By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY
ANTOFAGASTA, Chile — It looks like the surface of Mars. The rust-colored rolling hills of the Atacama desert appear alien, devoid of life — just sand and dirt and rock baked into vast, barren slopes that stretch endlessly into the bruised horizon.
Against this unforgiving backdrop, Daniel Craig is exploring the merciless side of James Bond. Quantum of Solace is the 22nd film in the 007 franchise, Craig's second after 2006's blockbuster Casino Royale, and the first true sequel to a Bond film, picking up the story just minutes after the previous film ends.
The movie, opening Nov. 7, is about halfway through filming. They've been to Panama and Baja California, Mexico, with plans to shift next to Italy and Austria before returning to London's famed Pinewood Studios for more stage shooting.
The action sequence shot in the Chilean desert last week is a turning point for the embittered superspy, his chance to discover whether his thirst for vengeance will turn him into the same kind of cold-blooded killer as the people he is fighting.
"He has his heart broken," says Craig, who turned 40 during the shoot. "The love of his life is killed, and he finds out she's not who she said she was. … He's out for revenge. But he's also out to find — and this is what the title is about — a 'quantum of solace.' Something has been taken away from him, and he's out to get that back."
Craig is running at full speed along the rooftop of a long, narrow building, wedged like a man-made plateau into the rocky red valley. He's firing a prop pistol into the mirrored skylights below.
The building is supposed to be an "eco-hotel," a buried tropical oasis amid this wasteland designed to lure the rich and powerful with the latest environmental technology. The hotel is a front for the villain, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric, the French star of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), a tycoon using a "Save the Earth" facade to hide his plan to seize control of part of South America's water supply.
"The villain has taken over this place. Greene is pretending to be 'green,' but he's obviously not," says producer Michael G. Wilson.
In real life, this partially subterranean structure is home to scores of visiting astronomers at the Paranal Observatory, site of four of the world's largest and most advanced telescopes. The silver domes stand sentinel on a nearby hillside awaiting sundown and the universe's nightly display of galactic fireworks.
These are the only structures for 75 miles and are situated in the thin air of the 8,700-foot elevation, where it's easy to run out of breath doing take after take of sprinting and gunplay.
Craig's sprinting gunshot scene is literally breathless — his chest heaves hard after multiple takes, but he laughs matter-of-factly later when asked about the high-altitude challenges. "It's (expletive) hard!"
The thin atmosphere has been hardest on the new Bond girl, Olga Kurylenko, 28, who plays a mysterious Bolivian-Russian rogue agent whose quest for revenge puts her in league with Bond. But even she prefers it to the marshy conditions of their last location.
"It's much easier to work here than in Panama, weather-wise," she says. "It's hot in both countries, but in Panama it's humid, and we were working on the boat and I was sweating. Here it's dry, it's different, it's much easier, but I'm out of breath a little bit."
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