By Christina Radish

Based on an extraordinary true story, the Paramount Vantage drama Defiance is an epic tale of family, honor, vengeance and salvation in World War II. In 1941, the Jews of Eastern Europe were being massacred by the thousands. Managing to escape certain death, three brothers take refuge in the dense surrounding woods they have known since childhood, where they begin their desperate battle against the Nazis.

At first, they are just trying to stay alive. But gradually, they begin to attract others -- men and women, young and old -- willing to risk everything for the sake of even a moment’s freedom. Tuvia (Daniel Craig) Bielski is a reluctant leader whose decisions are challenged by his brother, Zus (Liev Schreiber), who worries that Tuvia’s idealistic plans will doom them all. Asael (Jamie Bell) is the youngest, caught between his brothers’ fierce rivalry. As a brutal winter descends, these brothers turn a primitive struggle to survive into something far more consequential -- a way to avenge the deaths of their loved ones by saving thousands of others.

British actor Daniel Craig, better known to audiences as the current James Bond, spoke to MediaBlvd Magazine about telling this fascinating and intriguing true-life story.

MediaBlvd> Did they tell you anything about the guy you were playing that you could actually use?

Daniel> For all sorts of reasons, he didn’t talk about it. My theory, and I think it’s fairly accurate, is that the children of the people that went through it started growing up and asking questions and saying, “What was your experience?” There were people who had gone through The Holocaust and had survived Auschwitz, and these people survived in a very different way. The common theme was Tuvia Bielski. They said, “This man led us through.”

MediaBlvd> You’re the hero throughout this film, but you do have to kill a member of your own band and do some pretty hard things. How did you approach that duality?

Daniel> That’s what fascinated me about this. It’s obvious, if anyone watches the film or reads the book, and you understand the storyline, these people did very, very bad things. You always have to look at the net result, which is that 1,200 people walked out of this situation and survived, and keeping that many people together and under control, there were power struggles and major shifts in power. There was Zus Bielski, who was trying to gain control. They took revenge on the local population. They fought very hard against the Germans, at times. They’re walking a moral line, but for a good reason that I found fascinating. What would you do in a situation like this? How would you defend yourself? You’d like to think that you’d protect your family and the people around you, but what would you be prepared to do, to actually succeed?

MediaBlvd> Was some of that based on real things that happened?

Daniel> Most of what happens in the movie was absolutely reported, and it happened over a three or four year period. We condensed a lot of that into one year, like the running away and going through the swamp, and the fact that a whole infantry of 20,000 Germans were sent in to actually root them out. Obviously, this is a film and we’ve got to put it into a dramatic context.

MediaBlvd> Do you view this as a companion piece to Munich?

Daniel> I don’t think that. If you’d like to do that, you’re more than welcome to do that, but I don’t put my work into a DVD collection, like my blue period is here, or my Jewish period is here. I know this might sound kind of naive, but when I read this script, the last thing on my mind was Munich. I just read it. This deals with something that’s close to my heart because my grandparents went through the second World War. It has a direct link to all of us. The first World War was the war to end all wars, and this war was the war that stopped and made us all human. We signed treaties and said that we’d never do this again, but we’ve been doing it ever since, year by year, worse and worse, wiping our asses on these treaties. It’s an important piece of history. I found this story so inspiring because it was about the way that people survived this situation, and when they stopped fighting. That was the other thing that came up for me. When do you stop fighting? When do you actually find peace? When do you start living? There’s that line in this movie when Tuvia says, “We stop this now and we start to live.”

MediaBlvd> Did shooting on location help inform your character?

Daniel> Very much. We always had to have that reality, in the back of our mind. We were doing long days, and six-day weeks, but we had warm beds to go to, and we did have trailers. There were different map references. They would give us a map in the morning and say, “If you can find it, you can have it.” We’d stay on set constantly, and we’d be under tarps, watching the scenes. That made it very immediate. It made us all feel involved with everything, and it gave a community feeling to us, which was essential for the movie, to give it that life. It was cold, wet, damp and uncomfortable, but we knew that we were going home that night, so it was okay.

MediaBlvd> What was Ed Zwick like, as a director? Did he do a lot of rehearsals?

