Olga Kurylenko

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

007 has returned once again and with another new Bond movie comes another new Bond girl and Olga Kurylenko could not be any better a choice for the franchise's more modern era.

Born in the Ukraine, Kurylenko has molded from a model and an actress in French films to a tough female fixture on action films, including roles in the film adaptations of video games Hitman and Max Payne. Now she takes on the role of a lifetime as new Bond girl Camille Montes in the latest 007 film Quantum of Solace.

The 29 year-old actress first discussed with us the seemingly mammoth undertaking that is the casting of a Bond girl.

'A huge audition process, very intense,' Olga recalls, 'There were three auditions altogether. The first one was in Paris. It was a general audition. There were a lot of people sitting in the waiting room. After which, I got called back to London to do the second audition with a different scene.'

'That's when I met Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, the producers and Mark Forster, the director,' she continues, 'I got another callback for the third one and the last one, which was with Daniel Craig. And after that, I waited for three to four weeks and only then, I got an answer.'

A Bond film is not a Bond film without endlessly exciting and thrilling action sequences. We asked Olga to share with us the stunt she found the toughest.

'The boat scene,' she reminisces, 'It was difficult not to fall out of the boat, because the boat was going so fast like a rollercoaster. Seriously, it was like a Porsche. The scene was amazing. Usually, when you're on such a speedboat, you're holding on when you're sitting down.'

'We're not holding on,' Kurylenko continues, 'We're not sitting down. We had to fight. We had the whole choreography thing going on, with the text, with the camera moving aside trying to capture everything and guys chasing us. Then, we had to crash into other boats. And we were in the boat while we were crashing. But thankfully, I had flat shoes.'

Another action scene Kurylenko particularly found noteworthy was an airplane sequence.

'There were different moments, but there was a plane,' Olga recalls, 'There was a real plane, but we sat in, we had to do certain things. But then, all those movements where it spins and stands upside down, perpendicular to the ground, that was the real body of the plane on this special platform that moved it, rotate, all over, that was quite interesting. It was quite high up.'

As in with many of the Bond films of the past 15 years, the Bond girl has evolved from being merely a glamorous damsel-in-distress to a glamorous companion of butt-kicking ruthlessness. Olga sees those characteristics in spades in her deeply complex role as Camille.

'I think it's great that she's so different from other Bond girls and she's feisty and independent,' she says, 'She doesn't need Bond to help her. She doesn't need anybody to help her. She can do everything by herself. She has her mission in the movie and she has her own story. She's not an accessory to Bond. What's interesting about her is that she has a depth and scarred inside and outside, but especially inside, because she's carrying this pain that's happened through the years because of something very tragic that happened in her childhood.'

'She lost her family and that's what motivates her and her actions,' Kurylenko adds, 'Her whole life growing up was one day I'm going to get that person who is the reason that happened. By the end, it was important to show the vulnerability, because she's not a robot, so feisty and no feelings. She's human and suddenly, in those flames, we see that she goes back to that moment to her childhood and she becomes a child. And I think it's just how she was a little girl hiding under the table.'

Kurylenko shared with us the how she trained for the role of Camille.

'I trained extensively with a gun,' Olga reveals, 'I learned how to shoot and reload and put it together and take it apart. Also, I have lots of friends that are Hispanic, so before I did any training, I spent a lot of time with them, just listening to them, recording them. I asked them to read poems in Spanish and in English, just to see. And I kept on listening to it all the time on my IPod. And of course, I had a coach and we did training for certain sounds and preparing the accents.'

Olga also shares with us her enthusiasm for the people she worked alongside, including the current face of James Bond, Daniel Craig.

'Great support,' Kurylenko says, 'Great example. Wonderful actor. Very focused. Always knows what he's doing. Training a lot. Working a lot. It's great. It's a really good part.'

Another was the rather unusual choice of Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland Marc Forster as director.

'It's funny, when I saw his name,' Olga recounts, 'It didn't really ring a bell, but I looked and there was all these movies that I seen. I just didn't know that I've seen all those films. And one of those, Monster's Ball, one of my favorite movies, it's amazing. I loved The Kite Runner, that came out while we were shooting. It was great, Finding Neverland, all of those. I saw all his movies, all of them, it's really incredible. So I realized, he's a good director, that's great. I think, of course, I realized when I started working with him that we were so lucky he directed this movie, because this movie has so much action. And often, it's very easy to just forget about the rest. Often, in action movies, there's just action.'

