Just after nightfall on a muggy evening in Colón, Panama, an air-conditioned SUV exits the grounds of the hotel Meliá Panama Canal past two armed checkpoints. Director Marc Forster slouches into its passenger seat, spent after a long day choreographing a boat-chase scene for Quantum of Solace, aka Bond 22, starring Daniel Craig. Arriving on location in the derelict port city a week earlier, the crew had been warned about the dangers of the town, and it soon became clear, Forster recalls, that stories of gang conflict were not just tall tales meant to scare the gringos.
A scene from Quantum, set on a floating opera stage in Bregenz, Austria.
“We were filming the other day, and right down the street there was a shooting,” Forster says quietly as his driver negotiates the ragged highway toward a small Lebanese café a few blocks from where the gunfight occurred. (Forster, a vegetarian, can’t face another hotel meal.) Making Forster’s film The Kite Runner, shot amid ethnic unrest in western China, was a relentless struggle. In Panama, by comparison, Forster has been “surprised at how smoothly it went.”
Perhaps he shouldn’t be: The director, 39, has the otherworldly calm of a Swiss diplomat and delivered all of his previous seven movies on time and on budget, an impressive track record to money-conscious Hollywood producers. He met his own standards again with the Quantum juggernaut, despite a $150 million–plus budget (making it the most expensive Bond ever), a 103-day globe-trotting shoot, and such additional difficulties as a riot in Panama City and a series of accidents in Italy that had the international press dithering about a so-called Bond curse.
The media attention garnered by 007 is not surprising, even if Forster is more an insider’s favorite than a cineplex draw. Best known for 2001’s Monster’s Ball—which won Halle Berry a best actress Academy Award—he’s a critically acclaimed talent, but his largest domestic box office to date is a mere $51 million for 2004’s Finding Neverland. (Close behind is the high-concept Will Ferrell comedy Stranger Than Fiction, which earned $40 million.) His stylish yet bizarre psychological thriller Stay, which came and went without much notice in 2005, was, by the director’s own assessment, “abstract.”
Forster has nonetheless enjoyed a fine reputation in Hollywood, thanks in no small part to his cool nerves and impeccable manners. Born into a wealthy Swiss family, he has all the hallmarks of an elite European education—he’s multilingual, erudite and unerringly gracious. While his shaved head and serious demeanor give him the appearance of someone whose iPod holds more Mahler than Madonna, he has the deft communication skills necessary to coax the best from actors. Berry hasn’t lived up to her remarkable performance in her subsequent films, and proving that his tutelage was no fluke, Forster has since drawn heart-tugging performances from the child actors in Finding Neverland, which starred Johnny Depp as Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie.
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