Daniel> We had a lot of discussion before we started shooting. Sometimes you’d get to a scene on the shoot and it would just click and you’d go, “Okay, we know what want to do.” We’d set the camera up and shoot it. Then, there was the very emotional stuff that you give more time and let there be more air around for the scene. And, sometimes, we would just hit a brick wall, and everyone would come in, sit down and discuss it. The camera department would come in and say, “Maybe we can shoot it from up there. Maybe that will give it that feeling.” If the scene wasn’t working, Clay Frohman was on set and we would rewrite scenes, as we were going along, or we’d improvise bits and pieces, if we could.

MediaBlvd> Was it hard to learn Russian?

Daniel> I left school at 16 and I can’t conjugate a verb in any language, even English. So, I just did the Russian phonetically. Liev has an education, so he took pains to learn it a bit. It was tricky and difficult, but I’m glad that we did it. I’m glad that we made the distinction because the conceit is that we’re all speaking Yiddish to each other, and Russian and German is spoken around us. We all have an accent because it grounds it and it makes it sound that we have a uniformity. We’ve got English, Lithuanian and French. There was a whole international group of actors in there, making it the Tower of Babel, if we were speaking in our own accents.

MediaBlvd> What was it like to film the fight sequence with Liev, where those two brothers have to beat each other up?

Daniel> Having done a few fight sequences now, I know that the only way that you get them to look right is by rehearsing them, so that’s we did. We rehearsed it for weeks before we started shooting. We went into the studio, put mats on the floor and figured it out. What we wanted to do was try to make it as brotherly as possible, and show aspects that would make you go, “Those are brothers fighting.” There’s obviously a Cain and Abel thing with the rock, and that came about as a piece of improvisation. There was a rock there and we were talking about how we were going to end the fight, and that was the only way to end the fight. The one brother had to want to kill the other one. Also, he’s bigger than me, so I had to hit him with something.

MediaBlvd> Quantum of Solace was a huge worldwide success. Do you pay attention to that success at the box office?

Daniel> Of course, I pay attention. It’s not like I say, “No, I’m not interested.” It’s great! We couldn’t have expected it to do as well as it has done, but we put the work in. We put the energy in and we made the best movie that we could. You can only hope, from there on. If you knew what was a sure fire winner, everyone would be doing it. There’s always a risk involved, and it’s been a pleasure to have it do so well.

MediaBlvd> Will you be doing another James Bond film?

Daniel> No fucking way! I’m done with that story. I want to lie on a beach for the first half-hour of the next movie, drinking a cocktail. No. I don’t know what we’re going to do with the next one. I know that we’ve finished this story, as far as I’m concerned, and we’ve got a great set of bad guys. There’s an organization that we can use whenever we want to use it. The relationship between Bond and M is secure, and Felix is secure. We can try to find out where Moneypenny came from, and where Q comes from. Let’s do all that, and have some fun with it.

MediaBlvd> Are you looking to do another project like Defiance, before doing the next Bond film?

Daniel> We don’t know when we’re going to do the next Bond. Certainly no one is thinking about it, just at the moment. We’re going to give it a rest, for the moment. If we can squeeze something in, and I can do something next year, I will, but I haven’t found out what that’s going to be yet.

MediaBlvd> Do you use your status as James Bond to get personal, smaller movies made that you like?

Daniel> For sure. In a sense, Defiance was definitely very much like that. Ed had been struggling with it for a long time. He went to Europe and raised the money in individual territories. But, me saying yes to it gave it that little extra push. And, thankfully, Paramount and Vantage came in and picked it up. It’s not a very clear-cut process. As much I’d like to say that I’m definitely going to do that, there’s still a lot of work involved. But, I’m going to definitely work that way and try to encourage things, if I can. There’s definitely a responsibility to pay it back into the business a little bit. It’s also because I love doing it. There’s a narcissism as well.   

MediaBlvd> Flashbacks of a Fool was a very intimate film. Would you like to do more projects like that?

Daniel> I’d love to! That was really a labor of love. That was a friend of mine, who had written that about seven or eight years ago for me. We managed to get it made. I’m very keen to get stuff like that off the ground, if I can, whether I’m producing or not, or whether I’m in it or not. It’s nice to encourage people I know with a lot of talent to just get on with it.

MediaBlvd> Is there anything specific that you look for, when you’re looking for new film roles?

Daniel> I’m not consciously looking for anything. If there was that much material around for me to pick and choose from, I would be doing that, but there is a finite number of good scripts. There are only so many good pieces of material, or good books out there, and you have to look for them. To say, “I won’t do this,” is really shutting the door on so much material. I keep my mind totally open and just see what comes along.