OTHER ARTICLES 1. Production Information 2. “If you don’t get bruised playing Bond, you’re not doing it properly.” – Daniel Craig 3. “Vesper is not the classic Bond girl, wearing a bikini and firing guns.” – Eva Green 4. “He’s ice cold.” — Mads Mikkelsen 5. “I’m drunk with power.” — Judi Dench 6. “She has great sex. Then he’s gone!” — Caterina Murino 7. “It is a great story and a great thriller.” — Ivana Milicevic 8. “Life is made of obstacles and challenges.” — Sébastien Foucan 9. “A different Bond in every way.” – Martin Campbell 10. “CASINO ROYALE will be a classic Bond.” – Michael G. Wilson 11. “Because of Daniel’s more muscular physique, the evening suit is a new shape.” — Lindy Hemming 12. “Bond literally brings the house down ’round about him.” — Peter Lamont 13. “I spent eight hours a day in the water and two hours underwater.” — Chris Corbould 14. Locations for Casino Royale

“CASINO ROYALE will be a classic Bond.”
– Michael G. Wilson

Martin Campbell, who directed GoldenEye in 1995, returns to direct CASINO ROYALE. “Martin is a director who knows how to tell a story. We worked well together on GoldenEye, so he knows Bond and our production team. It was a fantastic opportunity to get him back to work with the new Bond.”

After choosing a director, the next task for producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli was to cast the actor who would play James Bond in 007’s 21st screen adventure. Says Barbara Broccoli, “As soon as we met him, Daniel Craig was the obvious choice for James Bond. He’s an actor who defines his generation of British actors. He is charismatic, versatile and sexy. The role is a big challenge, but he has proven to us that he is an incredible Bond.” Adds Michael G. Wilson, “In Daniel, we have a modern Bond, one who has the authenticity we need to redefine this very complex character. Bond is a commander, ex-Navy, who has just been given the extremely rare double-0 status – the authority to make kill decisions on his own. Daniel is skilled in articulating the conflicting emotions that Bond feels. He is a great actor totally committed to the role.”

The producers cast French actress Eva Green as Vesper Lynd, the first woman with whom Bond truly falls in love. Says Michael G. Wilson, “Eva Green is fantastic. She is destined to be one of France’s leading international actresses. Vesper is the most important woman in Bond’s life, and we needed someone who had all the qualities of Vesper: beauty, strength, enigma and some sadness. She is Bond’s equal. She is a good person who finds herself in an untenable situation.”

Judi Dench returns as M. “She has made the role her own, so we couldn’t imagine anyone else playing M,” says Michael G. Wilson.

The production started off in Modrany and Barrandov Studios, in the Czech Republic, before moving on to the Bahamas. Says Wilson, “It’s important that a Bond film has glamorous and exotic locations. We have a location in the Bahamas around the One & Only Club on Paradise Island where Bond tracks down Dimitrios. Our art department also transformed part of the Bahamas into the African Island of Madagascar, using a disused motel as a shanty town and an abandoned hotel complex at Coral Harbor as a building site where Bond chases Mollaka, played by free runner Sébastien Foucan. In fact, the abandoned hotel is where we filmed the hotel rooms in Thunderball. It’s now part of a military base. On The Spy Who Loved Me, we used the same location as a camera platform and had models and workshops.”

In the Fleming novel, the game played at Casino Royale is Chemin de Fer. For the film, the producers changed the game to Texas Hold ‘em poker. Explains Michael G. Wilson, “Although Bond has traditionally played Chemin de Fer, that game is no longer popular and there are very few people who understand it, whereas poker is now recognized throughout the world, with poker tournaments on television and online gaming at an all-time high. Poker requires bluff and strategy, which has more dramatic possibilities on screen than ‘Chimie.’”

Wilson enjoys playing poker himself and describes himself as “a recovering poker addict.” In conjunction with the scriptwriters and Martin Campbell, he designed and supervised the games played at the Casino Royale tournament.

“The setting for the Casino Royale in the novel is Royale Les Eaux in France, but the production moved the location to an unnamed town in Montenegro. We needed somewhere that seemed to be out of the reach of the international banking authorities in order for Le Chiffre to feel safe enough to come out of hiding. We actually filmed all those scenes in Karlovy Vary, a spa town in the Czech Republic, which met all our requirements.”