Daniel Craig hasn't been seen in theaters since 2008's Defiance but he'll have four films coming to us this year.  In a few weeks we'll see him in Cowboys & Aliens, he's got the horror flick Dream House in September, he did motion capture for Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, and he wraps up the year with David Fincher's adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  He can expect plenty of questions about Bond 23 and we can expect that he'll answer almost none of them.  However, he is willing to talk Dragon Tattoo in an awkwardly written quasi-interview with Esquire.

Hit the jump to read what Craig had to say about the adult-nature of the film and how Fincher is handling the violence in the story.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens December 21st.

Here's what Craig had to say about how The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the increasingly rare drama for adults:

"It's as adult as you can possibly make it. This is adult drama. I grew up, as we fucking all did, watching The Godfather and that, movies that were made for adults. And this is a $100 million R-rated movie. Nobody makes those anymore. And Fincher, he's not holding back. They've given him free rein. He showed me some scenes recently, and my hand was over my mouth, going, 'Are you fucking serious?'"

And why did Craig find those scenes so shocking?

"[It's] not that he simply showed me footage that was horribly graphic.  It was stuff that was happening, or had happened. And somehow you don't see it... There's more than one way to sense violence.  Much more powerful ways than seeing it step-by-step."

In the Swedish adaptation, director Niels Arden Oplev didn't shy away from the brutality, but it almost felt fetishistic.  [Spoiler Alert] The overall mystery storyline of solving a decades-old disappearance was overshadowed by the rape of Lisbeth Salander by her parole officer and her violent retribution.  That exchange happens in the first act of the story and it makes the mystery storyline feel small.  I have faith that Fincher can reestablish the balance, but the greater problem may lie in the flaws of Steig Larsson's original novel.