by Sean Egan
Brosnan had proven himself a different kind of Bond actor when in 1990 his disapproval of French atomic tests in the South Pacific caused the cancellation of the French premiere of GoldenEye. While that particular incident was probably beneficial – bolstering the notion of a modernised 007 – his flirtation with a man with whom they had only recently been in a bidding war may have been a step too far for Eon. Could Tarantino be the reason they decided not to engage Brosnan’s services again? Martin Campbell, the man who did end up directing Casino Royale, says not: ‘Frankly I’ve never heard that. You generally hear that sort of stuff.’ One thing not in dispute is that the decision was a shock.
Pierce Brosnan had made Die Another Day after his initial three-picture deal had expired. As it had done $456 million worldwide, it wasn’t too surprising that Eon initially gave every public indication that the option on Brosnan’s services would be taken up again. However, sometime in 2003, the powers-that-be in 007 World began publicly humming and hawing over the issue of Brosnan’s continuing. In September, for instance, an MGM spokesman said of the issue of the actor’s presence in the next film, ‘Once we get a director then I think we can get into casting.’ In 2004, while filming After the Sunset, Brosnan was stunned to receive a call from his agent telling him that it had been decided by Eon not to continue negotiations with him.
That Brosnan was asking for what Eon and/or MGM considered too much money has been mooted as a reason for the actor’s departure. Campbell has a different theory: ‘There was a feeling from the Broccolis that perhaps the previous Bond, they’d gone a little bit too fantastical with it. They thought it needed a complete rethink tonally and I think then they got the idea of doing Casino Royale, simply because they wanted to reboot. And of course Casino is a prequel to everything, so I think Pierce’s age put him out of the running.’
Whatever the reason, the upshot was that Brosnan was unequivocally the first actor to leave the Bond role involuntarily. Brosnan told Bruce Kirkland of the Edmonton Sun, ‘I accepted the knowledge after 24 hours of being in shock.’
Whatever the temporary element of humiliation in his exit, Brosnan can, in the clear light of day, look back with pride on his 007 legacy. His Bond managed to successfully combine the grittiness seen in Dalton’s films with the larger-than-life spectacle that – for good or ill – the public has come to expect of the franchise. There was also even an element of providence in his dismissal: as a consequence of it, he was the first long-term Bond who did not go into a protracted decline in either his physical appearance or the quality of scripts he was given.
Of being enticed back to Bond to direct the new version of Casino Royale, Martin Campbell explains, ‘Again: new actor, whole new tone to Bond. We wanted to go back to the tone of the books.’
There was, though, a bit of an issue with this particular book. ‘Nothing happens,’ Campbell says of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale. Naturally this is not literally true, but there were multiple problems presented by the book’s lengthy passages of baccarat and other elements that would make for nothing but a longueur in the context of a motion picture. He says, ‘We put the whole beginning of the story in with a lot of action, we had that airport sequence with a lot of action, but the real problem was there came suddenly this point where three sections of the movie were broken up into card games and the question was, “How do you hold the audience’s attention?” That was a big worry. What I realised was, it’s not the game itself: it’s the guys playing the game that is really the secret to it. So I just had to cover the hell out of it basically and get as much tension into those games as I possibly could.’ An additional solution was the shuffling-in of action during the game: ‘It’s broken up a little bit by the sequence where he gets poisoned and the sequence in the stairwell where the guys that Chiffre owes money to attack him.’
The previous franchise reboot that inaugurated the Brosnan era had gently mocked the series’ signatures. This reboot quite ferociously pulled them apart and reassembled them, not necessarily whole. It also dispensed with levity. This Bond was far too grim a figure for even gallows humour. Characters with double-entendre names were also out of the question.
While Brosnan’s Bond was an updated one, it was still recognisably a part of the same franchise as the Roger Moore films. The new Bond was so dark in tone as to make one wonder what somebody who enjoyed, say, Octopussy might have got out of him, raising questions as to whether the reboot was working against the Bond films’ notional audience. ‘I don’t remember discussing that with them,’ Campbell says of the producers. ‘I think they just trusted their judgement. That’s what Barbara and Michael do. There were no long discussions about who’s likely to see this, does it alter the demographics.’
