20 Things You Didn’t Know About Quantum Of Solace (2008)
11. “So They Called Us And We Facilitated A Change.”
Dominic Greene refers to the February 2004 coup d’état against Haiti's first democratically-elected leader, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He suggests that corporations making T-shirts and tennis shoes in Haiti contacted Quantum because Aristide raised the national minimum wage from 38 cents per hour to $1 per hour.
During filming, Mathieu Amalric observed that Colón on the Caribbean side of Panama, which represented Haiti in the film, was a real-life representation of his character's motivations.
On a day off, the French actor visited the archipelago of San Blas, which comprises 365 islands and cays along the northern coast of Panama “with just sand and coconut trees, and Indians that live there. No tourists, or [very] few tourists.... So I just spent one day in a postcard, really a cliché of happiness, just eating fish and swimming in blue water”.
However, generally, he considered that Panama “is just becoming a big, big tourist centre. Hotels are being built absolutely everywhere. They don’t have enough cement; they have to import cement from Russia because it’s just expanding everywhere. Big companies are making a lot of money here”.