It’s pretty commonly accepted that out of Daniel Craig’s four 007 films, Quantum of Solace is the least liked. It was pretty much a big mess with a threadbare plot and little of the tone of the beloved spy franchise.
While promoting his latest film All I See Is You, director Marc Forster spoke about the film’s production and admitted he wanted to quit the project due to the writer’s strike taking place at the same time.
He said: ‘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’.
‘So ultimately I said ‘Okay’. The idea was to make a follow-up to Casino Royale and 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. To disguise it.’
It’s a fairly apt description of what the film essentially ended up being.
Forster also pointed out that following up the hit success of Casino Royale, and having no source material, was a challenge: ‘Then ultimately you have a follow-up 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.’
The director said he was ‘pretty happy’ with the final result: ‘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.’