Five months before the release of Die Another Day, a rival espionage film series featuring another agent with the initials ‘JB’ – CIA operative Jason Bourne – had released its opening instalment. A sequel followed in 2004 and a third was now in preparation. Based on novels by Robert Ludlum, the Bourne films spurned stylisation for grit and featured a protagonist riddled with insecurities and uncertainty. Many suspected that the new brooding Bond timbre constituted a deliberate quest not to be left behind by Bourne. While Campbell concedes that the Bourne films were ‘probably subconsciously an influence’, he denies that Eon nudged him: ‘The Bourne films are terrific but they’re so different really. Bond is a fantasy figure, Bourne is a very realistic figure.’
Casino Royale was to take Bond back to the days when he was earning his stripes (or, rather, his double-O number). More than two decades previously, Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson had contemplated making the first post-Roger Moore Bond movie an origin story. Their vision of a reckless young naval officer who acquires a maturity through secret-agent work was vetoed by Cubby Broccoli, who considered the appeal of Bond to be founded on the very opposite of such callowness. Now the confluence of acquiring rights to the very first James Bond story and the determination to scale back the fantasy provided the impetus and opportunity to revive that origin-story concept.
Along with this intoxicating resolve for a new direction, though, came logic-related headaches. The most pronounced of these resulted from the decision to retain Judi Dench as M. Reasons Campbell, ‘If you think of M, God she’d be about ninety. You’ve still got her as M even though she’s been in all those other movies as well, which presumably happened after this movie. We said, “Look, if you start applying that logic it’ll never work.”’ Thus was brought about the most audacious of all the recalibration decisions: to make the film a ‘hard’ reboot. Casino Royale resets the clock, effectively pretending that all other James Bond films never happened. Unencumbered by previous Bond continuity, the writers now had almost unprecedented freedom.
It was perhaps incongruous that Eon hired Purvis & Wade for the project. As well as the derided Die Another Day, the writing pair were responsible for the subsequent Rowan Atkinson Bond spoof Johnny English. That and their technology orientation did not suggest that they could get with Casino Royale’s naturalistic programme. However, Campbell says that it can’t be inferred that there was something wrong with the first draft from the fact that ‘Paul Haggis did an extensive rewrite on it.’ He says, ‘It was mainly the character parts. The love story, all of that with Vesper was the key to it all, and that’s what Haggis is marvellous at doing. He did a complete sweep through the script.’ Purvis & Wade and Paul Haggis (note the legal distinctions as regards collaboration created by ampersand and ‘and’) created a story that, while it sang with love for the cinema Bond, also stayed true to his grittier literary roots. The result was easily the best 007 picture since the sixties.
Few would have predicted this from the incredulous reception that greeted the announcement in October 2005 that the sixth Eon James Bond was to be Daniel Craig.
As before, Campbell was involved in the casting of a new Bond. ‘Because of the tone change, it was a little more difficult to actually focus in on who was going
to play Bond, whereas with Pierce it was very obvious,’ he recalls. In the end it came down to two actors. One was Henry Cavill, a square-jawed, almost impossibly handsome twenty-two-year-old who has since gone on to fame by playing Superman and Napoleon Solo. Campbell: ‘He was close. He did a very good test, but the consensus was he was a little too young for Bond.’ Born in March 1968 and raised on Merseyside, Daniel Craig was a fine actor, notable for his appearances in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Perdition and Layer Cake. However, his thespian chops were no more the issue than the fact that he was ‘only’ five-foot-eleven. What aroused the ire of long-term Bond fans and inspired a tidal wave of Internet protest was that Craig was (1) strawberry blonde and (2) not straightforwardly handsome.