'But in this movie, because it's so intense, we needed someone astute to keep the depth present and he really kept it very concentrated on that,' she adds, 'He never ever let it go. During the scene on the boat, he spoke to me acting. He said, you know, when I'm looking at the screen, I'm looking at your eyes. What are you expressing' What is going on there' Always about depth, what's the feeling, not just'because I've worked with others, they're like, the woman looks good, she's feisty, she's fine, let's go to the next one, you know. He took his time and what was important with him was that everything was natural, that the characters are very natural.'

Another actor Olga expressed praised for is French actor Mathieu Amalric, who plays the latest 007 villain Dominic Greene.

'It was great,' she recounts, 'Mathieu is very interesting. His way of working is very different from others. For example, he has his own style. He's very spontaneous. He's different in every take. In each time, he's in constant research, like I never knew what he was going to do. He was surprising me. There was one take and then, there was a second take of the same scene, for example, and he would be like, I'm going to do something totally different. And I'm like, what' And he's like, you'll see. He wouldn't tell me.'

'He would do something and it was improvisation,' Kurylenko continues, 'You never knew what he was going to do. And that's what kept it so fresh. He would just suddenly change. On the same scene, in the next take, it would be a totally different emotion and a totally different level. And basically, I think they had to cut. They had all these varieties and the same scene played in five different ways. It was his suggestion. That was very interesting and it keeps it fresh. It's exciting. What is he going to do and it's great because the reaction is real.'

Another thing a Bond movie wouldn't be a Bond movie without is multiple exotic locales. In the case of Quantum of Solace, the locales include Italy, Haiti, Bolivia, and Russia. We asked Kurylenko if she got any opportunity during filming to soak in some of the great locations.

'It was pretty much work all the time, but we did get some free days off,' she replies, 'We shot six days a week, so it meant we only had one weekend. But I wasn't on the set everyday, we had days when I didn't shoot and I had some rest. And of course, I used them to walk around and try to see locations. It was amazing. I've seen some amazing things.'

However, despite her consistent presence with roles in Hitman, Max Payne, and now Quantum of Solace, Olga states that as much as she particularly enjoyed doing her latest one, she has no intention of being solely a fixture of the action genre.

'It just happened that way that they were action films,' Kurylenko explains, 'For example, I enjoy this one very much. This one was really the one where I was involved in action in other movies. What was really fun was doing your own stunts and learning the accent and it was a total transformation.'

'That was something new that I discovered that I never done before,' she adds, 'Also, learning the accent was a great challenge and it was a total transformation. But I don't want to do just that. I want to do as many versatile parts as possible. That's the goal.'

Kurylenko also says she does not concern herself with any of the potential baggage that comes along with being a Bond girl.

'That's a part of my job,' she explains, 'As they say, you do the movie and during the shooting, there's acting and you're working, but the actual work comes when you're starting to promote, so that's nothing. You think that's hard, wait, till you have to promote. You have to do it, especially for a movie like Bond. You put so much heart and strength your forces into the work you're doing for six months. We work too hard and your job is to do as well as possible. I mean, that's only normal.'

'Then, after, you're excited for it to come out, otherwise you wouldn't be doing it,' Olga continues, 'That's we want to do. We want people to see it and to enjoy it. So this makes sense, you have to do this. If promotion makes people realize what the movie's about and makes them want to go see it, then, it's all worth it because we already did one part of the job. You can't just throw this one away, because it's a part of the process, it's a continuation. So I did do all those fashion shoots and it was the most intense. I don't think it's going to be big for any other movie. This is the best. You keep thinking, Oh, my, God, am I really doing all this' It is really cool. You're like, wow, looks good.'

Finally, Olga shared with us what she plans to do next.

'I shot a movie in Israel afterward,' Kurylenko says, 'It's a completely different film. It's an Israeli film. It should be coming out next spring. The director is Danny Lerner. It's called Kirot, which means 'walls' in Hebrew. It's a drama with some action scenes present, but it's not about action.'

'There is action, but to me, it's not an action movie,' she adds, 'He did one low-budget movie in black and white in Hebrew and I thought his work was great, very interesting photography work and the frames and just the way he directed it and a great story, which he wrote himself.'