Who’s our contemporary, powerful, alpha male singer? We were spoilt for choice with gentle, poetic singer-songwriter types, but in terms of someone who could be brutal and hard and yet also be able to turn on a sixpence and be open, emotional and honest? Chris Cornell was suggested to me which was such a left field call but then when you start listening to Chris Cornell it’s obvious. He makes rookie mistakes, he’s learning all the time but we also see him doing things that maybe Bond shouldn’t do, like being too careless and risky. I thought ‘Well, what voice is that?’. I started thinking about the character, that he’s this blunt instrument and not very sophisticated. Even if I don’t know who’s going to be singing it, or if I’m going to be writing it, I like to do my take on it. Once that was established we needed to turn to the title song. That was a big thing to remove the James Bond theme from the James Bond film, but I thought, ‘How about we sort of sow the seeds of it as we go through’ so whenever he does something which we know becomes an iconic thing for 007 to do, like the first time he rides in the Aston Martin DB5, first time he flies to an exotic location, the first time he puts on a tuxedo, we drop little bits of the Bond theme like he’s earning it. So then we knew it was going to be Daniel, but it raised the question: where do you start with the score? We can’t have the Bond theme because he’s not James Bond yet.

Daniel had this sort of cold brutal streak but also a Connery panther-esque way about him. Director Martin Campbell did four screen tests: I think they did two or three scenes – a talking one, an action-y one and a romantic scene – and I got sent the footage to put music to them. No before they cast Sean, but for me I was seeing a Bond script which is in production, without the face of the actor playing James Bond in my mind. It was just my own imagination, which was fascinating as that hadn’t happened before, maybe on Dr.

I got the script for Casino Royale before anyone was cast as James Bond, so for the first time reading it, I was seeing the character without envisaging a face. The composer who scored five Bond films on writing the theme song and score for Daniel Craig’s first outing as 007.

News Writing Casino Royale’s Theme Song By composer David Arnold

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