(Note: This article will be appearing in this month's Venice Magazine.)
By Terry Keefe
With Daniel Craig adding a far harder-edge to his new James Bond, it figures that his female counterparts might need to bring the same level of intensity to the story and that’s just what they’ve gotten from Olga Kurylenko, who plays the revenge-driven Camille opposite Craig in the new Bonder, Quantum of Solace. Camille looks great wearing the top fashions, but she will just as easily smash your nose in with the heel of her Prada shoe. And like Craig’s Bond, her character is also considerably better developed than the versions who have come before.
Plotwise, Quantum picks up just one hour after Casino ends, making it the first Bond film in memory to take place in such chronological order. Heartbroken by the death of his beloved Vesper (played in the previous installment by Eva Green), Bond goes on the trail of the mysterious organization, known only as Quantum, who he believes responsible for Vesper’s murder. In Haiti, Bond meets Camille, who has shacked up with a Quantum operative named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), in order to get closer to the Bolivian General Medrano (Joaquin Cosio) who murdered Camille’s family. Camille is on a revenge mission which parallels the one Bond is on, and what forms is a partnership of sorts, with no time for romance. Camille’s character is given almost as much motivation and as many beats as that of Bond, and the climax finds them each fighting their respective foils to the death simultaneously.
Before seeing Quantum of Solace, I wasn’t really familiar with who Olga Kurylenko was, having missed her co-starring role in Hitman earlier in the year. But new billboards have just gone up all over town with her face right next to Craig’s, indicating the confidence that the producers have in her performance. Many of the Bond Girls from the past have sort of disappeared from the public eye relatively quickly once the 007 glow faded, but the career of the Ukraine-born Kurylenko looks to be just getting warmed up.
I just saw you last night in Quantum of Solace, but also the night before, when I went to see Max Payne.
Olga Kurylenko: Did you? I actually haven’t seen that yet. I’ve been so busy with this [indicates the massive press operation]. I’m not in that very long, am I? I get killed pretty early.
But before that happens, you were sort of treated as the second lead, so it was a bit of a surprise to see you get killed off.
Right. I hope people got my performance. I was trying to play her really big and large, because she’s part of this crazy world.
She fit in well. I was sorry to see her go, but in Quantum, your character’s survival skills are a lot better. The first major set piece you’re in is the pretty amazing boat chase in Haiti. The audience I saw this with last night burst out into applause at the end of it.
Really? I’m happy because that one took a long time! I trained every day for six months for this film. Every day I wasn’t on the set, I was training. And before we started shooting, I trained every day for months, four hours a day.
What type of training are we talking about? Was it mostly hand-to-hand combat?
Yeah, four hours of fight training a day, and then I went on to do two hours a day of the skydiving training in the wind tunnel, which I did for a month. The wind tunnel was insane, but it’s also insanely addictive. You’re flying! You do all these tricks – you learn to turn and flip. Then I had to learn to work with guns. To shoot, and aim, and to strip a gun apart, and to put it back together. I really had to know what I was doing.
Did you conquer any fears from the training?
Oh yes [laughs]. Because I don’t like heights too much, but I obviously had to work with heights.
And there’s that scene where you’re nearly pushed off the building.
Yes [laughs], and, believe me, I was looking down and I was like, “Ohhh...” The stunt guys took me up there the evening before we were going to shoot and said that we were going to rehearse and tomorrow we were just going to have to do it. Using a stunt double was not an option. And I overcame my fear on that one and I’m very proud, because I know what it was for me to fight through it. I feel like I can do anything now.
(Olga's Camille is pawned off by Greene (Mathieu Amalric) on a soon-to-be-dead criminal.)
Let’s talk about the audition process.
Well, there were three auditions altogether. I knew that I was going in the right direction after I was called back, but that was all I knew. The last audition was really so intense, because it was when I met Danny for the first time. Then it was three weeks after that I got the call that I had gotten the role, which was on Christmas Day.
This is obviously Daniel’s second time doing a Bond film. Was there any advice that he gave you regarding the shooting of the action scenes?
Not so much as it was always reassuring to look over and see him and know that that the other actor, meaning Daniel, really knew what he was doing in the action scenes. He had been through all the training and had done this already. That helped a lot.
Daniel’s Bond is extremely intense. Is there a moment during the shooting where he just turns that on, or does he walk around like that all day on the set?
Oh, on set he’s Bond [laughs]. Always.
(Daniel Craig and Olga Kurylenko)This is the first Bond film that I can remember where the female lead has a parallel story going on which is almost as important to the film as Bond’s.
I really liked that it was a totally different type of Bond Girl. She’s so strong. I really didn’t want to play the typical girl in these films. I was very excited, because I had seen Casino Royale, and seen that the concept had changed. The Bond Girl could be very interesting. I had so much to do in this film.
But one of those things didn’t involve sleeping with Bond, which is a big change also.
[laughs] I was happy about that, and I think people will be happy about that too. We’ve seen that Bond Girl already. This girl is something new. Something special.
The platonic partnership worked well with Daniel’s character arc, also, because he’s still heartbroken from the last film.
Exactly, that worked perfectly. She’s not into that, but he also isn’t into that either [laughs]. He’s not even thinking about sex, because he’s just lost the woman he loved the most. Obviously, Bond is pretty playful and he’s used women many, many times [laughs]. But what’s great about these new films is that it’s proven that Bond can fall in love.
Did you watch many of the classic Bond films as preparation?
I did. It was more that I had re-watched them, actually, because I had seen most of them. But my favorite of all the previous films would still probably be Casino Royale. It’s great to see the old films, but this series had to evolve. You can’t do the same things over and over again.
Prior to this, Marc Forster would have known more as an actor’s director, rather than a director of huge spectacle. He was an interesting choice.
I’m very glad he was the director because he really brought out the characters. It was something that was needed. It was so great to have someone like him, because you could have had a very impersonal director that only cared about the action. But this movie was also about pain, and love.
Mathieu Amalric is fantastic as the villain, Greene. He’s not a stock character at all. He plays him as charming and very persuasive, and complex, and entirely creepy at the same time.
He is such a versatile villain! And yes, his character is so creepy, but also, he wasn’t obvious about it. It’s subtle. And on the set, he was always in constant research for the character and thinking, “Oh, what am I going to do next?” Every take, he’d try different versions and go for something different. In one scene, he’d do five different takes, with totally different levels, which gave Marc a bunch of choices to work with. A total range of emotion.
(Mathieu Amalric as Dominic Greene.)Did Mathieu at least give you any warning that he’d be playing it differently on a new take?
Yes [laughs]. He’d say, “Hmm, what am I going to do now? I’ve got it. I’m going to do something totally different!” And I’d say, “What?!” and he wouldn’t tell me. But that was very exciting, because he’d surprise me all the time. Stuff that wasn’t in the script. And so, because of that, my performance would change too. And thanks to that, I wasn’t acting anymore. I was living. Living in the moment. It’s all much more real.
I think Mathieu is going to be a big star over here.
I think so too [laughs] except that he doesn’t want that.
Having just come off Quantum, you’re ready to parachute into any action role now it seems. No training necessary.
I am so ready [laughs]. I actually already shot another film after this, in Israel [Editor’s Note: She plays a hitwoman in the film Kirot], and there were some fight scenes for my character. And the stunt guy said, “Oh, well, we have nothing to tell you. You just finished a Bond film.” [laughs]
Quantum of Solace opens everywhere in the United States on November 14th.
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