“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.”