The roughly 30-minute casino sequence plays as a masterful microcosm of the movie - it has its own narrative arc, interspersed with punctuations of combat and death-defying shocks, and shows off Bond’s mental prowess and mortality. “Everybody was terribly worried that people would be bored with it.”Ĭampbell cracked it. “It was difficult to think how you keep the audience engaged in those card games,” the movie’s editor Stuart Baird says. Still, Campbell thought, how would he animate this green-felted drama? It was the perfect kind of character to get involved in a high-tension poker game. He made mistakes, but looked good (if occasionally bruised) making them. His Bond was brazen, reckless, emotionally-charged. When Daniel Craig signed on to embody the new direction, he embraced the idea of portraying a vulnerable hero. That meant a contemporary action movie - tougher, grimmer, less reliant on CGI, and more devoted to realism. I felt the whole thing needed to have its feet well and truly on the ground.”

“When I came on board, I felt the same way. “They wanted to bring it back to earth,” Campbell says. By the time Brosnan finished 2002’s Die Another Day, driving invisible cars through ice palaces, Bond producers knew the franchise had shifted into self-parody. Over the next three movies, the stories became excessively kitschy. In 1995, Campbell introduced Pierce Brosnan as Bond with Goldeneye, which moved on from Timothy Dalton’s gritty take into a more fantastical realm. “It was the thing I sweated on more than anything else.” “There was a lot of playing in it,” he tells Polygon. But for Campbell, who had never picked up a deck, it looked like a snooze. The card game, they believed, made for better drama - it was known more widely, required more skill and delivered higher stakes. Loosely adapting Ian Fleming’s 1953 novel of the same name, screenwriters Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis had replaced the author’s original game of baccarat with three big rounds of Texas hold’em. This was his second reboot of the James Bond franchise, and on the cusp of production, he realized the movie’s centerpiece - a showdown between 007 and the blood-eyed villain Le Chiffre - took place around a quiet poker table. The script for Casino Royale worried director Martin Campbell.

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