Quantum of Solace director wanted to quit over writer’s strike

It’s widely agreed that ‘Quantum of Solace,’ Daniel Craig’s second outing as James Bond, isn’t a particular series highlight.

The 22nd entry in the long-running spy franchise was one among many movies and TV shows to have been hurt by the Writer’s Guild of America strike of 2007, and started production without a fully finished script, with no revisions allowed by WGA rules.

Speaking to Collider, the film’s director Marc Forster admits that he wasn’t happy working under those conditions – and contemplated quitting altogether.

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“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’…”

Forster explains, “So ultimately I said ‘Okay’… 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 (laughs). To disguise it.”

The ‘Monster’s Ball’ and ‘Finding Neverland’ director admits he felt “tremendous pressure” to follow up ‘Casino Royale,’ which he calls “the best Bond movie in a long time.” Time constraints were also a source of concern: “we only had five or six weeks to cut the movie once we finished principal photography.”

“My nightmare was if the strike keeps going, we don’t have a completed story, plus we have a release date, plus we have five weeks to cut it, plus if all of this doesn’t work the film still comes out and you’re the person responsible for it.

“So I thought, ‘Okay, am I going to work after this?’”

Still, the director concludes, “in the end I’m pretty happy with the film, and 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.”

Sadly for Forster, ‘Quantum of Solace’ wasn’t his last high profile troubled production, as he followed it up with ‘World War Z.’

The director’s latest movie ‘All I See Is You’ premiered earlier this month at Toronto International Film Festival.

Picture Credit: MGM-UA/Sony, WENN