More Amazing James Bond Facts

In 1967, Sean Connery's brother Neil starred in an Italian James Bond knock-off film called O.K. Connery (aka Operation Kid Brother). A large number of familiar faces from the Bond films appeared in the movie with Neil Connery - including Bernard Lee, Lois Maxwell, Adolfo Celi, and Daniela Bianchi. Neil Connery looked a little bit like Sean but had none of his brother's charisma or screen presence. Neil was dubbed in the film because he had a medical condition involving his throat at the time and couldn't speak very well. O.K. Connery is terrible film objectively but could be seen as a guilty pleasure. Lois Maxwell said that Sean Connery was very angry that Bond regulars had agreed to appear in the Italian movie and felt betrayed by them. The ironic thing is that Lois Maxwell was better paid on O.K. Connery than she ever was on the Bond films!

In the PTS of 1981's For Your Eyes Only, most people are baffled when the ersatz Blofeld (impaled by his wheelchair on Bond's helicopter) says - "I'll buy you delicatessen in stainless steel!" This line was suggested by Cubby Broccoli. It was an old saying that New York mob people would say when they wanted to negotiate or do business. The writers on the film hated the delicatessen line but Cubby was the boss so it ended up in the movie.  

Roger Moore said that when he played James Bond he used to pretend the villain had halitosis in order to make himself appear somewhat repulsed whenever Bond encountered the baddie.

On the first day of shooting for On Her Majesty's Secret Service, a security guard on the gate at Pinewood Studios didn't recognise George Lazenby and wouldn't let him in.

In the 1955 novel Moonraker we learn that James Bond is paid a salary of £1,500 a year. That would equate to around £40,000 in today's money.

Ian Fleming was a consultant for The Man From U.N.C.L.E. television spy action series when it was in development. Cubby Broccoli complained that Fleming was helping the opposition!

In the film Diamonds Are Forever, Bond has membership of the Playboy Club. His membership number is 40401.

Ian Fleming wrote Casino Royale on a gold-plated typewriter. In 1995, Fleming's typewriter was auctioned at Christie's for £50,000.

In the film Dr No, Bond is an MI7 agent. There is no such thing as MI7 in either the Fleming books or real life.

When Goldfinger came out, there was an urban legend that Shirley Eaton had died as a result of being covered in gold paint. In reality, Shirley Eaton was (and still is) very much alive and you can't actually die from painting your skin.

In the legendary sequence in Goldfinger where Bond is strapped to a table as Auric Goldfinger demonstrates his laser, there was someone under the table with a blowtorch to give the effect of the laser cutting into the surface. It was an understandably nervous experience for Sean Connery.

A lengthy sequence in On Her Majesty's Secret Service where Bond chases one of Blofeld's men over London rooftops was cut from the movie. George Lazenby must have been irritated to see this sequence hit the cutting room floor because he injured his arm shooting it.

When he was cast as James Bond, Sean Connery worked with a dance teacher named Yat Malmgren so he could learn how to be more graceful and panther like in his movements and gestures.

Seventeen boats were destroyed in the stunt rehearsals for Live and Let Die.

The French premiere of Goldeneye was cancelled after Pierce Brosnan protested against French nuclear testing.

In early plans for the film adapatation of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Blofeld's headquarters was going to be located on the Maginot Line. The Maginot Line was a series of military fortifications built by the French along their eastern border in the 1930s to protect themselves from any German aggression. It was manned by the French army and even had its own subway system. It proved to be ineffective in World War 2 because the Germans aimed the focal point of their attack at the Ardennes region of Belgium and simply bypassed the Maginot Line. After the war ended, French troops were stationed at the Maginot Line again and one of its biggest bunkers became a NATO command centre. When France left NATO in 1966, the Maginot Line was abandoned.

It was very chilly at Pinewood Studios when they shot some of the bedroom scenes for Bond and Solitare in Live and Let Die so Roger Moore and Jane Seymour wore football socks in bed to stay warm.

