Bond star Daniel Craig on Spectre

The brazen cheek of arriving in Rome and blocking off the roads around the spiritual home of the Catholic Church is typical of the Bond films. Is the Pope aware that Mr Bond is here? “Nothing happens in Rome without his knowledge,” nods Barbara Broccoli, the film’s chic 55-year-old producer and daughter of the Bond films’ legendary overseer, Albert R "Cubby" Broccoli. Somehow you suspect even His Holiness won’t be able to resist watching Ian Fleming’s super-spy in action.

After all, Spectre comes in the wake of 2012’s Skyfall, which grossed a franchise-best tally of $1.1 billion, beating the next most lucrative entry in the series, Casino Royale, by $500 million. Arriving in time for Bond’s 50th anniversary, Skyfall won two Oscars, two Baftas and reams of critical adulation, paying homage to the series amid an engrossing story – one that took Bond back to his family pile in the Highlands (as every Bond fan knows, his father came from Glencoe and Bond was educated at a private school in Edinburgh).

With scenes shot close to the peaks of Buachaille Etive Mor and Buachaille Etive Beag, Skyfall’s conclusion with the death of Bond’s superior M (Judi Dench) was the most emotional scene in a 007 movie since his new bride is murdered at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. With Ralph Fiennes’ minister Gareth Mallory now promoted to the role of M and Naomie Harris’ agent Eve revealed as MI6 stalwart Miss Moneypenny, Skyfall set the bar so high, the team had its work cut out to deliver on Spectre.

Already the crew has been in Solden, Austria, filming in the energy-sapping, high-altitude Rettenbach glacier for yet another classic Bond-in-the-snow moment. After Rome, they'll head to Mexico City to shoot the film’s opening sequence, recreating the Day of the Dead festival – complete with 1,500 extras all dressed in costume – as Bond pursues a target through the city’s massive Zocalo Square. Then there’s Morocco in the 45C heat, where the production will stage “the largest explosion in cinema history”, according to Broccoli.

So is this the biggest Bond ever? If Spectre is setting out to top its predecessor, Daniel Craig is too wise to say so. Since making his debut in Casino Royale, the film that reshaped Bond for the 21st century, he’s learned to dampen expectation. “Hubris the enemy of filmmaking,” he says. “To say, ‘Yeah, we’ve got a great movie’ would just be stupid of me. I think we’ve done the best we could and that’s pretty good – considering who we’ve got in the movie, and who was on the crew, and who the director is.”

It is not until the end of the shoot that I meet Craig in a London hotel just a few hundred metres from Westminster Bridge, where another show-stopping sequence takes place. After an eight-month shoot that’s spanned three continents, he’s exhausted. “Life takes second place, which is terrible, and I’m not alone. The crew are in the same boat. We sometimes work terrible hours and the crew don’t see their families for weeks on end. It’s really tough, and you have to look after each other, jolly each other along a bit, because it sucks – but we all love doing what we do.”

It’s not been easy for Craig, who was labelled "James Bland" in the tabloids before his opening salvo in Casino Royale blew detractors away. How does he cope with the pressure of playing Bond? “The way I dealt with it on this movie, more than I’ve done it on any other movie, is just to block everything out,” he says. “All I wanted to do is treat this like an acting job. I knew the script. I’ve been working on it with Sam [Mendes, Spectre’s director] for a long, long time. I know it inside out. I know what’s going on.”

Adding much more grit and steel to the character than was ever seen when the likes of Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan played him, Craig’s laser focus is almost Bond-like in its intensity. “When I’m shooting, I come on set – I have earphones, I listen to music, and then I do my job and I act, and have as much fun as I possibly can,” he explains. “And that’s the way it went from beginning to end. That’s the way of dealing with the pressure. I could be thinking, ‘Oh my God, how’s this going to be? What’s that going to look like?’ But I just let it all go.”

