Premiere Magazine was kind enough to contact me and let me know about their fascinating interview with Mathieu Amalric.

A lot of the “reveals” are already known to the Bond fan who follows every scrap of news: Quantum of Solace picks up 30 minutes after Casino Royale ends. Camille (Olga Kurylenko) has a personal grudge against Dominic Greene (Amalric). Panama is “dressed” as Bolivia, and Camille is half-Bolivian, half-Ukrainian.

This bit is new to me:

What is known is that Amalric is Dominic Greene, a ruthless businessman and major force within Green Planet, the mysterious organization that blackmailed Vesper Lynd (played in the previous Bond installment by Eva Green). Greene, it is revealed, is also linked to Vesper’s death.

I mean, I knew that Greene was connected with the blackmail, but this seems more detailed than we’ve seen before.

With Daniel Craig, you feel this guy is really completely involved in the feelings of Bond. I mean, there’s almost a broken heart in this film. There is the fantasy, of course, of a James Bond film, but there is something that is very, very realistic in the feelings. The James Bond girls are not girls that you just smack and then you kiss and you make love to through the night and then move onto to the next one. It’s not that anymore. It’s completely different. So I think it’s why Mark [Forster] was approached. We have a lot of stunts. I practice stunts every day. I just love that. I have a big fight sequence of course, with fire and everything. But there are also scenes that have to do with very intimate feelings.

There’s also an interesting tidbit about the script:

“Every day there is a sort of ‘work in progress’ spirit on this set,” Amalric echoes. “There’s a new writer that has arrived. We have new lines and it’s changed.

New writer? As in, not Haggis? Not Purvis and Wade?

The rest of the interview is very personal, very much about Amalric as a man and an actor, and nicely intimate.