When Pierce Brosnan first had to drive the Aston Martin in Goldeneye, he left the handbrake on by mistake and damaged the car.

Daniel Craig was the first Bond actor who wasn't born before the movie franchise began.

Demand for Thunderball was so great that they had two simultaneous premieres in London full of celebrities, glitz, and huge crowds of fans. Sean Connery never turned up to either of them.

When they were shooting The Spy Who Loved Me in Egypt, the Egyptian government assigned an official to the production whose job it was to make sure that nothing in the movie or script was at all derogatory about their country. Bond's wisecrack in the film about "Egyptian builders" was therefore dubbed in much later in the safety of Pinewood Studios thousands of miles away.

Ricou Browning, the director of underwater photography on Thunderball, was the man in the monster suit in the classic horror film Creature from the Black Lagoon.

James Bond's car in Thunderball is capable of projecting high pressure jets of water. This effect was achieved in a fairly simple way. They simply ran the hose from an unseen fire engine through the Aston Martin.

Tula, one of the girls at the swimming pool in for Your Eyes Only, was born Barry Cossey. After a sex-change operation, she became a model.

Thunderball was so popular in Britain that some cinemas sold all their seats and then sold extra tickets to customers who were willing to stand!

In the film Live and Let Die, Bond is told that "Hamilton" has been killed in New York. This is a joke based on the fact that Guy Hamilton directed the film.

Cubby Broccoli told George Lazenby not to come to the On Her Majesty's Secret Service premiere looking scruffy. You can probably guess what happened. Lazenby, ever the rebel, turned up with long hair and a beard.

The U.S army jet pack scenes in Thunderball required two American military pilots to be on the set as they were the only people trained to fly it.

One of the red 1969 Mercury Cougar XR-7s driven by Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty's Secret Service sold at Bonhams auction house in 2020 for £356,500.

In the Fleming novels, Bond has a housekeeper called May. This character was not translated into the films. The reason why May is not a character in the movies is mostly because we rarely see Bond at home during the films and having a housekeeper seems a rather bygone old-fashioned type of thing.

One of the reasons why Judi Dench was cast as M (besides being a great actor) is that it was revealed in 1993 that the real life head of MI5 was a woman Stella Rimington. MI5 is the United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency and part of its intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

The original theme song for Thunderball was Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (the Italian nickname for Bond). This song was recorded by both Shirley Bassey and Dionne Warick. United Artists did not like the fact that the song didn't mention the movie's title and so at the last minute a new song (Thunderball by Tom Jones) replaced Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. United Artists might have regretted that decision in the end because Thunderball by Tom Jones didn't sell especially well - at least in comparison to Goldfinger.

Dr No has Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington in his art collection. This portrait had been stolen in real life when Dr No went into production.

It is obviously quite awkward today that the Afghan freedom fighters in The Living Daylights are the people who became the Taliban.

The news that George Lazenby had probably quit Bond franchise leaked before On Her Majesty's Secret Service was released. As a result, the promotional campaign downplayed Lazenby and billed James Bond as the star. This was very different from the Connery films - which always made a big deal of declaring that Sean Connery IS James Bond.

In Thunderball, all the 00 agents are required to attend a meeting. There are nine seats - indicating that there are nine agents in the OO section.

An incredible 23 million people watched Live and Let Die when it was first broadcast on British television in 1980.

When they began pre-production on For Your Eyes Only it was deemed very unlikely that Roger Moore would be back so they hired a number of stuntmen with black hair because the prime candidates to become the new 007 were dark haired actors like James Brolin and Michael Billington. When they learned that Roger was coming back they had to hurriedly get all their fair haired stuntmen back.

On the audio commentary for The Man with the Golden gun, Roger Moore said he didn't like the moment where Bond pushes the kid in the water.