The night I arrive in Rome, Craig has already shot his scenes for the car chase and is safely ensconced back at Pinewood Studios with Mendes, working on some dialogue scenes in a story that reunites Bond with Spectre, the terrorist organisation that plagued 007 when Sean Connery played the character. Tonight, it’s the turn of the stunt drivers, as Bond in his Aston Martin DB10 is pursued by the villainous Mr Hinx (played by Guardians of the Galaxy star Dave Bautista), driving a monstrous-looking Jaguar C-X75.

Around 9.30pm, rehearsals begin, the cars revving their engines into the night sky. Driving the silver Aston Martin is championship-winning rally driver Mark Higgins, dressed in a replica of 007’s Tom Ford suit and even sporting an Omega watch. Behind the wheel of the Jag is Russian-born Martin Ivanov, who doubled for Craig on 2008’s Quantum of Solace. Underneath his suit, he’s wearing padding to emulate the shape of the man-mountain that is Bautista.

For any motoring enthusiast, this is absolute heaven. “Both cars are one-off pieces,” explains the 52-year-old Powell, whose brother, father and uncle all were stunt men on Bond films. “The Jag – there are rumours it may go into production, and I really hope it does, because it’s an absolutely stunning car. And what we’re driving is a car built for us.” He smiles as a thought comes to him. “The car is a beast. The villain we’ve got is a beast and we’ve got a beast of a car for the villain.”

A former professional wrestler and mixed martial artist, Bautista is certainly a beast when it comes to his physique. “The best henchman we could ever hope to have,” grins Craig. “We wanted to get a big guy, and God bless most big guys, they don’t move particularly fast. David is the fastest human being I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m sure his 100 metres is at least a second and a half faster than mine. And that’s what we wanted him to bring – that physical presence. We wanted him to be scary.”

Yet Hinx is just one element to Spectre, which is rumoured to be the longest Bond film yet. While the plot is a closely-guarded secret, early footage has revealed that Bond will re-encounter Mr White (Jesper Christensen), an agent of the Quantum organisation first glimpsed in Casino Royale and still at large at the end of Quantum of Solace. This makes him the first recurring Bond villain since the days of Richard Kiel’s metal-mouthed Jaws, and it is White who seemingly leads Bond towards Spectre.

With the story beginning directly after the events of Skyfall (just as Quantum followed immediately on from Casino Royale), it gives the Craig-era Bond films an interconnected feel that the previous movies never had. “I wasn’t sure at first, but I’m pleased with the way things have turned out,” admits Craig. “I think it really informed the story. It seemed right to continue it. As Sam says, the Bonds I’ve done – he gets older. He’s not just Bond in each movie. He’s like the guy that was in the last movie, whose been affected by things.”

Leading Spectre's terrorist network is Franz Oberhauser, a high-ranking member of the organisation played by two-time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz. “The genesis of my participation goes back a few years,” Waltz explains. “I met Barbara and Michael [Wilson, Broccoli’s co-producer] five or six years ago. We talked in general, nothing specific. And then it slowly came together, over the years, and that’s when it happened – it gelled at that moment. It was not that my agent called me and said, ‘Guess what? You’re going to play a Bond villain.’”

Waltz’s casting was not the only thing that took years to come together. Eon Productions was in a legal wrangle with the estate of writer/producer Kevin McClory, a complex battle regarding the cinematic creation of Fleming’s character. When the disputes were settled back in November 2013, it finally freed up Eon to return to Spectre (or the Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, if you prefer) for the first time since 1971’s Diamonds are Forever, Connery’s last "official" Bond outing.

Ever since Spectre was announced as the title, it’s been speculated that Waltz is really playing Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Bond’s major nemesis in the years when Connery played 007. “What am I supposed to say?” protests Waltz. “I can’t say yes, I can’t say no. I mean, I can say no, but my usual response anyway, when people say, ‘Tell me about your character’, I say, ‘Why? That’s not what I do for a living! I play them so you can see them.’”

