Ray Pride

Story goes that director Martin Campbell runs into a friend, "Crash" and "Million Dollar Baby" screenwriter Paul Haggis, tells him he's doing "Casino Royale," the next 007 picture.

"Do you have a script? Is it good?" Haggis asks. "Yeah, it is," Campbell says. Haggis rolls his eyes, says he'd always wanted to write a Bond picture. Enter gleam in Campbell's eye... "Casino Royale," the twenty-first James Bond picture stars a new Bond, the very talented Daniel Craig, who's played a righteous killer in "Munich," Francis Bacon's bit of rough in "Love is the Devil," an American solider in "Fateless," a stalking victim in "Enduring Love," a brooding Ted Hughes in "Sylvia" and, most to point, a nameless hard-case gangster in "Layer Cake." The frosting on this particular cake is the rewrite Haggis brought to the fisticuffs and gunfire-laden outline of Ian Fleming's first novel: the movie hits the ground running with two major action scenes in a row and, for once, a Bond picture draws from other styles and trends of filmmaking instead of the series' own camp-drenched corpus. The very grownup dialogue, especially in Bond's flirtations with non-Bond girl Vesper Lind (Eva Green, of the immense blue eyes and English-French accent, from Bertolucci's "The Dreamers"), doesn't wink at the audience, but instead traffics in flirt and deception, with superb results. There are a couple of stretches of poker-playing ennui, but Campbell, who also directed Pierce Brosnan's first appearance in "GoldenEye," makes a pretty terrific, gritty, twenty-first century thriller. "I think `GoldenEye' was a template of the old Bond and that Pierce never really developed Bond much as a character," Campbell says. "I think that the writing in this film allows Daniel to have some interesting elements to his character. I think he can keep developing the character because, unlike Pierce, he is taking it from nothing."

Still, the 38-year-old Craig says, "I watched every movie, every moment of every movie. Quite avidly. I checked out really what was done wrong, and what I thought was done right. But then you have to kind of move on. You have to say, that's there, that's set, that doesn't go away, now what about this? Connery, that was him, he personified the Fleming character. I think as enduring as it is, it's one of the reasons it's endured. I didn't really take [from Connery's performance]. What is fascinating to me about this is that people talk about this being a violent Bond, but you watch `Dr. No,' and `From Russia with Love,' especially, it's just as violent. If you think about it [in the context] at the time, it's probably more violent, relatively. It's that darkness that he brought into it. The complication--this is a complicated character, it's not two-dimensional. This guy has a past and has a reason to behave this way. And that, for me, was one of the reasons I wanted to do this. The script explained a lot of what was going on in his head."

Why's Bond a masculine ideal instead of just a macho? "The fact is that he's a guy and a hero figure, he's a guy who just knows what's what. That, in a way, I think, all of us, we struggle a little bit, we go, `What's what? How do we deal with this?' He walks into a room, he sees the situation, and he goes, `I'm going to make this decision, and I'm going to make it now.' And that's exciting. There's an unpredictability, but also things are going to be okay, he's going to work it out. I tried to put in this a little bit more, to make it more dramatically interesting. He's a pretty good decision maker, he just doesn't tell people about it."

Craig combines his boxer-type rugged handsomeness with the expected charismatic performance: men and women alike won't be able to look away. He wasn't flummoxed by the early thumbs-down by longtime fans. "That's to do with passion isn't it? It has to do with the fact that people feel very strongly about this." Yet, he says, "There was nothing I can actually respond to. There's nothing I can say. Normally, I do a movie, and we premiere it or we show it to the press and they watch it and they give comment. They either like it or they don't like it. But this was coming three weeks into shooting. It was like: Hang on. Give me some time. Let me get into this a bit."

The story's a fitting origin tale, down to its final shot. "At the beginning of the movie, I don't think he cares if he lives or dies. It's his job. It's what he does. And this woman (Vesper Lynd) blows his mind, exposes him to something and breaks his heart. It's that whole process of change, I thought, that's going to make it an interesting movie. I wouldn't have touched this script, and I wouldn't have touched this film unless I thought there was an element of something like that. It also gives us a springboard. I never thought that far ahead, but if you get on to do another movie, we've got somewhere to move with this."

And he intends to be able to keep moving. "I was pulling muscles all the time. I would wake up in the morning going: I. Can't. Move. I can't get up. That's what it was like. I had to gently roll myself out of bed and get under a hot shower and get the muscles working. Collectively, we made a fantastic movie. I'll keep doing it for as long as I can--as long as there are painkillers on this planet."

"Casino Royale" opens with late-night Thursday showings.

(2006-11-14)

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