The eighties Bond films had increasingly static budgets because they were still paying off the interest on Moonraker going over budget. John Glen complained that the static budgets of the Bond films at this time made it difficult to stage all the action in Licence To Kill.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service was called 007 Seized The Snow Mountain Castle in Norway.

The famous crocidle stunt in Live and Let Die was a late replacement for a planned sequence where Bond nearly meets his end in a coffee bean milling machine. This would appear to explain why they go to great lengths early on in the film to show that Bond has an expresso coffee machine in his flat. It was meant to anticipate the punchline of a later sequence.

When they made For Your Eyes Only they found it almost impossible to get Carole Bouquet to smile in a natural way. So, for a scene where her character had to smile they slipped in an outtake of Bouquet laughing at a cheeky joke by Roger Moore.

Pierce Brosnan found himself in the wars shooting Tomorrow Never dies. He had to endure a bout of influenza and then needed stitches when a protective helmet worn by a stuntman hit him in the face.

The door code to the bio-room in Moonraker is the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Steven Spielberg had to be asked permission to use this. In return, Spielberg was allowed to use the James Bond theme in The Goonies several years later.

In 2013, the film director Steven Soderbergh argued the case for OHMSS being the best Bond film - "Shot to shot, this movie is beautiful in a way none of the other Bond films are — the anamorphic compositions are relentlessly arresting — and the editing patterns of the action sequences are totally bananas; it’s like Peter Hunt took all the ideas of the French new wave and blended them with Eisenstein in a Cuisinart to create a grammar that still tops today’s how fast can you cut aesthetic, because the difference here is that each of the shots — no matter how short — are real shots, not just additional coverage from the hosing-it-down school of action, so there is a unification of the aesthetic of the first unit and the second unit that doesn’t exist in any other Bond film. And, speaking of action, there are as many big set pieces in OHMSS as any Bond film ever made, and if that weren’t enough, there’s a great score by John Barry, some really striking sound work, and what can you say about Diana Rigg that doesn’t start with the word WOW?"

The British government only acknowledged the existence of MI6 in 1986.

Jill St John and Lana Wood play Bond girls in Diamonds Are Forever. There was a strange connection between these women some years later. Jill St John later married Robert Wagner. Wagner used to be married to Lana's sister Natalie Wood. Natalie Wood mysteriously drowned in 1981 while on a yacht with Robert Wagner and Lana has always suspected foul play in her sister's death. There is another bizarre Bond connection to this story because the third person on the yacht that tragic night was Christopher Walken. At the time Wood and Walken were shooting a sci-fi film called Brainstorm together. Wood had almost completed her scenes for the movie and only had a few left to shoot. They were all on Robert Wagner’s boat Splendour. After a night of drinking, Natalie apparently left the boat and her dead body was later found off Catalina Island, near Los Angeles. The 43 year-old Natalie Wood had drowned. She was wearing a nightgown and socks - which hardly seems like swimming attire. Her death was ruled an accident but bruises were later found on her body - which suggested foul play. The night in question, Wood, Wagner, and Walken had gone ashore to have dinner and returned to the boat around 10pm. They were all said to be mildly intoxicated from the drinks they had enjoyed that evening. Rogert Wagner said that Natalie retired to their cabin at around 10-45pm but when he went to join her he found that she was gone. Wagner said he had spent some time chatting to Walken before he went to see his wife. Upon noticing that the dinghy was missing, Wagner said he alerted the authorities (the Harbor Patrol and Coast Guard). A police helicopter found Natalie's drowned body the next morning. Wagner's account of that night and his actions has been disputed ever since. Not everyone believed he was telling the truth. Dennis Davern, who was the captain of the yacht that night, later said that Wagner and Walken had a blazing argument that night during which Wagner accused him of having designs on his wife. Davern further claimed that Wagner showed no interest whatsoever in looking for Natalie Wood after she went overboard. Davern assumed that Wood had taken the dinghy ashore after an argument with her husband. The dinghy in question was found near Natalie Wood's body when she was discovered. Robert Smith, the captain of the rescue boat on duty at the time, said he found Robert Wagner's attitude strange at the time. He claimed that Wagner had not immediately reported Natalie's disappearance. John Corina, a lieutenant in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Homicide Bureau, said in 2011 that new witnesses had come forward in the case. These witnesses were on boats mored near the Splendour at the time. They reported hearing a ferocious argument from Wagner's yacht that night. This evidence supported the claims of Dennis Davern. 