He does reveal that Oberhauser’s Spectre is a little different from the past, when nuclear missiles were the weapon of choice. “The specific quality of threat has changed within Spectre. We’re not so – except for Putin! – remembering that the Cold War was a cool thing. We haven’t been so worried about nuclear threats lately. We’ve been worried about what’s going on in the cyber-sphere. We have reason to be worried about the transparency that is being imposed upon us against our will.”

Ironically, this very threat almost toppled Spectre when security at Sony Pictures – the studio behind the film – was breached late last year. Along with numerous scandalous emails exchanged between studio chiefs, an early draft of the Spectre script was leaked online. “Fortunately, it was an old script,” says Broccoli. “The rest of the stuff was nonsense really … about us having fights about the budget. Well, what’s new? Producers fighting with the studio over money! We want to put all the money on the screen. We want to deliver the best film, so we fight for as much money as we can.”

Broccoli is particularly pleased with her choice of actresses this time around – notably the Italian siren Monica Bellucci. “I wanted Monica Bellucci for 20 years. And I really thought she was the one that got away.” But when the role of the widowed Lucia Sciarra came along, Bellucci was ideal – despite, at 50, being the oldest Bond girl ever. “To think that I’m 50 and I’m in this project ..." Bellucci marvels. “But I try to say ‘James Bond lady’ or ‘James Bond woman’, because of course I’m not a James Bond girl.”

It’s just one example of how the franchise managed to reinvent itself for modern audiences. “I think what is beautiful in this Bond is that Sam Mendes and Daniel Craig created a really special Bond,” says Bellucci. “So modern, so unpredictable … even though I love Sean Connery. This [is a] Bond who's completely in control, who kills, who loves women. This Bond has the instinct of death. He’s struggled. He’s looking for himself. This James Bond is more mysterious, more dark, more dangerous, but also very sexy because of that.”

Then there’s Lea Seydoux. The French actor from the Cannes-winning Blue is the Warmest Colour plays psychologist Madeleine Swann, who – it transpires – is the daughter to the aforementioned Mr White. “It’s something I’ve never played before in a film,” she says. “My characters are always kind of tortured and not very feminine. They don’t have a very obvious femininity. It was, I think, the first time I really played a woman. When I saw some footage of the film, I didn’t recognise myself. I was going, ‘Ah, I’m a woman. I look like a woman.’”

Back on the set in Rome, crowds have gathered, armed with iPads and selfie sticks, to watch Higgins and Ivanov perform a sequence from the car chase, as the Aston Martin and the Jaguar squeal around a corner close to the Vatican then disappear through a narrow archway. Capturing the footage is the EDGE, a car that comes with a crane-mounted camera sitting on its roof, remotely controlled by a co-pilot inside the vehicle. It's a relatively new innovation that has already been used to shoot the mind-blowing stunts in Mad Max: Fury Road. When I’m invited to sit in the passenger seat, I hear the word "action" over the radio mics and the two cars come skidding around the corner. Seconds later, my driver plants his foot down and the EDGE accelerates dramatically behind the two cars, only coming to a halt after both have driven through the archway.

It’s a thrilling moment, enough to make you buy into that classic Carly Simon Bond theme song, Nobody Does It Better (Spectre’s Writing’s on the Wall, by Sam Smith, doesn’t quite have the same triumphant ring to it). While it leaves me with delusions that I could clearly take over the 47-year-old Craig when he quits the role, Broccoli has other ideas. “I certainly intend to have him carry on for ever,” she says, despite recent comments in Time Out from Craig saying: “If I did another Bond movie, it would only be for the money.”

Doubtless Craig will change his tune as the memory of an exhausting Spectre shoot recedes, but Broccoli refuses to even entertain the idea of another actor playing 007 – even if the bookies have installed the likes of Idris Elba, Damian Lewis and Tom Hiddlestone as favourites. “It’s like asking a woman walking down the aisle who’s your next husband,” she says, a defiant smile crosses her lips. “It’s him and that’s it. I don’t want to think about anything else.”

If she has anything to do with it, James Bond – and Daniel Craig – will return.

Spectre (TBC) is released on October 26.