After Skyfall became the biggest Bond movie ever, its director Sam Mendes and his cast reunited for a follow-up that connected every film in the Daniel Craig era, returned to the dangling threads of Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace, and (secretly) brought back one of 007’s most iconic villains. But it was a sometimes bumpy road there – and one that took in some of the most ambitious globe-trotting sequences in the franchise’s history…
PREVIOUS: The Making Of Skyfall
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PART ONE: Mexico
Words: Neil Alcock
I’ve never seen anything like it,” one of Spectre’s cast tells Empire. “It’s so exciting, I cannot tell you. You have to pinch yourself. It’s… extraordinary.”
It’s a sultry March evening in Mexico City, and the topic under discussion is the traditionally eye-popping pre-title sequence of the 24th Bond film, currently shooting in the capital. You’d expect Johnny Extra to gush about anything they saw on a 007 set, but when the actor brandishing the superlatives has already demolished a canalside building in Venice, freefallen from a disintegrating DC-3 into a desert sinkhole and downed a helicopter by blowing up his character’s own ancestral home beneath it, you take them at their word. Yep, it’s fair to say that even Daniel Craig is impressed.
He’s not alone. Earlier that day, Empire is perched on a balcony of the city’s sumptuous gran hotel. Below us, in the Zócalo — Mexico City’s vast central square, bordered by a cathedral, a palace and various government buildings — a thousand extras, garbed in the macabre costumes of the country’s Day Of the Dead festival, are snaking their way towards an imposing, nightmarish stage erected at its centre. On the stage is the festival’s centrepiece, La Catrina: a giant grinning skull, 30 or 40 feet high, flanked on either side by two equally tall, cackling skeletons. another 500 extras, playing spectators, entertainers, police and soldiers, litter the square, while next to the stage is a beefy-looking military helicopter, which is about to embark on a less-than-smooth journey. It’s fair to say that we’re impressed too.
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As, indeed, are some of the architects of the scene, who join us on the balcony: second unit director Alexander Witt, production designer Dennis Gassner, costume designer Jany Temime, and— quietly surveying the action like a proud parent on sports day — producer Michael G. Wilson. “This is the biggest opening sequence we’ve ever done, maybe the biggest [of any] sequence we’ve ever done,” he tells Empire, pondering the complex logistics of it all. “The only thing that’s come close to it was putting on the carnival in Rio in Moonraker. That was pretty big, getting all the costumes and people and dancers, and we’ve done that here, but it’s a much bigger operation.”
Gassner is, if anything, even happier. in his off-white linen suit and fedora, the laid-back Canadian talks in an easy drawl (think Jeff Bridges playing Alan Grant) but becomes remarkably animated as he points out his team’s achievements. “Did you see what we’re doing out here?” he asks, gesturing at the Spectre-cle below. “I mean, look at that! When Mexico City and Day Of The Dead became part of the mix, we looked at it in a very excited way and said this could be an amazing opening. It’s always been a great event; I’ve seen bits and pieces of it, but not like this. I don’t think I’ll ever see it like this again!”
Witt, meanwhile, acknowledges the challenge of shutting down and taking over a major traffic hub in one of the world’s most populous cities. “It’s more challenging for the city than for us, to close down a square where all the roads come together, especially with the Mexican White House being part of the square.” The demands of the script don’t make life any easier, Witt explains: “It’s elaborate because you have 1,500 extras and you’ve got to fill up a square that you probably need two or three hundred thousand people to look like it’s full.” Indeed, as he speaks, ADs in the Zócalo herd the extras into different sections of the square, to be filmed in such a way that a composite image can be created later.
And then, of course, there’s the small matter of the aforementioned chopper, which will soon be involved in the hair-raising stunt seen in the second trailer: a 360-degree mid-air corkscrew that makes The Man With The Golden Gun’s car-based spiral jump look like
a wheelie on a BMX... And Empire’s hunch is that that might not even be the most mind-blowing thing you’ll see the helicopter do. To execute these amazing aerobatics, the production secured the services of top stunt pilot Chuck Aaron, one of just three people in the world licensed to perform them. In case you didn’t already wish you were him, Aaron goes by the call sign ‘Malibu’ and sports the kind of magnificent, twirlable moustache Bond villains only dream of.