Natalie's sister Lana Wood remains convinced that Wagner knows more than he has confessed to and might have murdered her sister. The investigation into Natalie wood's death later suggested that she could have picked up some of her injuries before she went in the water. The official verdict remains ambiguous and her death was put down to 'drowning and other undetermined factors'. One thing that is clear is Natalie Wood had been drinking that night so was in no fit state to swim ashore or pilot a dinghy. It could be that in her intoxicated state she underestimated how difficult it would be to get ashore. Though it could all have been a tragic accident the suspicion surrounding Wagner's participation has never completely gone away. As for Christopher Walken, well, Walken has (unsurprisingly) rarely spoken about the tragedy. In his few recorded comments on the tragedy he said it was just a random accident. One theory is that Wagner might have lowered the dinghy himself to make it look like Natalie Wood left the boat of her own free will. Wood was said to be scared of water - which would appear to make it unlikely that she would willingly climb into a dinghy alone and at night. Dennis Davern also claimed that Wagner refused to turn the boat's lights on to scan the water when it became apparent that Natalie Wood was gone. It should be stressed that Robert Wagner has never been charged with anything and believes any suggestion he had a hand in Natalie Wood's tragic death is completely preposterous. His grief at the funeral certainly seemed genuine too. However, John Corina has said that attempts by the police to interview Wagner about the case were persistantly frustrated by Wagner's lawyers. Robert Wagner would probably argue that he spoke to the police at the time and has nothing more to say. In recent years Suzanne Finstad wrote a bigraphy of Natalie Wood in which she claimed that a doctor who examined Wood's body found friction burns consistent with being pushed while trying to hold onto something. It seems like the mystery of Natalie wood's death will continue to keep armchair detectives busy for some time to come.

Lani Hall said she didn't like her Never Say Never Again title song very much at all. She thought it was a bit rubbish.

Roger Moore said he loved making Moonraker in France because the relaxed French crew didn't start work until noon.

Kim Basinger had to wear a wig on Never Say Never Again reshoots because she'd already cut her hair for another film.

The end of Diamonds Are Forever was supposed to feature a confrontation between Bond and Blofeld in a salt mine. However, they couldn't get permission to shoot in any local mines so they abandoned this idea.

The plot of the movie Quantum of Solace was partly inspired by the Cochabamba Water War. The Cochabamba Water War was a series of protests that took place in Cochabamba, Bolivia's fourth largest city, between December 1999 and April 2000 in response to the privatisation of the city's municipal water supply company SEMAPA.

Ilse Steppat, who played Irma Bunt in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, died only four days after the film was released.

One of the extras at Felix Leiter's wedding in Licence To Kill was a woman named Sandi Sentell. Sentell had won a competition to appear in a Bond film.

The helicopter PTS in For Your Eyes Only was shot at the abandoned Beckton Gas Works in London. This was where Stanley Kubrick later shot parts of Full Metal Jacket.

The motorbike chase in Never Say Never Again was supposed to be much more spectacular. The bike was supposed to have 'wings' which came out to make it capable of leaping over trucks and small buildings. Much to the annoyance of director Irvin Kershner though, this bike chase was made much more modest in the end thanks to budget cuts.

Roger Moore had to go to a bus depot in London to learn how to drive a double-decker bus before he made Live and Let Die.

Maryam d'Abo dubbed herself as Kara in the French language version of The Living Daylights. She was a fluent French speaker after spending her youth in Paris.

