Casino Royale

Casino Royale is the first book in the Bond novel series, known as the darkest and most literary of the Ian Fleming novels.  The movie rights to this novel were restricted until recently and the producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli decided that they could take on the challenge of this novel’s complex story line about a Soviet operative who squandered money and needed to win it back desperately. To make a relevant movie for the 21^st century required an effective total reworking of the plot into the modern world of terror networks and terroristic finances.  The storyline also presented both the opportunity and the challenge of showing how Bond became a 00 agent.  The amount of change occurring with the Bond character in this script made the produces determine it was time to get a new actor to play James Bond.  After a long four year gap in Bond films, the result was a new film with a number of changes and a complete rebranding of Bond.

The screenwriters wanted to have a single film capturing the spirit of the novel while focusing on the story of how James became James Bond, Agent 007.   Martin Campbell the director of Golden Eye worked with screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade and scriptwriter Paul Haggis to create the filmmaker group for this complex film.  This group  decided on a global reaching cast selecting English actor Daniel Craig as Bond, French actress Eva Green in the very critical role of Vesper Lynd, Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre, Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini as Bond’s liaison, and African – American actor Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter.  The filmmakers also chose sets from around the world to also make this film appealing to a worldwide audience.  Finally the stakes for the critical poker game were raised by bringing poker expert Thomas Sambrook to the set to teach the actors how to play intricate Texas Hold’em Poker convincingly on the big screen which showed much more tense strategy than the original Baccarat Poker game found in the novel.

The strategy of telling the Bond story required perfection from both the sets and the actor.  Daniel Craig undertook three months of training to endure the physically challenging and grueling shots required to tell the story while getting a look of a lean and dangerous man.  Set designers at Pinewood’s 007 stage created the most complex set ever built for a Bond film to replicate the interior of a Venetian villa that crumbles into the Grand Canal by using both a full scale set and a 1/3 size miniature on the set.  Car chases in the film also involved the use of rare and expensive Aston Martin DBS super cars performing world record stunts.  All this action climaxed in the gut-wrenching torture scene leading up to Bond losing his girl.  The results was a colder Bond with a bitter taste in his mouth regarding the death and betrayal of his girl which was reflected in the new theme song “You Know My Name” presenting the essence of the new Bond character.

After creating a high stake film, Casino Royale premiered with Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, in attendance at the 60^th Royal Film Performance in November 2006.  From a “royal” start, this film was accepted by audiences around the globe to become the highest-grossing Bond film of its time and the first Bond film to surpass $100 million at the box office.  Daniel Craig was nominated for Best Actor and he set the new standard for Bond as a harder and colder Bond in a more complex world.