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That stunt follows a sequence of events that sees Bond going rogue to hunt down minor villain Marco Sciarra (Alessandro Cremona) through the Day Of The Dead parade, leaving a typically insurance company-bothering trail of destruction behind him. There’s a commotion from the throng below us as Cremona bursts through the crowd and heads for the huey. He leaps in, but not before a familiar-looking secret agent (actually a stunt double) clambers aboard after him, and the helicopter’s inhabitants prepare for in-flight fisticuffs as it takes off, swooping low over the Zócalo’s grandiose rooftops.
Expectations for the sequence are naturally high, especially given Skyfall’s incredible opening jeep / motorbike / digger / train set-piece, and that’s both a burden and an incentive for cast and crew. Just ask the main man. “There’s a huge amount of pressure,” Craig tells Empire that evening. “But fantastic pressure, because I think we made a good movie [with Skyfall]. By having Sam back we’ve created a language that’s one foot in the past but hopefully very modern as well, and we wanted to continue that. What you saw today is obviously a fantasy, helicopters don’t often fly down the main street of Mexico City... But hopefully [Spectre] is richer and the characters go a bit deeper.”
The one thing Craig wants to avoid, he tells us thoughtfully, is “mediocrity. It’s got to be spectacular and the best thing you can do.” On the basis of all that Empire has witnessed in Mexico City, mediocrity seems unlikely.
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PART TWO: Austria
Words: Phil de Semlyen
Perched by an Obertilliach ski slope high in the Austrian Tyrol, only a Spectre-issue Helly Hansen puffer jacket preventing the onset of hypothermia, Empire is shielding its eyes from the glare of sun on snow. Just behind are a group of schoolkids playing hooky to catch MI6 and SPECTRE doing battle for the first time since Never Say Never Again (or For Your Eyes Only, if they’re sticklers for canon). A hundred yards in front squats a two-tiered alpine barn that only five minutes earlier had been a hive of activity. The last of the stunt and explosives experts slowly depart the area. “No filming!” shouts a crew member as a curious local tees up a smartphone.
The skiers swishing blithely past have no idea that in a moment Her Majesty’s finest will be blasted across the valley in the battered cockpit of a light aircraft like a rocket-propelled rooster. Not the man himself, of course. You couldn’t hire a crash test dummy to sit in this cockpit, let alone the most heavily insured man in British cinema. Besides, Daniel Craig is back in Pinewood with Sam Mendes and the first unit, finishing the beginning of the action sequence that ends here.
It’s the kind of temporal brain-twister action movies of this scale throw up. Balance sheets and tight schedules have two separate crews working on the same scene hundreds of miles apart. The magic of cinema — and specifically that of editor Lee Smith — will render those joins undetectable. This set-up is the culmination of a three-part sequence that sees 007 pursue SPECTRE vehicles carrying henchman Hinx (David Bautista) and mysterious doctor Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) — also Mr. White’s daughter — down a glacier, through a frozen forest and, by now wingless, through a barn. It’s the ‘through’ part the locals are so keen to witness. Any minute now, the rigged explosives will go off, propelling the front half of the Britten-Norman Islander into the thinnest of air. At least, that’s the plan.
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It’s hard to imagine these second-unit crewmembers, most sporting campaign beards, as ‘second’ to anyone. They’re the highly drilled workhorses behind the latest stunt to gild James Bond’s rich history of carefully coordinated mayhem. In their 450-strong ranks are franchise veterans. The film’s affectionally dubbed “snow whisperer” Stefan Zürcher, for example, has worked on nine Bonds, and nearly perished for the cause on The Living Daylights when his snowplough plunged through a frozen lake. And one of today’s key men, unflappable stunt co-ordinator Gary Powell, has kept Bond safe(ish) since Casino Royale. “The planning and logistics of a sequence like this takes months,” he points out. “Then there’s getting permission to film in the village, because they’ve probably never seen anything like this.”
At one point there were a thousand crew members in situ as first and second units converged. There’s “a lot of PR” required to keep the locals, mostly no-nonsense farmers, happy during the shoot, a production manager explains. Soon they’ll be able to boast of joining Bregenz (Quantum Of Solace) and Weissensee (The Living Daylights) in offering an Austrian home for Bond, but for now they’re probably just keen to know why two modified Land Rover Defenders and a Range Rover have been careering down their slopes at 60mph. “There’s always danger with everything we do,” says Powell, pre-empting Empire’s next question. “We’re on icy roads so anything can happen, but I’ve got three rally champions driving. Good team there.”
