Royale talk: part two

Learn more about Casino Royale, available on Blu-ray Disc and UMD, in the second part of this interview with director Martin Campbell.

Do you have to convince yourself that the actor you are going to choose to play this iconic character is going to be up to giving a performance that will be holding the whole thing together?

Yes, but ultimately you don't know, you just hope you get it right. Daniel [Craig] had never done an action film before and you gamble that he is going to be able to deal with that. Action is difficult. There's a tendency to be dismissive and say 'oh it's just action...' It's tricky. And I'm talking about the kind of action that feeds into the character and narrative. I don't mean the kind of action sequences that are there for their own sake without any character involved. Some actors you would expect to be very good because of their image turn out to be incapable of doing action. Others know instinctively what is needed and are just naturals.

What was Daniel like?

He turned out to be very good indeed. I mean, to begin with he buffed up and he trained and he looked great. But I think there was a little bit of a learning curve in the way you do action, the way you shoot action, the way it's done. But once he was in the rhythm he was great and he's done a fantastic job.

Bond's relationship with Vesper Lynd - played by Eva Green - sounds like it's crucial to shaping the man?

Yes, that's all in the book and in the film. It's all about that. And it very much shapes him. At the end of it he becomes Bond, the one that we all know. And we do things that play into the myths. He asks for a Martini for example, but he doesn't say "shaken not stirred", he lists the ingredients, which is in the book. It's "this with this and a touch of lemon..." So there are one or two embryonic moments as to how these things started.

There are, as always with Bond, some very beautiful actresses in the movie. But each is playing a very different role. One is more like a traditional Bond girl but the other he actually falls in love with. What happens?

Well, Caterina Murino, who is a lovely actress, plays Solange and her purpose is to show how Bond can be kind of chauvinistic in the way that he uses women in the sense that he will take them to bed to get information out of them and then leave them. That's his attitude going in. She plays the wife of a guy who works with Le Chiffre and Bond knows that he can use her to get to him.

So he's quite cynical in the way that he uses her?

Exactly. And that's the point. With Eva Green's character, Vesper Lynd, he meets someone who changes his life, she gets to him in a way that no woman ever has and changes his life because he falls in love with her.

That's a big role. What was she like?

Eva was fantastic. It was interesting because we had approached a few better-known actresses but then we went to Eva and I was amazed at how good she was. Her English is amazing and she has no accent at all. We tested her and she was very nervous in the test but I knew instinctively that she was the right actress. The Vesper character is very enigmatic and is a major, major part. This is not a Bond girl, this is serious stuff.

It sounds a bit like Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Is that fair?

Yes, going along that route but that wasn't written with the sort of depth this one is. In that, he marries her but there were no scenes that showed the development of the relationship whereas in this one there is - the relationship is developed throughout.

Is it possible to forget that it's a Bond movie while you are making it?

Oh I do, the actual Bond thing doesn't effect me at all, it's making a film, the drama that affects me. And you know as much as this is a Bond film it's also a love story, it's about a relationship and that has to work and that has to be right and it is, I think. On that level we have great chemistry.

This interview was conducted in London while Martin Campbell was editing Casino Royale.

Casino Royale is available now, on Blu-ray Disc and UMD; for more information please visit Sony Pictures' offical website.