To sell the authenticity of the game as much as possible, the production hired Tom Sambrook, a reg at the Vic in London. cut of the torture-scene had a line trimmed for being “too sexual”. It is at this point that one remembers that the U.K. “It’s also two guys eye-f***ing one another, basically. “What you realize is, it’s not just the card games - it’s the stakes,” Campell adds, explaining the appeal. The Casino Royale poker sequences, despite the best efforts of the onset consultants, are very much movie poker.Ĭasino Royale might not be the most accurate poker movie.

The poker world quietly chuckled into their sleeves. “I think the sequence was pretty convincing,” Campbell said. And the three big poker hands had to reflect that. They decided the movie had to be “grounded in reality” Campbell said. The studio brought in Paul Haggis, still hot off Crash and Million Dollar Baby, was brought in to add some emotional depth to Purvis & Wade’s first direct adaptation from the novels. Niel Purvis and Robert Wade had descended metaphorically into self-parody with Die Another Day, and literally into self-parody with Johnny English. It was time for a reboot.Īnd who better to reboot bond for the 00s than the man who’d brought Bond into the post-Soviet world of the 90s: Martin Campbell.

Bond beginsīy 2006, Paul Greengrass had taken over the Bourne franchise. Stealing everything he could from other movies too. He passed this on to Campbell who did the same. Baird had worked on Maverick, where the director Richard Donner had filmed everything over and over from every angle. One of the tricks was shooting enormous amounts of coverage. Everybody was terribly worried that people would be bored with it.” the editor, Stuart Baird said. “It was difficult to think, how you keep the audience engaged in those card games.

But the amount of poker in the Casino Royale script was worrisome. How do you go from that to ten guys sat quietly around a table?Ĭampbell had previously directed a short baccarat scene for Bond in Goldeneye. And he’s gone toe-to-toe at knifepoint with one terrorist, before hunting another to an explosive climax on the tarmac of Miami airport. The two Antonio Banderas Zorro movies and Vertical Limit.īy the time we get to the game in Montenegro, Bond has parkoured across Kampala. Since Campbell last directed Bond he’d done a number of hi-octane action flicks. To celebrate, Polygon tracked director Martin Campbell, and some of the crew to their lairs and asked them shooting the poker scenes. It’s been fourteen years and some small-change since Casino Royale hit screens.

Casino royale backdrop scene poker