Casino Royale is already nine years old? Man, does time fly. I remember it hitting the cinemas, I think it might even have been the first Bond that I ever watched.
It was the first I ever saw on the big screen. I'd seen little bits and snippets of a bunch of different Bond movies over the years, but I didn't start paying attention to the movies until right around the time they started shooting CR, once I started hearing all the controversy over casting Daniel Craig as Bond.
Within the time-span of a week, I had come across a copy of the first Young Bond book by Charles Higgins and watched Goldfinger for the first time. I was oddly off-put by how the movie seemed more light-hearted than the supposed
kid's book that I was reading. For the hell of it, I decided to go to the library and see if they had a copy of the novel Casino Royale (I wasn't even sure that it was a book; wasn't even aware that it was the first Bond story). Sure enough, they had a copy and I was
hooked. Within the following months, I owned all twenty Bond films on DVD (my folks bought a huge collection dirt cheap on eBay from China for me
) and many of Ian Fleming's original novels.
As odd as it was, I actually pictured Craig in my head the entire time I was reading Fleming's novels. There hadn't been any trailers or serious quality footage of him as Bond at that point, but they did have that very first promotional photo of him as Bond. To me, that photo is
still the character "James Bond" that I see in my head whenever I go back and read Fleming's novels.