Daniel Craig ready for action in Defiance.

LOS ANGELES — A licence to kill has its perks, no question. The babes. The bling. The bucks. And that’s just off-screen.

But if you’re the actor playing 007, the role of Her Majesty’s most indestructible, indomitable super-spy also comes with a seemingly unavoidable accoutrement. The fact is, no Bond has managed to carve out a career independent of the legendary character until after retiring their Walther PPK.

Sean Connery, remember, wasn’t certified an Oscar-winning icon until years after he had ditched the martinis and shed the tuxedos for good. Sure, Pierce Brosnan enjoyed nominal success with his non-franchise offerings — but do Dante’s Peak and The Thomas Crown Affair really count?

And, so far, Daniel Craig has yet to show he can buck history. Since he electrified the Bond label with 2006’s Casino Royale, his non-007 career has sputtered with the disappointing The Golden Compass and the outright bomb The Invasion (which was filmed before Royale, but released after it).

So you might assume there’s added pressure on Craig with Friday’s arrival of Defiance, which opened in New York and Los Angeles last month to qualify for Oscars. To wit: can he shoulder a movie without the benefit of beverages that are shaken, not stirred?

Yet speaking to journalists at a Beverly Hills hotel, the 40-year-old Brit insists his criteria for choosing scripts hasn’t changed much — if at all — since the onset of global superstardom.

“There’s no conscious effort on my part to do anything different. Look, I’m not going to take another British spy role; if another secret service agent comes up, I’m probably going to push it away ... But I’m reading a lot of scripts and just responding to the material I have.”

What does he respond to?

“The good stuff. Only the good stuff.”

Presumably, he would include Defiance in that company. Based on true events, the historical epic casts Craig as Tuvia, eldest sibling of the Bielski brothers, Jewish resistance fighters who, in the forests of Byelorussia, carved out a community for more than 1,000 Jews fleeing the Nazis during the Second World War. Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell co-star. Behind the camera is Edward Zwick, whose credits include Legends of the Fall, Glory and Blood Diamond.

Remembers Craig, “Ed Zwick and I had had conversations over the years (in which we said) that we must work together, like one does, but then he sent me this script. He said he’d been wanting to do it and it was a labour of love. I read it and I thought this is a story worth telling. It was as simple as that.”

Remarkably less simple was shooting itself. Produced for $30 million — a paltry amount compared to the $150 million forked out for, say, Australia — the production put down stakes in Lithuania to re-create the unforgiving conditions the real Bielskis faced in Nazi-occupied territory.

“It was testing, but enjoyable,” Craig says. “We had a lot of fun. We laughed a huge amount and I think that energy was important because I think these people must have laughed at the ludicrousness of that situation.”

Meeting the offspring of the Bielskis during filming, he says, was “strange because it’s a family full of life. It wasn’t really about asking direct questions about how Tuvia was because this is an interpretation of how he was at this time, not when he was an older man. But these were big, robust guys. They were exactly that — big men who obviously bulldozed their way through this situation and survived ... and kept this community together.”

Defiance debuts on the heels of a number of other Holocaust- and Nazi-themed films released in recent weeks, including Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Good, Adam Resurrected and The Reader. Some critics have gone so far as to call for a moratorium on the subject, with one newspaper referring to Defiance as part of a “genre” — a comment that rankles Craig.

“A genre movie suggests someone cynically trying to sell something. You make a horror film because it’s guaranteed to make money. This film is not guaranteed to make money. Everybody knows this. We all did this for love. To say this fits into a genre is offensive. We all did this movie because it inspired us. This film deals with an incredibly important part of recent history that’s affected us all.”

Stop the presses: Craig cracks a smile

LOS ANGELES — What’s this — Daniel Craig in a good mood? Laughing at his own expense?

Hardly what you expect from an actor dubbed “Grumpy Bond” by the British press. Yet for a recent marathon set of interviews, Craig is agreeable, approachable, laid-back and — hey, maybe he’s having an off day — prone to cracking a smile.

Turns out, if you want him to lighten up, all you have to do is remind him that, following months of promotional duties for Quantum of Solace and Defiance, he’s finally due for a break.

“People intimated that I had a problem with the press, but I never had a problem with the press. I just find this awkward,” he says of the interview process. “It’s difficult at the best of times. I’m enjoying my work more than I ever have. This process is selling what you do. There’s no point making a movie like (Defiance) and getting all Greta Garbo about it and hiding away and say, ‘I don’t want to talk, leave me alone.’ I want to get this out and have people see it.”

Still, he confesses to “looking for a little peace and quiet,” after which he will be returning to the Bond series for a third time. No surprise there, considering how well his stripped-down secret agent has been embraced by even the snarkiest fans and critics.

“It’s incredibly gratifying,” he says. “I went into it with just the intention that I leave it in a better place than when I found it. That’s all you can do. And hopefully ... I will get out of it before it goes wrong. I never intended to get that part. I never ever thought about doing it; it was completely off my radar. But when the opportunity came up, I just looked at it like as any other job and went, ‘I’m going to tear the ass out of this. I’ve got to get this so right or it’s a waste of my time and a waste of everyone else’s time.’ We’ve made mistakes, but the quality’s good and we’ll keep it up if we can.”

Original drama increasingly rare on big screen

LOS ANGELES — Defiance doesn’t have a roman numeral in the title. Nor was it based on a graphic novel. And we’re fairly certain there won’t be a video game either.

All of which makes it an increasing rarity in today’s corporate Hollywood climate, realizes director Edward Zwick.

“I think it’s really hard to make dramas right now,” says the helmer of Blood Diamond, Glory and The Last Samurai. “I think studios would rather only make superhero movies and sequels, period, if they had their druthers. What’s ironic is that the actors, the movie stars, still want to be actors; they have artistic ambitions.”

Which helps explain how Zwick has continued to make movies without resorting to green screens, special effects and wall-to-wall CG.

“I got to make Blood Diamond because (Leonardo DiCaprio) would do it with me. Revolutionary Road (which Zwick produced) happened because of Kate (Winslet) and Leo, not because the studio, however well-intentioned, wanted to do it. It’s the same with some of the things George Clooney does and with Brad Pitt and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. These guys are the last backstop against a total homogeneity out of Hollywood of studio product.”

In that company, you can include Daniel Craig, whose post-Bond clout made Defiance a reality. “We couldn’t get this movie made for 10 years,” Zwick recalls. “Then two things happened: My last two pictures did well in Europe, better than they did here. And Daniel was suddenly James Bond.

“So we financed Defiance out of Europe and got domestic distribution here. That’s the only reason it happened.”

That said, the timing of Defiance — following so closely Quantum of Solace — isn’t as strategic as it might appear. “We’ve created this self-fulfilling prophecy (in the industry) where any movie where people talk or have an idea and don’t fly or spin webs is released in a window of three months,” Zwick explains. “So it was inevitably going to end up here, at this moment.”

kevin.williamson@sunmedia.ca

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