Skyfall is 'totally original story'

In an exclusive interview given to the London weekly listings magazine 'Time Out' for December 8-14, designed to help publicise 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo', James Bond star Daniel Craig offered some further thoughts on the new 007 adventure 'Skyfall', and again praised the director Sam Mendes.

Reflecting on his original decision to accept the role of 007, Craig said the deciding factor for him doing 'Casino Royale' was the script. Then, turning to the new 'Skyfall' script, Craig added: 'And I think this one is better. I really do. It's a totally original story. I read it and it just works as a story. It sounds like a simplistic thing to say, but you read it and you go: "Oh yeah, I get that, yeah, and oh, yes, yes, okay", and that's unusual'.

Asked about his second Bond movie 'Quantum of Solace', Craig said he and the director (Marc Forster) had the 'bare bones of a script', but then there was the Hollywood writer's strike, 'and there was nothing we could do'. Craig revealed that he tried to rewrite some scenes himself - 'and a writer I am not'.  He and Forster also had to try and work on the scenes together. 'We were stuffed. We got away with it, but only just. It was never meant to be as much of a sequel as it was, but it ended up being a sequel, starting where the last one finished'.

When asked whether he had anything to do with getting Sam Mendes on board as director for 'Skyfall', Craig responded: 'I did, yes, I did. He's English, he's Cambridge-educated, he's smart. He's lived with Bond all his life, he grew up with Bond the way I did. We grew up at exactly the same time, and I said to him, "We have to do this together, we have exactly the same reference points, we both like the same Bond movies and we both like the same bits in the same Bond movies we like". We sat down and just rabbited for hours about "Live and Let Die" or "From Russia With Love", and talked about little scenes that we knew from them. That's how we started talking about it. That's what we tried to instill in the script. He's been working his arse off to tie all these things together so they make sense - in a Bond way'.

Craig also praised the management skills of Mendes as a director, together with the abilities of Roger Deakins as director of photography, and added: 'The air is rare, and we've had the chance to employ some brilliant people. Win or lose, we've done the best we can because we've got the right people in the job'.