Thought and Action

Thought and Action:
An Interview with Daniel Craig,
Star of Layer Cake

Though he may not be a household name yet, British stage, television and film star Daniel Craig has a presence that one doesn't easily forget. Whether in meaty roles in small films-- a burglar turned gay consort in Love is the Devil, a womanizing handyman in The Mother - or supporting roles in big films - Paul Newman's murderous son in Road to Perdition, a wily treasure hunter in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - Craig infuses each performance with authority. There are no false notes in the repertoire of this actor who recently was at the center of a media frenzy over who will be the next James Bond. But Craig is too level-headed to be distracted by all that; instead he channels his considerable energies and intelligence into creating intriguing characters, like XXXX, the never named drug-dealing, capitalist anti-hero of Matthew Vaughn's directorial debut, Layer Cake. In person, Craig conveys the same intensity he brings to the screen; during a recent conversation his words and ideas tumbled and swirled so quickly the room around us was practically humming.

ANDREA GRONVALL: You're not even 38 yet, right, and yet you've had quite a career. Do you go by instinct? How much do you rely on the advice of your managers, your agents, friends and family in choosing roles?

DANIEL CRAIG: All of them, really. A lot of it's instinct, but I read scripts, and as I read, I want to know that something's going to change me and affect me and make me do something that I haven't necessarily done before. It genuinely has never really been about the money; I've earned a living, which for an actor to say is usually quite rare. I've had a lot of luck, and I've made some mistakes in my time, but I really believe you've got to keep yourself as busy and as interested as possible in what you do because then you can maintain it. I think as soon as you do decide to take [big] money, that's fine, but you've got to get your priorities right. If it stops you doing other things, then you have to think very carefully about which way you need to go. I suppose what I'm saying is, I just give it as much thought as I can. And it takes me a long time to decide whether I want to do something or not. Or if I do need to make a decision very quickly, I just apply the same rule, namely, will it change me?

AG: What do you mean by mistakes? Projects that turned out to be a waste of your time?

DC: I've done a lot of work to earn money, because I've had to, because I need to pay the rent, and I need to do those things. So they're not mistakes, it's just sometimes I wish they'd disappear. I've been lucky enough that with some success, I've been able to have more choices, so [more often] I do the things I know I should be doing. There's another side to that, which is that if you're in a job, and it's not working in the right way, it's part of your job to make it work in the right way. It would worry me, getting to a stage where you just do job after job after job; you tend to get jaded, and you tend to get lazy. Because some jobs take an effort, and I don't mean effort as in acting, they take effort in management, in encouraging people to do better. I just sort of put a flame under it. You can either lay back and say, well, I'm an actor, I turn up to do my job and go away, or I can get involved, which means you have to go shout, or you're going to have to sit down and have meetings. And I believe that's part of your job, but that's exhausting, and I don't want to do that all the time, because I'm not a producer.

AG: Why did you decide to do Layer Cake?

DC: First and foremost, the script, I promise you, it was in great shape, due to Matthew Vaughn - and obviously J.J. Connolly, who wrote both the book and the script - but Matthew worked with him for a whole year on the script to get it to a shooting state. I'd been offered, and been talked to about doing gangster films, or let's say, crime movies-because I'd say this is more of a crime film than it is a gangster movie-and none of them appealed to me, movie scripts with huge amounts of violence in them, with supposedly scary people, but whom I don't find scary. Yes, what they do is horrible-they shoot three people in the first scene, then you're going to start having to pull people's ears off in the sixth scene, or whatever it is, because the escalating violence is sort of what that kind of film is about. What I like about Layer Cake is its intelligent through-line. First of all, I think it's very close to the truth; I think this is what successful drug dealers are like. They don't drive around in flashy cars, they don't show off, they behave very quietly, they get on with their job and they earn lots of money. And it goes up and up and up and up the scale. Secondly - and selfishly - I like the moral aspect of the movie, which is that the violence has consequences, and you feel emotionally involved with the violence. It's not that deep-it's still a piece of entertainment-but you feel that, and so consequently you enjoy the movie more, because that adds to the sense of drama. It grabs you.

AG: It does. The film's conceit of viewing these tiers of criminals as layers on a cake is marvelous; and the food metaphor is apt because the movie is also about the food chain of scary underworld predators. You go through layers in the film to reach Eddie Temple, the Michael Gambon character who's a rich, respectable businessman -- yet he is in a way more evil than anyone else, even though he never pulls a trigger. In a very interesting duality, your character is sort of the mirror image of him. XXXX is someone moving up but trying to get clean, but here's Temple at the top, getting dirtier than before.

DC: Totally. And again, I think that in spite of the fact that it's just a movie, and that's what it is, I do believe it's an accurate portrayal. Temple is a businessman; he owns skyscrapers, he probably has politicians who are friends. He will deal in anything-anything-as long as he makes money.

AG: Because something is a popular entertainment doesn't mean it isn't art, and Layer Cake is very artful-from beginning to end, it's riveting.

DC: I really appreciate that, because I believe in it. I'm very proud of it, strangely enough-because one of your first questions is what makes me choose my jobs - well, I believe this is an art form, and every piece of work you do is political. Whether it's a big blockbuster, or a smaller movie like this, whatever it is, it has a political message to put across. And you should understand that political message, but it shouldn't get in the way of being entertaining, because that's what we do. We entertain, as well as inform. That's the crux of all this, that's the crux of what I get out of it.

AG: What are the press like in your country?

