done, simply for the time constraints, but this crew seem more than able to handle it when asked, so I guess it’s just a directors choice at this point.
Impossible. Mendes would have chosen the 2nd unit director himself and could have/should have communicated everything he wanted to be shot. With previz-tools it would have been storyboarded and the 2nd unit director would have followed that guidance to the letter.
And quite frankly, I do not see the difference. Or even worse: I don’t think the action sequences or the location establishers would look differently with a 2nd unit director. Maybe even better.
Well, we can’t agree on everything, can we 
Personally i think there’s the world of difference in 2nd unit, tending to give films’ set pieces a ‘gloss’ for want of a better word that can often jar with what the director does; hence some Bond movies feel like 2 films cut together - the 'talkie-thriller/drama bits and the big bang whizzy action set-pieces. TWINE is an prime example.
Whatever weaknesses they may have SF and SP seem to me to have a greater consistency of pace and more importantly Tone throughout.
When a director opts to do the action him/herself i see this as a bonus and i’m grateful for their passion for authorship.
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I do get what you mean, the jumps between Apted and Armstrong are very noticeable, as they are between Tamahori and Armstrong to a slightly lesser degree, but I find it’s mostly in the way it was coloured and lit, so very much the work of the DOP - which in the case of Mendes, he had two highly prolific and identifiable DOP where any shot not overseen by them would stick out like a sore thumb - so I’d argue you could keep a second units work in a less jarring way as long the DOP was still managing each and every shot.
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Supposedly Gassner is not returning for production design:
Old Boyle team member Mark Tildesley is set to take over.
It sounds highly plausible, and given BB’s push for allowing directors carte Blanche (within reason) I could definitely believe it. However, how did only a Norwegian James Bond fan site pick up on this? I’ve read other reports from the opening, no others mentioned this (For example - http://www.theedgemarkets.com/article/james-bond-museum) but, like I said, it does sound highly plausible despite its source.
And as long as that DOP is Deakins
I really like Hoytema‘s work - But, yes, Deakins is an industry legend for a reason.