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Fights! Camera!
ACTION!
Daniel is extremely fit and strong – and he’s 100 per cent up for it. In the construction site scene [above] we had him 90ft up on eight-inch girders. He had no problem with that,’ says Gary Powell, a long-time Bond stunt co-ordinator.


But Casino Royale takes a different approach to action from the last two effects-heavy 007 outings; in fact it harks back to the earlier Bond films. In You Only Live Twice, when Sean Connery escaped on a jetpack, a stuntman used the real deal – the only functioning one around at the time. And in Casino Royale, everything, from a plane exploding to Daniel Craig leaping across huge gaps 90ft above the ground, is ‘real’.


‘Audiences are getting bored with computer graphics,’ says Powell. ‘There’s so much computer work in action films, you may as well be watching Shrek.’ For a blockbuster, Casino Royale is uniquely light on computer effects. ‘We use them to top up, but really as little as possible.’


Sébastien Foucan, the French freerunner who plays terrorist Mollaka, says, ‘There were security systems in place but all the action is real. There was no point pretending the chase across the girders wasn’t going to be dangerous – it was.’


Fortunately, the major casualties during filming were the machines. ‘In one sequence,’ says Powell, ‘Bond’s Aston Martin gets rolled after a chase with a Jaguar. We had four Astons and four Jaguars on hand. If something went wrong, we didn’t waste time repairing it. We just kept the cameras rolling.’


One of the most spectacular and explosive sequences takes place at an airport – supposedly Miami International but in fact Dunsfold airstrip in leafy Surrey – and Live was invited to view some of the action first-hand.


The sequence depicts a terrorist, Carlos, attempting to blow up a prototype superjumbo aircraft and thus send Boeing’s share price into free-fall, so that the villain Le Chiffre can clean up on the stock market.


As Carlos steals a fuel tanker, with the aim of ramming it into the plane, Bond leaps on to the roof of the vehicle. Carlos attempts to shake him off, by swerving violently and then ramming into anything in sight. First, he smashes into some baggage trolleys fitted with nitrogen cannons – which shoot the trolleys and their contents into the air on impact – and then he ploughs into a bus.


There were in fact three tankers for filming: one for basic driving, another fitted with a huge counterweight on one side to enable it to drive on two wheels, and a third that has a driving position hidden so it looks like the principal actor is driving when in fact it is a stuntman. Each tanker was stripped from 16 tons to eight and fitted with a 600bhp racing engine. They were also fitted with pyrotechnic devices on the sides to make sparks fly on contact with other vehicles.


To make the bus jump in the air on impact, one half of the bus was yanked into the air using a pulley system. The explosions are created with petrol. The same shot was repeated 30 times in one night. Then, around 3.30am, the inevitable finally happened: the vehicles get too close and BANG! There was an almighty crash. A front wheel on the tanker blew and its axle buckled. The ambulance and fire teams, who are on constant call, leapt into action.


But the stuntman driver got out of the cab grinning. The stunt co-ordinator looked unconcerned, even when steam and sparks started coming from the cab’s radiator. Powell got on the walkietalkie and a new tanker arrived, while a forklift truck removed the mangled vehicle. ‘That one’ll be fixed by Monday,’ he said nonchalantly.


As we left the set, I asked how big the explosions were going to get in the airport scene. ‘Put it this way,’ said one of the crew. ‘There’s a petrol tanker… and it’s a Bond movie. What do you think?’

I’VE GOT YOUR NUMBER
Casino Royale’s arch-criminal is gambling boss Le Chiffre – ‘The Number’ – who Bond has to bankrupt to defeat. Mads Mikkelsen tells Jon Wilde the joys of playing a Dr Evil for the 21st century
Ever wondered what it’s like to knock seven bells out of James Bond? Then Mads Mikkelsen is the man to ask. As Casino Royale’s chief villain, Le Chiffre, his brawls with Daniel Craig provide some of the most violent scenes of any Bond film.


‘There are worse things to wake up to than the thought of beating the c**p out of Daniel Craig,’ Mikkelsen laughs. ‘Then you arrive on set, see Daniel’s face and realise that he’s fully pumped up for a fight. Not only is he a very hard puncher, he’s also completely focused. What made our scenes particularly severe was that a lot of the fighting was completely improvised. Also, those scenes were shot continuously in one take. That meant we had to shoot some of them 20 times. That’s 20 times I had to take on Daniel Craig.


‘To be honest, I’m not a great fighter. I’d sooner run away. But there’s nowhere to run when you’re shooting a Bond film. You need to get on with it and make it look good. And if my scraps with Daniel look real on screen, that’s because they were real when we were filming them.’


Le Chiffre (The Number) is a scarfaced casino owner with a nice little sideline in torture. His masterplan is to rake in millions through his gambling empire and use the proceeds to fund terrorism. Mikkelsen relished the thought of entering the pantheon of memorable Bond baddies, but he was more than a little put out to discover his role didn’t call for more high-octane action.


‘As soon as I heard that I’d got the part I thought, “Great. That means I can look forward to jumping out of helicopters and driving fast cars over cliffs.” But I went nowhere near a helicopter and the only time I got into a fast car was when Daniel and I sneaked off the set without anyone knowing to drive around in his Aston Martin.


‘The only compensation was that I got to play plenty of poker. We researched the casino scene fairly intensively, and the whole cast became pretty good at poker as a result. By the end of the film I’d like to think I got so good that I wiped the floor with everybody – including Daniel. He might get the better of me in the fight scenes, but I definitely got the better of him at poker.’


Mikkelsen readily admits that some of the training required for Royale was ‘the far side of gruelling’, but he was well-prepared – he’s been an exercise junkie most of his life. As a child growing up in the suburbs of Copenhagen, he excelled at athletics and gymnastics.


In Denmark, Mikkelsen has been a household name since starring as an undercover murder investigator in the hit TV series, Unit One. He was voted ‘Sexiest Man In Movies’ in a Danish women’s magazine. One devoted fan was driven to leave her husband and three children and camp outside his Copenhagen home in the hope of securing a marriage proposal (she was dissuaded by Mikkelsen’s wife).


Like everything else, Mikkelsen appears to take this sort of thing completely in his stride. ‘I’d sooner be voted the sexiest man in Denmark than ugliest man. Look at Gérard Depardieu. He looks like a bag of potatoes – and do you think he would have received any female attention if he’d worked in a vegetable store? I once made a movie called Flickering Lights in which I played a psycho who went round killing cows with a machine gun. And still people talked about how gorgeous I looked…’


He has little time or patience for the world of back-slapping celebrity parties, preferring to stay at home with his wife of 19 years, choreographer Hanne Jacobsen, and their two young children.


‘I don’t live the film-star life. When I’m not acting, I like to be at home, sorting through my comic-book collection or playing with my kids. I live quite an oldfashioned life. I can barely turn on a PC and I’ve only just learnt to text message.’


Given which, he’s determined that the global exposure he can expect from being a Bond villain is not going to change his life in the slightest. ‘It might mean that I’m recognised by a few more people. But I’m not planning to move to LA. I’m as famous as I want to be. Besides, they don’t get my jokes in Hollywood.’