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THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS.

The eye, steely blue in color, possesses a piercing, chilling gaze that is both eerie and enigmatic. Standing roughly 30 meters tall and 50 meters wide, this giant, movable painted iris -- a surreal sight by even the most Dali-esque standards -- is the centerpiece of the production of Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca that's currently being performed at the Seebühne floating stage on the shores of Lake Constance in Bregenz, Austria. Several hundred people in evening attire were gathered at the Seebühne (or Lake Stage) earlier this week. They were not, however, there for Tosca, but rather to serve as extras in a scene being shot for the upcoming James Bond film, Quantum of Solace.

Rotten Tomatoes and our sister sites IGN.com, MySpace.com, and AskMen.com were among the select few media outlets invited to the set. We were there to see director Marc Forster film a sequence in which 007 (played once again by Daniel Craig) attends a production of Tosca at the Lake Stage in order to spy on the story's central villain, Dominic Greene (portrayed by Mathieu Amalric). Still nursing a broken heart over the betrayal and loss of his beloved Vesper Lynd at the end of Casino Royale, Bond has vowed to track down those responsible for her treachery and suicide. Casino Royale ends as 007 locates Vesper's contact Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), an important player in this shadowy network, at his gorgeous lakeside estate in Italy and then shoots him in the knee before making his first introduction as "Bond, James Bond."

Quantum of Solace picks up almost immediately where Casino Royale left off, with Bond interrogating Mr. White in order to find out who his associates are. Bond's quest for answers -- and possibly revenge -- leads him to the Festival Opera House in Bregenz. The scene that we observed being filmed takes place early on in the story. A tuxedo-clad Bond tracks Mr. White to the opera, where a meeting between White and his fellow conspirators -- including Greene and his henchman Elvis (played by Anatole Taubman) -- is taking place during the first-act Te Deum scene of Puccini's Tosca.

Bond, as Quantum director Marc Forster explained, "is trying to figure out who these people are and what is the relationship between them, because he's realizing just how many there are. He's trying to figure out how they are connected because the interesting thing is we have several bad guys in this movie. Dominic Greene is the lead one but there are a couple of other ones and he's trying to connect them all." After noticing that the bad guys are communicating with each other via ear pieces, Bond manages to procure one -- you can imagine how -- so that he can eavesdrop on them. After observing their movements from backstage, Bond makes his way down into the seating area, passing by Mr. White, who wryly comments to his date as several of the "guests" begin to leave the auditorium, "Tosca isn't for everyone."