Aboard the plane during its earlier trajectory down the slopes was Rob Hunt, stuntman on two previous Bonds and, whisper it quietly, one Bourne. If light aircraft make seriously uncomfortable toboggans, he’s not getting much sympathy from his boss. “There’s not a lot of suspension when you’re coming down the slopes,” laughs Powell, “so his vision’s quite blurry at the moment.” Hunt and his fellow stunties originally had even more derring to do up in these mountains. The final chunk of the already lengthy sequence, originally due to end with a skidoo chase through the village and culminate with Bond and Hinx facing off at a dam, was truncated, presumably because at some point someone would have needed to stop for a pee.
“Everyone’s done their homework so when we get to the shooting day, it shouldn’t be a challenge,” adds Powell, as the countdown to barnageddon commences. If he speaks with the reassurance of a man who’s seen it all, that’s because he has. This isn’t even his first Bond-meets-light-aircraft gig. He worked on Pierce Brosnan’s improbable skydive into the cockpit of GoldenEye’s Pilatus Porter. “It’s a little different having a plane chasing three cars through the woods,” he says. The stunt co-ordinator exudes professional pride in his 15-strong team, and appreciates his director’s openness to new ideas. “Sam likes to be proved wrong,” he grins, “which is good because I’m more than happy to do that for him — in the nicest possible way.” The easy option here, a classic Bond ski chase, was jettisoned in favour of “trying to do something different”.
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It’s definitely different. Bond has been in a barn or two before (famously with Pussy Galore in Goldfinger and Tracy di Vicenzo in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) but there’s no hay to roll in this time, just an imminent detonation and a trip into the blue yonder. Second unit director Alexander Witt, on whose shoulders all this ultimately rests, has nine cameras ready to capture it all. Mendes will scrutinise the results on remote playback later. “So far he’s been happy, no complaints,” says Witt. “He doesn’t send smileys back, just, ‘Move on.’ It’s just for him to get a sense of the shots we’re doing.”
Witt is calm as things prepare to go all Michael Bay on us. And then it happens. There’s a heart-jolting bang and through a blizzard of logs and splintering timber shoots the cabin of that entirely Q-unapproved Bond plane. It thumps to Earth and grinds to a halt 100 yards further down the slope. The locals whoop their approval. Empire, meanwhile, glances around, half-expecting to spot Powell and Witt engaged in a celebratory fist-bump, handshake or high five. But they’re already onto the next set-up. They’re losing the light.
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PART THREE: Pinewood
Words: Chris Hewitt
Sam Mendes almost didn’t edit this issue [of Empire]. Because Sam Mendes almost didn’t direct Spectre.
Back in March 2013, there were over a billion reasons why Eon’s Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli wanted Mendes back in the director’s chair for the 24th Bond film. That’s how much Skyfall, Mendes’ previous crack at the world’s least-secret secret agent, had raked in around the world, a record for the 50 year-old series. But money isn’t everything; there was also critical acclaim, not for the first time in 007’s history, but certainly on an unprecedented scale. There were awards. There was love in the air. It seemed like a no-brainer for Mendes to become the first director since John Glen to direct two consecutive 007s.
But then Mendes walked away. In a statement he talked of “a very difficult decision” but cited “theatre and other commitments” that needed his “complete focus over the next year and beyond”.
As we know, Mendes recanted four short months later. And just two years after that, he’s sitting in an armchair in his Pinewood office, mug of coffee close by, trying to make sense of it all.
“It was partly that Michael and Barbara and MGM wanted to go really quickly,” he says. “In fact, at one point there was talk of releasing it this summer. It would have been released a month ago (in June). I said, ‘That’s impossible.’ There was also talk about doing two back-to-back. I felt, as Daniel did, that was verging on the insane. One is almost more than you can cope with, let alone two!”
The “theatre and other commitments” included directing Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (“I didn’t go off to do a tiny show — it was almost as much work as Skyfall”) and King Lear, along with “moving back to England and all sorts of stuff that’s really boring.” Also, even though Mendes is a man who’s pretty much done it all (including winning an Oscar for his first film), directing a billion-dollar blockbuster with a cultural footprint as large as Skyfall’s is a different challenge entirely. “It took me a while to get my head around it,” he admits. “But the success of Skyfall didn’t feel like a straitjacket. It felt like an opportunity.”