1984, the year before Roger Moore's last Bond film was released, saw a number of rumours that Pierce Brosnan was going to be the new Bond. An Australian newspaper published an article in which they said Brosnan had already signed a secret deal to replace Roger. Brosnan had to deny these rumours and even wrote to Cubby Broccoli assurring him that these stories did not originate from him or anyone connected to him.

Guy Hamilton said he didn't like Yaphet Kotto very much when he directed Live and Let Die. "Yaphet Kotto, I regret bitterly. I did not enjoy working with him at all. Originally it was to be a very distinguished American black actor. Suddenly Harry Saltzman announced he's out and UA say Yaphet Kotto is really hot property. We were forced into Yaphet Kotto. I'd never met him until he turned up on the set. He starts off thinking he should be playing Bond - quite seriously. He was very badly behaved, he would try and make life difficult."

When a Bond film came out, Cubby Broccoli liked to go to cinemas and watch the film with an audience so he could see what worked and what didn't. He was always especially interested to see which jokes made the audience laugh and which didn't.

According to writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the script and production of Never Say Never Again was so amateurish that the crew started shooting scenes in the Bahamas without the script yet having any explanation whatsoever for why Bond should be in the Bahamas!

Carole Bouquet suffered from sinus problems and couldn't do any underwater scenes in For Your Eyes Only. They used the magic of movies to make it appear that her character Melina was underwater.

Gloria Hendry said that Roger Moore was an absolute gentleman on the set of Live and Let Die and even generously shared his chauffeur driven limousine with her.

If a 1983 interview he conducted with Starlog for the release of Octopussy is anything to go by, James Bond writer Richard Maibaum wasn't the biggest fan of Roger Moore's Bond. Maibaum felt the films had become too tongue-in-cheek and complained that Roger kept changing lines in the script in favour of his own quips.

Roger Moore was the first actor to shoot a second gunbarrel intro. He had to do this because of an aspect ratio change.

The character of Nigel Small-Fawcett in Never Say Never Again was a last minute invention of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais to give the film more humour. Rowan Atkinson, who played the character, was completely unknown outside of Britain at the time. Atkinson is famous in many countries now for playing Mr Bean.

For what it's worth, Licence To Kill has a higher Rotten Tomatoes rating than Quantum of Solace or Spectre and is only 5% behind No Time to Die. It also has a higher rating than the last three Brosnan films. Of the Brosnan era, only Goldeneye outscores Licence To Kill on RT and that's only by 2%. And yet people still write about Licence To Kill as if it was a complete critical misfire!

According to Robert Sellers in the book When Harry Met Cubby, Broccoli & Saltzman considered dumping Roger Moore a week into the production of Live and Let Die and tried to get Sean Connery back.

Don McLaughlan, the head of public relations at Lotus Cars, used an ingenious but simple ploy to get the Lotus in the Bond films. He simply parked a prototype Lotus Esprit at Pinewood Studios! Someone from EON saw the car and the Lotus ended up in The Spy Who Loved Me.

Quantum of Solace was called A Grain of Comfort in Croatia.

The mansion belonging to Sanchez in the movie Licence To Kill was owned by friends of Cubby Broccoli. In return for a donation to a charity of their choice, Cubby was given permission to use the house in the film.

Harry Saltzman was said to be obsessed with gadgets - much more so than Cubby Broccoli. So the tradition of gadgets in Bond films probably stems from Harry Saltzman.

The moon buggy in Diamonds Are Forever kept breaking down during the chase sequence because it wasn't designed for rocky desert terrain.

In the 1990s there were stories that a new version of Never Say Never Again was going to be released on laserdisc with a new music score and much deleted footage put back in. Most Bond fans would pay money to watch that.

Britt Ekland, who played Mary Goodnight in The Man with the Golden Gun, said that Cubby Broccoli thought she was too thin so before shooting began he took her out to a lot of Italian restaurants to try and fatten her up and gain a few more curves.

