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He has only seven movies on his CV but director Marc Forster now finds himself in the hot seat for the latest Bond movie. With his current film, The Kite Runner, on release the German born-Swiss raised director explains what drew him to working with 007.
"We did these little films, two and three minutes long, and there wasn't synchronised sound so you shot your movie and wrote the voiceover to tell the story. My English in the first semester wasn't great so I just showed them in silence. That helped me later on to tell stories with far less dialogue."
This much is clear in films like Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland. There was an inevitable degree of exposition required for the reality bending comedy Stranger Than Fiction, but when it came to The Kite Runner - adapted from an acclaimed book by Khaled Hosseini - Forster had the experience and confidence to concentrate on telling the story through the characters.
"When David Benioff did the adaptation I was glad there was no voiceover," he explains, "so many books use voiceover as a guide to lead them through it because the book obviously has so much more material. I felt it was much more interesting to let the actors tell the story."
The heartbreaking tale of an Afghan man's belated redemption for a moment of weakness in childhood is a haunting one, vividly brought to life by Forster and his team.
With language no longer a barrier to his directorial choices, Forster has proved himself adept at bringing diverse and fascinating stories to the screen. And in doing this he becomes the latest man hailing from German language cinema to cross over to Hollywood, following on the heels of such legends as Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann, Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang.
"I think, for me I feel there are two ways to go as a filmmaker," he adds. "You either become a master of your craft like Hitchcock, you get known for that and it sort of becomes your trademark. Or you could be like Billy Wilder, who jumped from genre to genre.
"I always felt for me that the latter is more of a challenge because I feel like every time I’m doing something else, doing a new genre, I feel like I might fail. Failure for me is important because I think I grow as an artist and I learn something and then I can
re-do it and maybe try it again. From that point it's just something, every time, to dive into another world is something really challenging."
Which brings us to the Bond movie, still bearing the working title Bond 22. Taking on the directorial reins is a daunting challenge for 38 year old Forster, who admits he came late to the longest running movie franchise in screen history.
"I grew up in a house without television," he reveals. "The first film I saw in a cinema was Apocalypse Now in 1982 or 83. I think the first Bond films I saw were the late Roger Moore films, Octopussy, that era."
It is, he admits, a refreshing thing to move between projects like The Kite Runner and a Bond movie, films that on the face of it seem utterly different from each other.
"With Kite Runner I was dealing with a book that sold eight million copies, about a culture I knew anything about, with all the expectations of everybody hoping I didn’t Hollywoodise that book. Then with the Bond film I’m suddenly faced with: 'oh, you're not an action director, what do you know about Bond?'.
"It’s a bizarre thing. Just recently I did an interview about it and the journalist said to me 'the franchise is older than you are,', I hadn’t even thought about it. But the thing that really interested me, and the reason I accepted it, was that I thought in Casino Royale Daniel Craig really presented us with a new Bond.
"It feels like a real three dimensional character now. There's a darker side to him, an emotional side, and I think we've never tapped into before. The Bond films represented something else, so I think this was a new journey into a new direction. I found that really, really interesting."
In the end it’s all about character, and Marc Forster is intent on proving to the sceptics that he has plenty of it.
ANWAR BRETT
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