“There was a lot of [card] playing in it,” he tells Polygon. “It was the thing I sweated on more 💰 than anything else.”

In 1995, Campbell introduced Pierce Brosnan as Bond with Goldeneye, which moved on from Timothy Dalton’s gritty take 💰 into a more fantastical realm. Over the next three movies, the stories became excessively kitschy. By the time Brosnan finished 💰 2002’s Die Another Day, driving invisible cars through ice palaces, Bond producers knew the franchise had shifted into self-parody. “They 💰 wanted to bring it back to earth,” Campbell says. “When I came on board, I felt the same way. I 💰 felt the whole thing needed to have its feet well and truly on the ground.”

That meant a contemporary action movie 💰 — tougher, grimmer, less reliant on CGI, and more devoted to realism. When Daniel Craig signed on to embody the 💰 new direction, he embraced the idea of portraying a vulnerable hero. His Bond was brazen, reckless, emotionally-charged. He made mistakes, 💰 but looked good (if occasionally bruised) making them. It was the perfect kind of character to get involved in a 💰 high-tension poker game. Still, Campbell thought, how would he animate this green-felted drama?

“It was difficult to think how you keep 💰 the audience engaged in those card games,” the movie’s editor Stuart Baird says. “Everybody was terribly worried that people would 💰 be bored with it.”

Campbell cracked it. The roughly 30-minute casino sequence plays as a masterful microcosm of the movie — 💰 it has its own narrative arc, interspersed with punctuations of combat and death-defying shocks, and shows off Bond’s mental prowess 💰 and mortality. More importantly, it proved Craig capable of daredevil thrills and martini-sipping refinement, and leveraged his skills into one 💰 of the best depictions of poker in movie history. “I think the sequence was pretty convincing,” Campbell says. “What you 💰 realize is, it’s not just the card games — it’s the stakes. It’s also two guys eye-fucking one another, basically. 💰 That was the secret.”