Roger Moore actually became a very accomplished skier after moving to Switzerland in the 1970s. Even so, he wasn't allowed to ski in the James Bond films for insurance and safety reasons.

Tom Mankiewicz (who wrote the script) felt that Jane Seymour was miscast as Solitare in Live and Let Die. Mankiewicz felt that Seymour looked far too young and innocent and this made it seem as if Bond was taking advantage of her.

Aston Martin was founded in a small London workshop in 1913 by the engineer Robert Bamford and the car enthusiast Lionel Martin.

The abandoned Diamonds Are Forever moon buggy was later rescued from a muddy field and restored by Graham Rye of 007 Magazine. It then found a new home at Planet Hollywood.

Peter Hunt (director of OHMSS) said that Sean Connery approached him about directing Never Say Never Again. Hunt said he he couldn't possibly accept the offer because he would have felt like a 'traitor' to EON and Cubby Broccoli.

When Bond's Lotus comes out of the sea onto a beach in The Spy Who Loved Me, 007 hands a fish to a bemused onlooker before he drives off. Cubby Broccoli didn't like the fish joke (he wondered how a fish would get in a waterproof underwater car!) and wanted it removed but Lewis Gilbert and Roger Moore both loved it and persuaded Cubby to let it remain the film.

Madeline Smith was only paid £100 to play Miss Caruso in Live and Let Die. "It was a tiny amount. You hardly got anything at all in those days. But I was 23, and it was a wonderful experience. I absolutely loved Roger Moore. I could not believe it when I got the part. I never even auditioned for it. I had been in an episode of The Persuaders, which Roger had directed, and unbeknown to me, he suggested me for the part."

Irvin Kershner had only seen two Bond films when he directed Never Say Never Again. He had no interest in James Bond and only did the film as a favour to Sean Connery.

Before production began on Live and Let Die, Tom Mankiewicz had lunch with Sean Connery in a charm offensive that EON hoped might persuade Connery to do the film. It was of course unsuccessful. "I always hear that it's my ******* obligation to play James Bond," Connery told Mankiewicz. "I've done six, when does my ******* obligation stop? After ten, twelve, fifteen?"

The French Navy supplied the frigate and Eurocopter Tiger you see in Goldeneye.

Pierce Brosnan had a beard and long hair at the press conference unveiling him as James Bond because he was about to shoot a Robinson Crusoe film.

During production on The Spy Who Loved Me in Egypt, the crew were in low spirits because of the poor quality of the food. Cubby Broccoli therefore had his favourite pasta and tomatoes flown in, took over a local restuarant, and personally cooked spaghetti bolognaise for the entire cast and crew. This raised morale and made Cubby even more popular.

If you include audiobooks, short films, and video games, over two hundred people have played James Bond.

Goldfinger was briefly banned in Israel when it was reported in the media that Gert Frobe was a former member of the Nazi Party. Frobe left the Nazi Party in 1937. It transpired that Frobe had actually helped hide and rescue Jews during the war.

David Bowie turned down the part of villain Max Zorin in A View To A Kill. "I didn't want to spend five months watching my double fall off mountains," said Bowie.

Tomorrow Never Dies was supposed to begin with a mountain climbing PTS but this plan was abandoned in the end. Roger Spottiswoode said the sequence was abandoned because it would have been too dangerous to shoot.

GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 sold about 8 million copies.

Drax's henchman Chan in Moonraker is played by Toshiro Suga. Suga was Michael G. Wilson's akido instructor.

When he was interviewd on the set of The Spy Who Loved Me for the BBC, Roger Moore admitted that he didn't have the faintest idea what the plot of the film was!

Roger Moore said he got banged up quite badly shooting the ice hockey sequence in For Your Eyes Only.

Adolf Hitler shot himself with a Walther PPK.

A first edition of the Casino Royale novel can go for over £5,000.

