Daniel Craig, part one (video)

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This weekend we thought we’d share with you a bit of Daniel Craig, whose Flashbacks of a Fool is currently doing the rounds. Tune in tomorrow for part two, a Q&A with the man himself.

Daniel Craig is likely to play down his dual role on Flashbacks of a Fool. Ask, for instance, what it was like producing the film as well as starring in it, and he quips: “I’ve tended to be dragged in to those conversations where decisions are made about finance and locations and stuff.

The truth is that Craig was absolutely crucial in getting the film made and took his role as producer very seriously indeed. He has known director Baillie Walsh for more than ten years and had always encouraged him to make a feature.

“I just felt that he should be making movies,” says Craig. “And I’ve always felt that way. He’s a fantastic storyteller and this is what he should be doing. Baillie did a documentary a few years ago (Mirror, Mirror) and his music videos with bands like Massive Attack and INXS were the benchmark in that genre.

“And then he wrote this script about five years ago with me in mind and said ‘I want you to do it one day’ and I said ‘absolutely, we’ll do it.’ And that’s how it started.”

It was to be a bumpy ride. At first it was difficult to secure funding for the film, even with Craig’s name attached. But then Craig took on the role of James Bond in Casino Royale and his stock, and power, within the industry rose even further.

Casino Royale scored that elusive double whammy – it became a huge box office hit as well as gaining rave reviews all around the world – and in turn helped Craig and Walsh get Flashbacks of a Fool into production.

“I did it because I believed in it and because I believe in Baillie,” he stresses. “He needs to make movies and I felt that was important. But Bond does help and I would be lying if I said it didn’t.

“Doing films like this makes me remember why I do what I do. Being a producer on this, basically what I have to do is speak to people and say ‘I believe in this, spend some money.’

“And it’s a step up because (in the past) that was somebody else’s job, that was my bosses’ job, they did all of that and I turned up and did the acting. But now it’s me who has to say ‘I really believe in this, please spend some money.’ And actually following it through and getting the movie made was very rewarding.”

In Flashbacks of a Fool, Craig plays Joe Scot a British born actor living in Hollywood whose once glittering career is going downhill fast, thanks to a hedonistic lifestyle of booze, drugs and womanising.

When he hears the terrible news that his best friend from childhood, Boots, has suddenly died, it forces him to reassess his life and go home to England and confront the past that has haunted him since he was a 17 year old living in an idyllic seaside town.

“I think it’s really beautiful,” Craig says of the finished film. “The story is really simple, it’s about dealing with the past and taking care of business. I think Baillie has done an amazing job.”

It unfolds in two time-frames – present day Los Angeles where Scot holes up in his hi-tech soulless luxury cliff top house – and back in the 1970s when the teenage Joe was on the verge of manhood, happily enjoying a golden summer with his friends when events conspired to change his life forever.

The young Joe (played by Harry Eden) falls for the beautiful Ruth (Felicity Jones) and earns a date with her, much to the envy of his mates. But at the same time he becomes the object of a bored, lonely housewife’s (Jodhi May) frustrated sexual desires and when she seduces him it triggers a chain of events ending in the tragic death of her child.

“The child getting killed so deeply affects him that it sends him off on to that destructive path and I can personally relate to that, not in such an extreme way but if you go off on that wrong path and don’t deal with it and don’t address it, it will find it’s way back to you.”

Both the LA sequences and the ‘golden summer’ from Joe’s teenage years were filmed in South Africa and Craig believes that the surprising location worked particularly well for the film.

“It’s also about how important those (teenage) years are. The young Joe is such a bundling ball of energy and hormones and every experience is so vivid. And that’s why filming in South Africa worked for that sequence so well because when you remember those times everything is so bright and so colourful, basically because your hormones are going through the roof.”

Craig was born in Chester, England, and grew up near Liverpool. He attended the National Youth Theatre at 16 and then Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1996 he starred in the highly acclaimed BBC drama Our Friends In The North, a corruption and crime saga rightly regarded as one of the best television dramas of recent times.

As a result, Craig found himself in great demand and was inundated with offers of more television drama; instead he opted to work in small independent movies like Hotel Splendide, The Trench and Obsession.

The gamble paid off and Craig was cast by Sam Mendes to play the psychotic son of Paul Newman’s character in The Road To Perdition and later, poet Ted Hughes opposite Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath in Sylvia. He has worked with director Roger Michell twice; as the young man who beds a grandmother and her daughter in The Mother, and as Joe, a writer who attracts the attentions of a stalker, in Enduring Love.

He starred in the hit British gangster movie, Layer Cake and Steven Spielberg’s Munich. In Infamous, he played killer Perry Smith, who, along with his accomplice, developed a close friendship with the writer Truman Capote as he researched his book, In Cold Blood. He recently played Lord Asriel in The Golden Compass.

He will be seen in the Ed Zwick directed World War Two epic, Defiance, shortly and in January started filming the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace with director Marc Forster.