The 2006 film Casino Royale was a key part of the iconic James Bond franchise, with Daniel Craig taking over the reins from Pierce Brosnan and giving the character a new edge more fitting with the modern, tougher hero.
Brosnan’s The World Is Not Enough and, particularly, Die Another Day – his final Bond movies – had negative reviews, and with a new actor came a new director, namely Martin Campbell.
Campbell recently revealed to Polygon that the team behind James Bond “wanted to bring it back to the earth” with the film.
He said: “When I came on board, I felt the same way. I felt the whole thing needed to have its feet well and truly on the ground.”
As any genuine poker fan should know, one of the movie’s most exciting plots saw Bond competing against Mads Mikkelsen’s terrorist financier Le Chiffre in a high-stakes game of poker.
Talking about the poker sequences, the director noted that the key to making them ‘convincing’ was that they were not just card games – “It’s the stakes. It’s also two guys’ eye-******* one another, basically. That was the secret.”
During the movie’s production, Stuart Baird, Casino Royale’s editor, was concerned that people might be bored with the movie’s poker scenes.
Campbell made sure that they portrayed Bond’s mental ability and his mortality, referring to Craig’s Bond as “a bull in the china shop,” and that: “He just hurls himself no matter what the dangers are, he’s not really thinking.” Craig’s final Bond movie will be released in April next year.
