Empire UK

HERE HAVE BEEN ONLY TWO BOND MOVIES

since Christoph Waltz won his first Academy

Award for Inglourious Basterds back in 2010. And

yet when the Austrian actor was confirmed as

Bond’s arch-nemesis and potential ‘step-brother’

Franz Oberhauser at the Spectre global press conference last

December it was hard not to ask: what took them so long?

Waltz and Bond seem made for each other. Eloquent

urbane incredibly intelligent able to imbue a single word

like “James” with the sort of menace that would stop lesser

double-00 agents in their tracks the 58 year-old double Oscar-

winner may not be able to spar physically with Bond (that’s

Dave Bautista’s role) but is the sort of wily coyote you can

imagine running rings around MI6’s finest. “We’d never had a

supervillain” says Mendes of Oberhauser. “He’s got something

brilliantly dark inside him when he turns it on” adds Craig.

Today as he sits on a sofa in a London hotel suite on

an overcast Tuesday morning in July the impish Waltz is

thankfully keeping all that brilliant darkness locked away as

we chat about Bond and a career that can be divided into two

stages: the first when he was a respected actor in his native

Europe; and the second higher-profile stage which began

when he opened a script written by Quentin Tarantino...

Sam Mendes is guest-editing this issue... That’s interesting.

I was asked to guest-edit an issue of Die Zeit a weekly in Germany

a sort of intellectual social-democratic paper with a long

tradition. Pretty highbrow. Why would you ask me to guest-edit?

I know nothing about journalism. I have the highest regard for

putting a paper together. So why on earth would they ask me?

They wanted you to set the agenda? They would have helped

but I’d have sat there and had an opinion. I despise that. People

wedging in sideways completely ignorant but with an opinion.

Do you find a lot of that in your working life? I certainly do.

It’s fascinating how the craft of filmmaking careens like a vehicle

gotten out of control. You can always argue for classical film

grammar. I had a film teacher in New York who gave this fantastic

example. He said you walk up to a vendor in the street and say

“Hot me a give dog” and the vendor will eventually piece it

together depending on his IQ and give you the desired or

requested hot dog. But if you say “Give me a hot dog” he gets it

right away. It makes a lot of sense to use grammar if you want

to be understood. Yet oddly I find in film that they consider it

a creative liberation to toss that overboard.

Your first big American film was with Quentin Tarantino

playing Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds. He works on

his own without interference. Then to go from that into The

Green Hornet which I imagine had lots of interference...

Oddly none. That’s why that was such a disappointment (laughs).

Over the years have your eyes been opened seeing the way

Quentin works? I always feel that I have to come to Hollywood’s

defence a little bit. Not everybody in the studio is an idiot. There

are a few really brilliant people working there. They don’t run it

which is the problem. Even if they’re presidents or CEOs they

only run part of it. John Boorman wrote this fabulous book

Money Into Light. That’s what movies are. I can lament that and

stay at home or I say “That’s regrettable nowwhat do I do with

it?” Coming back to the defence of Hollywood I think everybody

is in that same situation. People who work at the studios have

the same desire to make great movies but they’re being rapped

An audience with Christoph Waltz aka James Bond’s 24th nemesis and Quentin Tarantino’s favourite actor WORDS on the knuckles by the corporations. Money into light.

CHRIS HEWITT

PORTRAIT

ROBERT ASCROFT

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