Meanwhile, Wilson, Broccoli and writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade were still beavering away on the story of Bond 24, aided and abetted by Daniel Craig, a man who has more story input than any Bond in history. “It’s gone exactly where I wanted it to go,” says Craig. “There are so many rich seams to mine.”
Together, the Bond Brain Trust was determined to come up with a story so utterly grab-you-by-the-lapels-of-your-safari-suit compelling that Mendes would have no choice but to come back. And it worked. “Story was always the way in,” says Mendes. “And once we located that, I felt a sense of ownership. Once you’ve got that, you’re in, whether you like it or not.”
Which leads us to today, and Empire’s latest trip down the Piccadilly Line to Uxbridge (other London Underground lines are available) for our final visit to the set of Spectre. We’ve been to some of the most exotic locations Planet Earth has to offer on this movie — Mexico, Austria, Chris Corbould’s house — but there’s something about Pinewood that still rushes the blood. After all, it’s where you’ll find the Albert R. Broccoli 007 Stage, the logo rising resplendent above all the buildings that surround it. This is the only place in the world you can drive down a street called Goldfinger Avenue. And, as you do so, you might just have to swerve to avoid Roger Moore, who still keeps an office here. Pinewood is Bond.
There was this big spectre hanging over the movie and the franchise, which is Blofeld, and what happened to the supervillain. That’s all I’m going to say – Sam Mendes
Today, the 007 Stage is being prepped for a major helicopter sequence. Instead, we’re off to a smaller stage, retracing Bond’s steps through his old stomping ground: the MI6 building. Last seen being blown up by the dastardly Silva in Skyfall, the former HQ of the British Secret Service will play a crucial role in Spectre. And the vertigo-inducing, four-storey set that a sweaty-palmed Empire shakily clambers up is a fabulously authentic recreation of a gutted, once-glorious building. It’s here that, later, a certain secret agent will be drawn, into the dilapidated shell of a building he once knew intimately, now ravaged by fire and pressure and time. He’ll walk through offices where computers have been fused together by heat, and find himself in the lobby of the building. He’ll be inexorably drawn towards the wall, on which stands a stone memorial bearing the names of all the MI6 agents who have fallen in the line of duty (actually, they’re all key Spectre crew members). And it’s here where those flinty blue eyes may even betray a flicker of emotion as they light upon the last name — crudely spray-painted in large red letters. His name. James Bond.
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Even though all the pre-Craig Bond movies had a loose chronology (Moore’s 007 visits the grave of Lazenby’s wife, Tracy, in For Your Eyes Only), the series just didn’t do sequels. Instead, the character breezed through a series of standalone adventures in which the fate of the world was perpetually at stake, while our hero often acted like he couldn’t give two figs.
That all changed with Casino Royale and the casting of Craig. His Bond doesn’t shrug, he absorbs. “Watching those movies, the character is leading us through the story but nothing really touches him,” says Craig. “I couldn’t act like that. I wouldn’t know how to. From the beginning, it’s been, ‘It’s okay to get a bit emotional.’ And hopefully by doing so, you raise the temperature a bit.”
The Craig Bonds had already introduced the concept of a direct sequel into the Bond franchise. Quantum Of Solace picks up mere minutes after Casino Royale ended. So it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, considering Skyfall’s enormous cultural impact, that Spectre is a direct follow-up. But Mendes is keen to point out that it’s not simply Skyfall 2.
“It’s quite a different film,” adds Mendes. “It’s quite daring to take something that you know has worked and turn it around. For me, the idea of trying to do another Bond movie and do something exactly the same would seem to be foolish. It was about being able to do things with this movie that I hadn’t been able to do on the last one.”
One of those things is expansion, and the embracing of a wider story for 007. The MI6 set is so large that it plays host to holding cells, in which a shadowy someone has placed photos of people who would be living and breathing still had it not been their misfortune to know one man in particular: Bond. We won’t give away the identities, but there are blasts from Bond’s past that stretch back to Casino Royale. “A weird game is being played,” teases Mendes. “That’s definitely front and centre in terms of an attempt to give a shape to all the Daniel Craig Bond movies. We wanted this to be an accumulation, a gathering of everything that he’s done as Bond.”