Blonde was a big problem not simply because of the issue of tradition (even if Moore was not that much darker in his early Bond films). Fairly or unfairly, blonde hair is synonymous with lack of gravitas. Moreover, while Craig is hardly unattractive, his face is a bit wide, his eyes are somewhat small and his nose is not exactly chiselled. He simply did not conform to the standard pattern of male beauty that had always been embraced by the Bond series and without which, it was assumed, Bond’s ladykiller status would not be believable. Moreover, while he had the requisite clipped accent, Craig’s rough-hewn air did not suggest a denizen of casinos, exclusive gentlemen’s clubs and fine restaurants. It hardly helped that, when Craig was introduced as the next Bond, a dramatic arrival on board a speedboat at a media conference was undermined by his looking like a wimp because Britain’s pedantic health-and-safety laws required him to wear a life jacket over his suit.
A further problem arose when the fact was made public that Casino Royale would be an origin story. Although Craig was the first actor under the age of forty to play Bond since George Lazenby, he had a been-around-the-block mien. Previously one of his few plus-points for his naysayers, it now seemed to make a nonsense of the idea that he was to play a rookie.
Campbell recalls, ‘They slagged him off something terrible. “We’ve got a blonde guy, he looks like President Putin.” The usual British press negative reaction.’ Craig has admitted he collapsed into a depression for twenty-four hours over the reaction to his casting. Campbell: ‘I must say to his credit, he came in one day when we were filming very early on and I said to him, “You obviously don’t read this bullshit on the Internet and so forth?” He said, “Yep. I read every bit of it. I need to, because I know all the crew have read it and everybody else. I just like to keep up to date.” But it never affected him. He just pushed through it. He didn’t care.’ The only thing Craig did seem to care about was his craft. Campbell: ‘He took it very, very seriously. He had something to prove, Daniel.’
Although the mounting costs of shooting in the highly industrialised countries saw filming transfer to Prague, Campbell had freedom in matters fiduciary. ‘It was good,’ he says of his funding situation. ‘I think the budget was 150 [million dollars], which we came in on budget, and I think with tax reductions it came to 134.’
One indication of a change of style is the fact that Campbell opens Casino Royale in black-and-white. Explains the director, ‘It’s bleak, it’s Prague, it’s in the past. The other thing was, I wanted the first colour on the screen to be the blood running down the top of the frame [from] the rifle barrel, which gave a terrific contrast.’ In this noir-ish pre-title sequence, Bond is shown killing treacherous section chief Dryden (Darwin Shaw). He has been dispatched to do so by M.
It is revealed that acquiring the double-O status takes two kills, and Dryden is Bond’s second. This is in keeping with the two kills that earned Bond the status in the original novel, although is not in keeping with the altered meaning of the term: Double-O can hardly mean a licence to kill if one has to kill to earn it.
The first kill – an accomplice of Dryden – is shown in flashback and involves Bond spinning and shooting, which forms the gun-barrel sequence. ‘I tried to make it the origin story of the gun barrel,’ explains Campbell. ‘So, when the bad guy is picking up the gun, that is the gun barrel he’s about to kill Bond with and Bond shoots him first, and that becomes the stylised blood coming down the top of the frame.’ This is the first occasion that the gun barrel sequence follows, rather than precedes, the pre-title sequence and the first occasion that it is not accompanied by ‘The James Bond Theme’. As it takes place after a vicious fight in a toilet, it’s also the first in which Bond is open-collared.
The credits state, ‘Based on the novel by Ian Fleming’ – amazingly, the first time this formula of words has ever been used in the franchise. Said credits are knowledgeable, being based on Ian Fleming’s playing-card cover design for the first edition of the book. Notable for their absence among the battling silhouettes, gun motifs and cascades of spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds are the traditional slinky, underclothed female figures. It’s rather a pity that this is accompanied by ‘You Know My Name’, a piece of featureless rock by Chris Cornell, written in collaboration with David Arnold, although the latter at least adds some impressive production swells and punches.
