New James Bond movie features fewer gadgets, more grit

Daniel Craig is seen as James Bond in an image from the new James Bond movie 'Casino Royale'. Picture / Reuters

MIAMI - Forget the gadgets, invisible cars and exploding space stations. The next James Bond movie is going to be pure grit, real stunts and a spy who fumbles a kill, falls in love and dislikes violence, the makers say.

"Casino Royale," the 21st movie featuring the debonair English superspy, takes Bond back to the start of Ian Fleming's series, when he carries out his initial two assassinations and first earns his licence to kill.

There'll be no computer-generated imagery, the prologue is in black and white "to shake everybody up," and the MI6 agent, played for the first time by English actor Daniel Craig, will take a while to get into his trademark tuxedo.

"At the end of it he's sort of honed into the Bond, the emotionally shut-down beautiful machine that Bond's become," director Martin Campbell told reporters this week on a visit to the movie set in the Bahamas.

But on the way to being the smooth, unruffled, lady-killer 007 fans have grown accustomed to, Craig as the first blond Bond, will clearly show a more human side.

"The great thing about it is that he makes mistakes and screws up. Bond finds violence hard to take, he won't admit to that. He has to do two killings, one is very messy. He falls in love with a girl, genuinely falls in love," said Campbell.

There is no "Q," no "Moneypenny" and only "a little bit of gadgetry," in the movie due for release in November and being distributed by Columbia Pictures, a Sony Pictures Entertainment unit, he said.

Craig, 38, said the Bond he hopes to portray begins as "sort of fallible." The script doesn't shy away from the sexism that marked early Bond movies but which has since been diluted.

"But he's Bond, he's not always nice," Craig said.

"Edgy" and "gritty" are the adjectives most commonly flung around by those involved in the movie.

"He's a hard guy, that's the difference I think," said special effects supervisor Chris Corbould.

There will be plenty of action.

In a chase scene set on the African island of Madagascar but filmed in the Bahamas, Bond tries to run down terrorist Mollaka in a bulldozer, and then follows him on foot through a construction site, jumping from a 140-foot (43m) crane to a 120-foot (37m) crane.

Mollaka is played by Sebastien Foucan, French co-founder of a popular urban sports trend called Freerunning, or Parkour, and his powerful running style makes Bond appear clumsy.

But Bond's relentless determination is supposed to shine through as he scrambles after Mollaka through a Madagascar shantytown and jungle.

The film will be a departure from the explosives- and gizmo-laden spectacles seen in 2002's "Die Another Day," or 1995's "GoldenEye," which was also directed by Campbell.

"Even after 'GoldenEye' I remember remarking, thinking, how many control rooms, how many madmen can take over the world?" Campbell said. "Where the hell do you go with it? Do you get another madman, do you blow up another control room? How many space stations can you take?"

Co-producer Michael Wilson of EON Productions said the invisible car in "Die Another Day" had begun to dip the hugely successful movie series into the realm of the unbelievable.

"Technology was beginning to overwhelm the story and the characters," Wilson said.

The latest movie in a 44-year franchise that has grossed almost US$4 billion since "Dr. No," starring Sean Connery, was screened in 1962, "Casino Royale" will be a return to the roots, said co-producer Barbara Broccoli.

That was one reason why EON dumped Pierce Brosnan, the most successful of the five Bond actors to date, and is taking a gamble with a new, younger face, she said.

"If you don't grow and change you die and we felt this was the right time and the right story to tell, and Daniel was the right guy to do it," Broccoli said. "So here we are." 

- REUTERS