So, then, to the big question: who’s the Machiavellian genius (besides our esteemed editor, of course) behind that weird game? The name’s Oberhauser. Franz Oberhauser.
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Long story short: for decades, Eon didn’t have the rights to evil organisation SPECTRE or its leader, the bald, scarred, cat-stroking blowhard, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. now they do. So, when the movie and its cast were unveiled to the world’s media last December, just before the start of filming, everyone presumed that a film called Spectre had to include Blofeld. And the presumption was that Christoph Waltz just had to play him. Had to be.
However, it seems that may have been a case of putting 002 and 002 together to make 007. Much has changed about this very modern iteration of the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. Blofeld, it seems, is yesterday’s news.
Oberhauser, according to Mendes, is “a figure that has a root in Bond’s past, and a root in Fleming.” That root can be traced back to Octopussy, the original Fleming short story, in which a man called Hannes Oberhauser is referenced by Bond almost as a father figure. After all, once his parents died, Bond had to go somewhere. Why not into the care of Hannes Oberhauser? And does that mean Franz Oberhauser is the son of Hannes, and effectively Bond’s ‘step-brother’? If Oberhauser really is the author of Bond’s pain, Chapter One may have started early, possibly with well-timed wedgies.
“In Skyfall, we got to Bond age 12 when his parents died, but what happened after that?” asks Mendes. “What happened during his adolescence? It’s a kind of retrospective creation story, in a way. When you looked at the surface of Skyfall, it felt like an ending. But it was a new beginning on so many levels. It felt like there were all these threads to pull, so let’s pull them.”
Let’s assume, then, that Waltz is not Blofeld. So much so, in fact, that he perhaps should have been called Not Blofeld. But rumours are pests, and there are still cynics convinced Eon is hiding its glorious bastard in plain sight; that, despite all the denials, Waltz is playing Blofeld, after all. This is known as Pulling A John Harrison, after the wildly complex efforts to mask the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch’s Star Trek Into Darkness villain was actually Khan, a decision that contributed to some of the fan fury heaped upon that movie.
“Why was there a backlash?” asks Mendes, when Empire brings this up. We venture that fans may have felt tricked, maybe even lied to. “But there’s a narrative as well,” he counters. “The naming of a character is part of a story. The audience cannot and should not be given — and I’m not confirming or denying anything — information that the characters do not have. And preserving tension in the narrative of a story that is a riff or an acknowledgement of the iconography of Bond over the years has been crucial. Otherwise you are taking an audience out of the narrative before it’s even begun.”
Just talking about Blofeld is tricksy. Mendes could be forgiven for banning the mere mention of the B-word on set.
“The B-word!” he snorts. “No, we talk about it all the time. It’s the great figure from the Bond vault, as it were. There was this big spectre hanging over the movie and the franchise, which is Blofeld, and what happened to the supervillain.” He chuckles. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
So Oberhauser is a supervillain, smart and sinister enough to lure Bond to the MI6 building where they’ll have a very intense confrontation. For some filmmakers, the presence of a supervillain, and the fun to be had from pure, unrestrained id, can sometimes lead to the hero being overshadowed or ignored. Mendes insists that with Spectre, the focus will remain on the most important B-word of them all.
“In Skyfall, Bond is playing catch-up the whole time,” says Mendes. “Here, it’s a totally different story. Here, he has to drive the movie.” And Bond’s investigation will throw up some interesting revelations... “There’s some big stuff the movie is moving towards,” teases Mendes. “There are depth charges you hopefully don’t see coming.”
While the director was keen to spare Bond a “psychological” ordeal this time around, there’s no question that, as 007 flits between London, Mexico, Morocco, Austria and Rome (sadly, Chris Corbould’s house will not feature in the movie), his ordeal will be physical. Craig’s Bond has already sustained bullets to the body and blows to the balls, but Spectre will really dole out the damage, including a train fight with Dave — sorry, David — Bautista’s hulking henchman, Mr. Hinx, that is deliberately redolent of the Connery/Robert Shaw dust-up in From Russia With Love. “It’s a different kind of style of fight, a different kind of antagonist,” says Mendes. “There are challenges and lots of situations in the movie where you think, ‘How on earth is he going to get out of this?’” The author of Bond’s pain laughs. “It’s a pretty dark place.” James Bond will return...?
Originally published in the November 2015 issue of Empire.
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