While the book’s characters and overall structure are maintained, various tweaks and updatings are applied. Le Chiffre is gambling away not the funds of SMERSH but the capital of terrorists and insurgents, to whom his unnamed organisation is a private banker. The location of the central card contest is moved to Montenegro, while baccarat is jettisoned for poker. The latter is not only a game more readily understandable to the masses but one that gives rise to intrigue about Le Chiffre’s ‘tell’ – a physical tic that gives away when a player is bluffing about his hand. The objective of the Secret Service/MI6 (as they are alternately called) wiping out Le Chiffre is not to cause financial problems for the enemy but to put the man in a position of such danger that he will take up MI6’s offer of sanctuary in exchange for providing information on his organisation, which is believed to be connected to the 9/11 attack.
Although since Brosnan’s debut we have become used to the dialogue and character interplay being modernistically sceptical of the series’ traditions, values and nomenclature, this film takes it much further. M, for instance, says to 007, ‘I would ask you if you could remain emotionally detached but I don’t think that’s your problem, is it, Bond?’ Bond says, ‘Vesper? I do hope you gave your parents hell for that.’ Vesper herself (Eva Green) is the very opposite of the drip the character constitutes in the original book. She is an HM Treasury official who provides the funding for Bond to participate in the poker game. (When she introduces herself with, ‘I’m the money’ and he responds, ‘Every penny of it,’ it is the closest the movie comes to including M’s secretary, absent for the very first time.) Vesper is disdainful of Bond. After Bond has sneered at her for trying to compensate for her beauty with masculine clothes and a prickly manner, which he suspects undermine the very chances of the promotion she is trying to assist, she responds with her own theorising: ‘By the cut of your suit, you went to Oxford or wherever and actually think human beings dress like that. But you wear it with such disdain, my guess is you didn’t come from money and your schoolfriends never let you forget it … hence the chip on your shoulder. And since your first thought about me ran to orphan that’s what I’d say you are … And that makes perfect sense, since MI6 looks for maladjusted young men that give little thought to sacrificing others in order to protect Queen and country …’ She also turns Bond-girl objectification on its head: ‘You think of women as disposable pleasures rather than meaningful pursuits. So, as charming as you are, Mr Bond, I will be keeping my eye on our government’s money – and off your perfectly formed arse.’
Campbell says that this soliloquy was deliberately an equivalent of M’s misogynist-dinosaur speech from GoldenEye: ‘It was a real reality check for Bond. And that of course is why he admires her, because she’s got the balls to do it.’ Of course, we know this is all hogwash on one level – Bond will get this ice maiden into bed and the series will continue on the same path of sex, violence
and breast-beating it always has. Moreover, whatever realism is in evidence, Bond will never be depicted wearing glasses to read his top-secret documents or unable to achieve an erection when trying to seduce Bond girls. However, it’s all a far cry from the unchallenged swaggering of Connery and Moore. Moreover, it’s the sort of stuff that makes even the once cutting-edge Brosnan films already seem slightly tame and antiquated.
Despite the predominant realism, the first chase scene – set in Madagascar – involves, as ever for Bond films, supreme athleticism, preternatural reaction time, incredible fearlessness and the heedless endangerment of many innocent bystanders. It exploits current interest in Parkour, the street sport that involves the use of public fixtures as climbing frames, with ‘free running’ superstar Sébastien Foucan cast as villain Mollaka. It’s an indication of where the franchise is now heading that Foucan’s breathtaking facility is juxtaposed with Bond’s occasional hesitancy and clumsiness.
The film is an even better trainspotting opportunity for Bond aficionados than Die Another Day. For instance, when Bond follows a clue on Mollaka’s phone to Nassau, he participates in a card game with his accomplice Dimitrios (Simon Abkarian). The prize he ends up winning is a 1964 Aston Martin (although with a left-hand drive appropriate for the Bahamas). Another example is M calling Bond a ‘blunt instrument’.
Later on, another Aston Martin – a modern DBS model – is provided 007 by M. The handguns, communications equipment and defibrillator in its concealed trays are the picture’s only significant gadgets. Campbell says that, if discussion turned to anything ‘a little too silly or fantastical’, it would be jettisoned. Nevertheless, Craig’s Bond is a bit of a whizz with IT.