Cubby Broccoli apparently cast Britt Ekland in The Man With the Golden Gun after being impressed by her nude scene in the classic British folk horror The Wicker Man. What Cubby didn't know was that Ekland had a body double on The Wicker Man. That wasn't really her bottom in the film.

Around the time that Thunderball (which was peak Bondmania for the Bond franchise) was released, Sean Connery recieved about 1,500 fan letters a week.

Putter smith, who plays the killer Mr Wint in Diamonds Are Forever, was a muscian with no previous acting experience.

The 2006 film Casino Royale is the first Bond movie to have a black and white sequence.

At a 2014 auction, one of Bond's safari shirts from The Man with the Golden Gun fetched nearly £5,000.

The sadistic torture of Bond by Le Chiffre in Casino Royale was based on the French-Moroccan torture known as passer á la mandoline. Ian Fleming said this was actually done on captured Allied agents during the war.

Live and Let Die was one of the few Bond films that Richard Maibaum didn't write on. He was later critical of the movie. "To process drugs in the middle of the jungle is not a Bond caper," said Maibaum.

The PTS freefall in Moonraker required over 90 jumps before sufficient footage was in the can. The parachutists could only film very limited footage on each jump.

In 1971, as Diamonds Are Forever geared up for release, Sean Connery said of Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman - "They’re not exactly enamoured of each other. Probably because they’re both sitting on fifty million dollars or pounds and looking across the desk at each other and thinking: that bugger’s got half of what should be all mine."

Legend has it that Harry Saltzman didn't like Shirley Bassey's Goldfinger song. Harry was apparently quite famous for having a tin ear when it came to music.

It was Sean Connery who chose Edward Fox to play M in Never Say Never Again. Fox plays M as a priggish upper-class bureaucrat who doesn't seem to like Bond very much.

Sean Connery's tatoos had to be covered up when he played Bond in the EON films. You can see them in Never Say Never Again though.

The PTS of Octopussy, though set in Cuba, was actually shot at RAF Northolt in England. They simply added a few fake palm trees.

In an interview many years after Bond, Sean Connery said that no one had the faintest idea if Dr No was going to become a success when they were making it. "Everyone who said that the first one was going to be a success is a liar because they didn’t know. The film costs less than a million dollars. They didn’t make one immediately afterwards because they still weren’t sure. Everybody forgets that. Believe me, nobody could have foreseen that all these years later, we’d be sitting here discussing James Bond."

Martin Grace was the stunt double for Richard Kiel's Jaws in the movies. To depict the steel teeth of Jaws, Grace put tin foil wrapped orange peel in his mouth!

The black actress Gloria Hendry (who plays Rosie) was removed from the promotional art for Live and Let Die in apartheid South Africa.

It is often claimed that Casino Royale (2006) was the first Bond film to feature rain. However, there appear to be a few splats of rain in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Although the scene with Madeline Smith's Miss Caruso opens Live and Let Die, it was actually the last scene to be shot during the production.

Peter Jackson was in contention to direct The World Is Not Enough. It is alleged that he dropped out of contention after Barbara Broccoli screened his film The Frighteners and absolutely hated it.

The acclaimed American director Katherine Bigelow said she was badgered by Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal to direct a James Bond film but declined these offers. Bigelow, had she been interested, would have become both the first American and the first woman to direct a Bond film.

Cubby Broccoli used to be a business partner with the famous American producer Irwin Allen. When Cubby told Allen he wanted to option the Bond books, Allen told him the Fleming novels were awful and wouldn't even be worthy of television.

Terence Young once said - "If you asked me what were the three ingredients for James Bond, it was Sean Connery, Sean Connery and Sean Connery!"

In a set visit to the production of Licence To Kill, Garth Pearce noted that Timothy Dalton hadn't let becoming James Bond change him at all as a person. Dalton still lived in the same modest house he'd had since before he became Bond and still did all his own shopping at the supermarket.

Around 75% of the women James Bond has taken to bed have tried to kill him in the end.

- GH

HOME

FORUM