James Bond is back and back to basics. Casino Royale not only tells the story of how the famous secret agent got his license to kill, but also how he developed a taste for martinis and Aston Martins. This is before he met Q though, so this 007 does all his spying without the help of exploding pens or jet packs.
“Any gadget, any kind of effect that happens, is part of the storytelling,” said Craig. “You see at Miami Airport there are a lot of planes landing. They were there to sort of say, ‘We’re in Miami. Here are the planes.’ We couldn’t have planes landing in the back of shots, so we had CGI to give us that. But nothing that you see in the movie, stunt-wise, is not happening. It’s all happening. And if it’s not me doing it, it’s someone else doing it, and they’re getting hurt. You also find out what it’s like falling down a flight of stairs. It feels like you’re falling down a f*cking flight of stairs. And that’s what we wanted to feel. We wanted to feel the pain, the pain in it.”
This Bond still has a way with the ladies, but definitely in the bad boy sort of tradition, as opposed to the lovable scamp Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan played. “I didn’t go out to make him likable. I didn’t go out going, ‘Please like him.’ I wanted him to be somebody who changed. I did not want him to be the same person at the beginning of the movie as he was at the end. And I wasn’t thinking beyond this movie at the time. I was thinking that if we ever do another, we need to have somewhere to go. I wanted to see a fallible human being, somebody that made mistakes, somebody who an audience watches and goes, ‘This might not turn out good. This might turn out really bad.’ And sometimes it did.”
Based on the very first Ian Fleming novel, James Bond’s first adventure has him play a high stakes card game against the evil Le Chiffre. If he can win all the villain’s money, there will be no funds with which he can finance terrorism. The film updates the book’s baccarat with poker, and embellishes an action packed story of chasing terrorist contacts and preventing explosions.
Taking on such a high profile franchise was an easy decision for Craig. “There are simple answers and there’s no kind of bullsh*t attached to it. The script was great. I got it and I read it and I thought, ‘I’d be a fool not to have a go at this.’ Hindsight is a very easy thing to say, but I was going, ‘If I don’t do this, you’re going to regret not having a go at this,’ because he is one of the biggest icons in movie history. And I’m an actor. This is what I do for a living. If I don’t take on challenges like this, then what’s the point? Still, I had other kinds of plans in my mind, maybe, what I wanted to do and how I wanted to carry on, but this came along and Barbara Broccoli is very persuasive. She made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
Having previously specialized in dramas like Sylvia or The Mother, with the occasional supporting role in a Tomb Raider or Munich, Craig didn’t have to change his style much for the big budget Casino.
“You’d be surprised, really. The biggest difference on a movie set like that is when you walk on and you’re doing a huge stunt sequence. Then you get an understanding of how big the scale is. You see many more people on set. But when you’re in a dialogue sequence, when I’m doing it with Eva [Green] or I’m doing it with Mads [Mikkelsen], it’s scaled down. You’re trying to do the same thing as I was doing in The Mother. You’re just telling a story and you’re acting with other people. I don’t differentiate between the two, and that was important when we were doing the film. I didn’t want us to shoot two movies. I didn’t want to shoot an action movie and a love story. I wanted it to be absolutely seamless. I wanted it to be so that I could see the storytelling going on in this.”
Craig also looks nice and chiseled stepping out of the ocean in the kind of swim trunks only Sean Connery could previously pull off. His gift to himself for finishing the film was to let himself go, just a little bit.
“I went on holiday and let myself go in lots of ways. But that was just because we were in France and eating good food and drinking lots of wine. And I have kept up going to the gym, but not quite as intensely as I was doing it during the film.”
Casino Royale opens November 17
