Fighting evil in the garden of Eden

The giant white domes nestling, like enormous golf balls in a bunker, at the bottom of a 34-acre former china clay pit in Cornwall resemble something out of a James Bond movie. They would, you think, surveying the scene from the top of the hill, make a perfect headquarters for one of those megalomaniacs bent on world domination that 007 faces in each fresh adventure.

The shock is that if you had ventured into the domes that make up the world's largest greenhouse, the £86m Eden Project near St Austell, the other weekend, you would indeed have come face to face with the latest Bond villain, Gustav Graves, as impersonated by British actor Toby Stephens.

Bond 20 - as the movie was known for the first two months of shooting until finally acquiring the title Die Another Day this week - chose the Eden Project for scenes involving Graves at home. A degree of movie magic is involved as the bad guy's hangout is actually in Iceland, not Cornwall. The interiors of his ice palace are being constructed on the massive 007 sound stage at Pinewood Studios, Buckinghamshire.

This is the twentieth in the series and comes 40 years after the first adaptation featuring Ian Fleming's secret agent, Dr No, opened in cinemas. Other locations include Hawaii, Spain and Iceland itself, but few could be so appropriate as the Eden Project, which has welcomed almost two million visitors in its first year of opening and been dubbed the eighth wonder of the world.

You can imagine an outlandish Bond adversary living here in the two giant conservatories, or biomes, where humid and temperate climates have been created to house plants from all over the world.

When the paying visitors leave at closing time, the film-makers set to work. Massive movie-making lights have been set up and miles of electrical cable laid around the humid tropics biome, the bigger of the two pods. Cameras have been mounted on platforms and a rope dangles from the roof. Down this rope slides a slim, unmistakably female, figure in a skin-tight leather suit, a gun in her hand. Take after take, she is lowered from the top of the 55 metre high dome and makes a smooth landing among the greenery.

This is Jinx, one of the obligatory James Bond girls, in a tale involving what the press synopsis enigmatically describes as "betrayal, hi-tech weaponry and military domination on a large scale". No one involved in the project will to give away too much. Secrets need to be saved for the film's release in November when Die Another Day will face stiff competition from blockbusters including the second instalments of Harry Potter and The Lord Of The Rings.

American actress Halle Berry plays Jinx, although she's not the person on the rope. That's her stunt double. Berry is elsewhere, no doubt wondering about her chances of collecting an Oscar at the end of the month after being nominated for Monsters Ball.

She's missing, but Toby Stephens, actor son of Maggie Smith and the late Robert Stephens, is to be found somewhere in the tropical rainforest, waterfall and thousands of plants that make up the Eden Project.

This is the first day of filming for an actor who's made his name on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company, including the title role in Coriolanus, and in TV series such as The Camomile Lawn and Tenant of Wildfell Hall, but has yet to break into movies. Playing a Bond villain is as surefire a way as any of getting noticed.

"I haven't had a huge run playing the character but being a baddie is great fun because one gets to exercise a piece of one's personality and one can run rampant," he says, in possibly the poshest voice you've ever heard come from a Bond villain.

So how bad is Graves? "He's bad," replies Stephens with relish. "I've watched a lot of the old Bond movies. I did go off and trail through them to see what had been done because you want to bring something new to the game.

"The thing about Bond villains is they have henchmen to do the really dirty work. You have various freaks to do the nasty stuff."

Although they met at the pre-production press launch, he has yet to square up to Pierce Brosnan's Bond in front of the cameras. The current screen 007 is missing from the set, out of action for two weeks after injuring himself on set.

Brosnan wants to do one more Bond movie after this, and then the role is up for grabs. As a fit young British actor, Stephens might well have been considered a contender to take up the licence to kill before he played a villain. "I would be lying if I said I didn't want to play James Bond. Every guy has aspirations to be Bond when they are a kid, but I never took the idea seriously," he says.

For him, Brosnan is the best Bond because he's "completely remade" the role. "Everyone has their own personal favourite," he admits. "Over the years, I've seen them over and over again. Having got this part, I looked at the three Pierce Brosnan has done and he has all the ingredients required."

He rates Charles Gray, who played SPECTRE's number one Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever, as probably the best villain.

Director Lee Tamahori also views Brosnan as the quintessential 007, while his favourite movie is between Goldfinger and From Russia With Love, two of the early entries in the cinema's most successful franchise.

Nowadays, producers Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli change directors for each film rather than having the same director work on two or three in a row. New Zealander Tamahori's record has been patchy since the blistering drama Once Were Warriors. Hollywood movies The Edge with Anthony Hopkins, Mulholland Falls and Along Came A Spider have been only modest successes.

Shooting Die Another Day for six months on locations around the world requires massive amounts of energy, so changing directors from film to film makes sense. "We all want to try our hands at one but don't want to make a living out of them," he says.

"You get wrung out like a rag, but pleasurably. There's never five minutes to spare because you are always making some decision that has to be implemented some weeks, maybe months, from now. It's a huge machine but I like it, only because I know it's going to stop one day."

He's aware that fans dictate the Bond formula remains unaltered, but is hopeful the script takes a slightly different route than usual. "I know there's a requirement to keep Bond as he is. But he's betrayed at the beginning of the movie and that leads down a path of retribution for 100 pages of the script. He's a loner like he was in the books, the blunt instrument that he was in Fleming's books," he explains.

There is also the unspoken obligation to top the previous movie, to come up with stunts and action sequences even more breathtaking than last time.

"It's only difficult because it's all been done before. There have been 19 Bond films so there's nothing that's not been seen. That makes it a little tricky," he says.

* Die Another Day opens in cinemas on November 22.

* For information about the Eden Project check out www.edenproject.com