'I CAN'T really remember what the first James Bond movie I saw was," says Marc Forster, who has been chosen to direct the next celluloid outing for Ian Fleming's secret agent, currently known by its working title, Bond 22.
"It must have been in the mid-1980s, because there was no television in my house, and I didn't see many movies until then. Roger Moore was in it, I think."
But of more imminent concern to Forster, below right, is The Kite Runner, an adaptation of
Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel about Afghanistan. "The Kite Runner was such a hard film to make, emotionally and physically," Forster says. "We were filming in a very remote part of western China, doing everything through translators because there were four languages – English, Mandarin and two Afghan languages, Dari and a little Pashto. We were so far away from everything that there were constant delays in getting film stock and even food. And we were at extremely high altitudes, sleeping in yurts; it got very cold at night."
The problems didn't end with the shooting. Fears for the safety of the Afghan child actors involved in a pivotal rape scene forced the postponement of the film's opening until the boys could be moved from Kabul. (They were, as of last week, settled in the United Arab Emirates.)
Forster (Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland) may be one of the few available movie directors to whom the complex logistics of a James Bond picture could seem like a relief. He received a new draft of the screenplay for Bond 22 from Paul Haggis, two hours before the writers' strike, and says: "It's a script I can shoot."
The ability to generate suspense from some of the more aberrant emotional states may serve him well in his new assignment, because Bond, as played in his recent incarnation by Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, seems, Forster says, "very isolated, a man damaged in some way".
Craig's Bond felt to him like "a completely new interpretation of the character", he says. "This James Bond is darker, more tormented. He's humanised, in a sense. In a way the most interesting place for a James Bond movie to go is inward – deeper into Bond himself."
When he was offered the job, Forster says: "I had to think hard about whether I wanted to do it. I'm not sure I could have found a way into Bond before Daniel Craig reinvented him." But his intuition told him to accept the challenge, the kind of intuition that has resulted in a varied filmography and is something he doesn't fully understand.
"I just get a feeling about something," he says. "With The Kite Runner the story moved me, and I wasn't sure exactly why. The main character's father wants him to be a doctor, and the father dies of cancer. And it wasn't until I saw the movie that I realised that my father wanted me to be a doctor and died of cancer. Honestly, it didn't occur to me until I was finished, but it must have had some effect."
The Kite Runner is on release from December 26
