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Some years ago, and this is gospel, a friend of a friend obtained some casual work in the food hall of a Knightsbridge store. He was warned about bothering the celebrities who frequented the place, but the sight of Roger Moore perusing the deli counter proved too great a temptation. As the story has it, he sneaked up, pressed a two-fingered gun barrel into Moore’s back and intoned, in a cod Russian accent, “This time you lose, Mr Bond” — an act that resulted in instant dismissal and a failure to extend his tenure as far as lunchtime. Moore, apparently, was not without appreciation for this piece of improv, arching an eyebrow in casual amusement.

Poor old Roger has always been a figure of fun. But this overlooks the fact that he retained the licence to kill for longer than any other actor — 12 years — making him the standard bearer for the franchise. Watched now, those early flicks (Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me) are great entertainment, certainly superior to any other Bond movie of the next three decades. A better memory to hold than that of the jowly japester leering his way through A View to a Kill, his final mission.

When it comes to Bond, one thing is sure — no matter what the cyclical reinvention, or the trumpeting of “back to basics”, the sporter of the tuxedo will inevitably be sucked into a slapstick of ridiculous gadgets, preposterous scenarios and a flabbiness that even the sturdiest of Moore’s corsets could never contain. Moore, Dangerous Dalton, even George Lazenby: each was hailed as an exciting new broom. The avowals of “grittiness” that greeted Daniel Craig are interchangeable with the “Bond for a modern era” banners that welcomed Pierce Brosnan — until he went out in a fug of Cossack hairspray, smug one-liners... and an invisible car. We’re still in thrall, of course: Sebastian Faulks’s Devil May Care, “writing as Ian Fleming”, is Penguin’s fastest-selling fiction hardback. “Why?” does not figure with Bond. It’s simply “How does the new film compare with the last?”.

Following Casino Royale is a tough assignment. Regarded as the best Bond for ages, it came with the unprecedented kudos of a Bafta nomination for Craig, the proverbial “blunt instrument”, as M called him, a man for our time, less Walther PPK than Saturday- night special. Perhaps this nod from the industry explains the decision to premiere its sequel in the upmarket context of the London Film Festival this month. Directed by Martin Campbell, Casino Royale made nearly $600m at the box office, the most financially successful of the series. “There’s really no upside,” says Marc Forster, the put-upon director of its sequel, Quantum of Solace. “If I make a film that isn’t as good as Casino Royale, it’s going to be a failure. If it doesn’t make as much money, it’s going to be a failure. Casino Royale was so beloved, people now expect more. The film has to be better.”

Meeting Forster entails an element of cloak and dagger that would have done Ian Fleming proud. It involves directions to a nameless, numberless building in Soho and ringing a bell marked “Savile Row”. There’s no intercom, so someone comes down and casts a furtive glance up and down the street before whisking you in. Tucked away upstairs in an editing suite, you find the director — a tall, shaven-headed Swiss national, 38 years old, who dresses in black and could feasibly pass as Blofeld’s sprightlier nephew. He is very pleasant and speaks in slow, German-accented English. Even so, the nerves are jangling. “This is crazy, this is absolutely abnormal,” Forster groans. “I only have, like, five weeks to cut the movie. Usually, I reflect, I make decisions, I cut it again, I look at the rhythm, because a film, when you cut, it’s a piece of music. But the whole journey of this film is very different than anything I have ever experienced.”

The first thing you are compelled to ask Forster is what the hell he’s doing helming a Bond flick. Forget that he’s the franchise’s first non-Commonwealth director (though, according to Fleming, the agent’s mother was Swiss), Forster is one of the most sought-after directors around, a man who has made his name with an eclectic mix of sensitive, decidedly nonaction fare. There was the grim Monster’s Ball (2001), which earned Halle Berry an Oscar (until she blew her credit by appearing in, ahem, a Bond film); the awards-showered Finding Neverland, with Johnny Depp as JM Barrie; the surreal fantasy Stranger Than Fiction; and an adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, with dialogue largely in Dari and Pashto.

His only stab at a thriller, Stay, can be found in all good DVD stores. Reportedly, the Quantum producers wanted “an art-house movie”.

“My agent called me and said, ‘They want to offer you Bond. Are you interested?’,” Forster recounts. “I said, ‘Not really.’ He said, ‘They’d like to meet you.’ And I said, ‘Look, I’m not going to do it, there’s no point.’” He was eventually shoehorned into a room with the producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, daughter and stepson of the mogul Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, and keepers of the Bond flame. They argued that Forster was just the sort of chap to further Bond’s new serious direction. “It was a pleasant meeting, and I liked them. They were much more open than I ever would have thought, because you hear these stories of them being protective of the franchise — there’s a sort of machine in place, and you become a manager, and I wasn’t interested in doing that.” They assured him he could do whatever he wanted within the framework of the Bond tradition, and could bring in his own people. “But,” says Forster, “I still wasn’t convinced.”

At New York University’s film school, Forster’s heroes were Fellini, Antonioni and Bergman. He’d been stubborn enough to turn down Brokeback Mountain for artistic reasons. He liked the early Bonds, he says — “Dr No, Goldfinger, I thought they were ahead of their time” — but had no intention of directing one. Then they wheeled out the secret weapon, Daniel Craig. “So I met with him,” Forster says. “I thought, ‘He’s really real. There’s no bullshit. I felt like I wanted to work with this guy.’ The next thing I knew, I was on a plane.” Thus was Quantum of Solace born. “What scared me,” he continues, “was that there was no script.” A minor problem in the world of Bond.

Quantum of Solace has 007 in hot pursuit of a villain named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Almaric), a purported environmentalist who’s really intent on nicking Bolivia’s water supply. The story features the usual repertoire of travel-brochure set pieces: the Palio horse race in Siena; the lakeside opera at Bregenz; scenes in Chile and Panama. It has a theme tune by Jack White and Alicia Keys (“I thought with Amy [Winehouse] it was going to work out, then it didn’t”, is all Forster will offer), and two Bond girls: our own Gemma Arterton and, the result of an exhaustive global trawl, the Ukrainian Olga Kurylenko. “It was an amazing thing to find a beautiful woman who could act and speak English.”

Such things cannot mask an indisputable fact: the film’s title is a stinker. “I felt the same as you,” Forster concedes, relaying how he was summoned to the Broccoli office and they’d stuck it up on the wall. “They said, ‘Look, what do you think?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ I just felt, ‘That sounds a little strange. How commercial is this?’ I just wasn’t so sure. But the longer I have lived with the title, the more I like it. I think it really works.”

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