DC: [Smiling] They're wonderful.

AG: The reason I ask is, I want to know how batty the British press has gone in the last few weeks over all this speculation about the new James Bond. Have they made your life miserable?

DC: Well, I've been here [in America], you see. In a way, it's been fortuitous, and I can't knock it, because [the flurry in the press] came out just before I started doing tours around the country with this. And it came out at quite a good time, because of course that meant that probably more people wanted to talk to me than otherwise would have, so at least I can talk about Layer Cake and get that going. There's very little truth in what was said, but I'm down on the list with two or three others who are being considered, but that's as much as I know. It's nice to be on that list, but it's a decision to make down the line; I haven't really given it a great deal of thought. I think - and this is just my opinion - I think the powers that be, whoever they are, have put my name out there, because Pierce [Brosnan] is being mentioned again, just to get a debate going. And I think it's as cynical as that, because people are coming up to me saying, it's on the radio, it's on television, listing my name with other names, sort of asking people to vote.

AG: I do think planting those items in the press is a business decision on a number of levels, including starting a dialogue out there with the public. I also think it's interesting that it happened so soon after MGM was sold to Sony and its consortium. You wonder, is someone trying to prove he or she is being proactive-

DC: Yeah, for sure.

AG: Or is it one of those alpha-dog things, someone trying to show who's in charge?

DC: All of those things. You have to believe that all of those things can happen, because they do. But anyway, Sony couldn't legally get involved in anything with MGM until the sale was tied up a few weeks ago, which is when all this press shit hit the fan. "Ah!" said Doctor Watson.

AG: You're a very intense and physical actor; these two qualities, along with your intelligence, have made your rise in the industry rapid. But you haven't done much comedy. Why not? The scene in Layer Cake where after a violent confrontation with Gene (Colm Meaney) you bounce like a rubber ball before hitting the floor is hilarious.

DC: I thought I was such a tart doing that, because it's upstaging, which is just awful. See, they're talking in the foreground and I'm just screwing around in the background.

AG: It made the scene.

DC: Well, romantic comedies don't appeal to me, it's as simple as that. My comedic favorites are the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen. The Marx Brothers do something, which Woody Allen did mainly in his earlier movies, which is set the camera, and it stays set, and you have a stage. Because that's how comedy works; the camera doesn't move in for a close-up of an eyebrow arching, because that's bad comedy. Great comedy is what the Marx Brothers did, because they rehearsed, and they rehearsed, and they rehearsed, and they rehearsed, and they rehearsed. And then they just turned on the camera. I couldn't do that.

AG: Well, rehearsal in film is a luxury.

DC: That's a real luxury. But the Marx Brothers had done their routines on the road, and Woody Allen I think rehearses.

AG: I can picture you in a Woody Allen film.

DC: From your lips to God's ears. I'd love to work with him. I've just worked with Douglas McGrath, doing his film Every Word is True, about Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood, and he knows Woody very well.

AG: So, that film is wrapped now.

DC: It's over, yes. Next I'm on to the Steven Spielberg film that's starting at the end of June. It's set around '72, the Munich Olympics.

AG: When you create a character from scratch-as opposed to a character that already exists in a work being adapted to the screen -- what steps do you take to find the door into that character, to make him true?

DC: Reading it, over and over and over again. Discussing it-rehearsals, as you say, are a rarity in film, but if you get the chance to have rehearsals then grab it. It's never usually about nailing things down; it's about discussing and breaking the ice with the other actors. You know, there's still an element on the first day of filming where you have to stand up in front of thirty people and make a fool of yourself-as does everybody else, by the way, because we're all on show in a movie, it's just in the nature of how you make a film. If I do a back story [for my character], then I will make it up and think about it, write a few things down as I go through the script. Some actors plot their scripts--and I don't say that you shouldn't plot your script-but they'll say, "Here at this point, I should be feeling like this" because they look at the overall picture, and they think, what's the emotional arc of this? And I'm like-oooh, emotional arcs just terrify me, because I kind of want to do all of the work before we start shooting, and then once we start shooting, forget it, just forget it and get on with it. If I don't know my lines by then, if I don't know who I am by then, then I'm never going to know who I am. That's the fear you hold at the beginning [of a project], but hopefully when you're filming, you've done enough work and you've had enough discussion, that when you get to a scene, it's condensed. You're only doing a two- or three-minute scene, and at that point you ask, what are we trying to achieve with this scene? What are we trying to say? Let's get that said, and see if we can get somewhere else with that as well. And that's kind of the magic, that's where I like to be, so that we can do exactly what's written, do what we want in shooting, and then do a couple of takes for the sheer hell of it to see what happens, with changing some lines around, or moving or improvising. I kind of want to keep it as loose as that, because then the magic can happen sometimes.

AG: That's why your performances have a sense of flow.

DC: Maybe.

AG: That's how you avoid them feeling canned. You're serious about your work, you're not glib about it.

DC: I'm serious about it, but I'm not that serious about it. It's very, very, very important to me, but like my friend [and Enduring Love costar] Rhys Ifans said--when he was asked what do you take to every set--said, "My sense of humor." And he's absolutely right, because you can lose the bigger picture so easily. Because making a film, basically, is a collective sense of panic controlled, because who knows where the money's going to go, who knows who's going to be spending the money. I love film sets, which are like borderline hysteria, because then sparks fly.

AG: Are you an adrenaline junkie?

DC: Completely. There's no point in turning up unless you're ready to rock and roll.