Inside The Living Daylights

Following the departure of Roger Moore as James Bond after A View To A Kill, producers Albert R. Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson decided to ally the search for a new Bond with a new direction for the series. Looking to imbue the character and film with a tougher, harder edge, The Living Daylights, directed by John Glen, took inspiration from the real-life story of a KGB officer who defected to the CIA for a short time in 1985, then re-defected to the Soviet Union, rooting the drama in real-life geopolitics while still delivering on classic 007 action and adventure. This is the behind-the-scenes story of the 15th Bond film.

1. A NEW DIRECTION 

The first idea for Bond 15 was an origin story exploring the character’s roots. The story started in 1972 with Bond as a young lieutenant in the Navy who, to avoid a court martial, undertakes a mission in Singapore for MI6 to kill warlord General Kwang. It was ultimately decided that the series shouldn’t look backwards, and the next treatment was inspired by the 1962 Ian Fleming short story The Living Daylights, with Bond sent to protect a defecting army officer and refusing to shoot the cellist sniper (Maryam d’Abo’s Kara Milovy in the finished film). “We then had to make a two-hour movie of this,” said screenwriter Richard Maibaum.

1. DALTON. TIMOTHY DALTON

Casting for the new Bond began in earnest in January 1986. After actors including New Zealander Sam Neill, Brits Michael Praed and Mark Greenstreet, Australian James Healey, Frenchman Lambert Wilson, and Irishman Pierce Brosnan (his time would come) were tested, the team went back to an actor who had been considered 20 years previously. The RADA-trained Timothy Dalton had been approached in the late sixties following The Lion In Winter, but the actor turned the role down, believing he was too young. Dalton refused the role again when it looked like Moore would leave following Moonraker, but when Broccoli came calling for The Living Daylights, the actor was more in sync with the role.

“When we met Timothy in 1986, we saw during the intervening years he had added poise, experience and self-assurance,” said Cubby Broccoli. “He was excited by the idea. He saw Bond as being more serious, just as ballsy as Connery’s 007, but carrying his own personal imprint. He wanted to play the character closer to the way Fleming wrote it — which suited me.”

After signing on the dotted line, Dalton re-read all the Fleming novels to immerse himself deeply in the character.

“For me, he clearly lives in the moment,” said Dalton about Bond. “He’s always on the edge of his own death, everything is heightened.”

1. ROCKING GIBRALTAR

The Living Daylights opens with Bond on manoeuvres in Gibraltar, a training exercise that goes wrong when an assassin kills a 00 agent. The sequence was Dalton’s induction into the world of 007 spectacle, but the filmmakers felt confident in his ability to be physical. “Tim’s very good at action,” said Glen. “He was a good mover, and he was very keen to do as much of his own stunt work as possible.” The pre-credit sequence culminates with Bond jumping on the killer’s Landrover speeding around narrow roads. Dalton flew in to do close-ups on top of the moving Jeep, so Broccoli sent second unit director Arthur Wooster a message: don’t damage him!

“He was keen and threw himself around,” laughed Wooster. “My old heart was going crazy and I couldn’t get rid of him quick enough — I was terrified.”

4. THE RETURN OF AN OLD FAVOURITE

Bond teams up with Kara in Bratislava, and the pair flees to Vienna. For a car chase around a frozen lake in Czechoslovakia, The Living Daylights saw the return of an old favourite — the Aston Martin, here upgraded to the Volante model, kitted out with an array of Q dept gadgets including laser beam cutters, automatic missiles, rockets, studded tyres and skis for driving on ice. Shooting in Weissensee, Austria, the unit used three real cars and a number of doubles for moments it flies through the air, leaps over a dam and falls down a snowbank.

“It was a dangerous chase because when we first arrived, the lake was just freezing over,” said stunt coordinator Paul Weston. “When we walked out on it, you could see the fish beneath you, as it hadn’t gone white yet. It was like standing on a sheet of glass.” 

5. SAY CELLO WAVE GOODBYE

After Bond is forced to destroy the Aston Martin, he finds a more unorthodox mode of transport — Kara’s cello case. The idea came from Glen during a writing session at MGM. 

“I said to Cubby, Dick and Michael, ‘I’ve got this idea to use the cello case as an escape vehicle where Maryam can sit on one side and Tim can sit on the other side, and go down the mountain,” said Glen. “Cubby pulled a face and Dick thought it was the worst idea he’d ever heard. I borrowed a cello case to demonstrate it was possible. Then they were convinced.”

The cello case was made out of fibreglass and was fitted with skis underneath and handles on the side, allowing Dalton to control the direction. While stunt performers Herman Sporer and Ida Huber doubled as Bond and Kara in long shots, Dalton and d’Abo spent three days shooting the sequence, which was not without its challenges.

“On one side was the ravine and down at the bottom was the camera crew,” recalled d’Abo. “Timothy weighed more than I did, so it was off balance and they put firecrackers underneath the snow to look as though we were being shot at — which I had a real phobia about.”

For the sequence’s finale, Bond throws Kara’s cello over the barrier at the checkpoint. Glen tried the moment with stuntmen, and it didn’t look right. “Tim said he wanted to have a go at it,” recalled Glen. “He tried and did it perfectly it one take.”

6. MAGIC CARPET RIDE

Bond travels to Morocco to kill the power-hungry General Pushkin (John Rhys-Davies) taking him to where he is hiding with arms/drug dealer Whitaker (Joe Don Baker) and his hired killer, Necros (Andreas Wisniewski). After 007 assassinates Pushkin, he is chased across the rooftops by the Moroccan police. Timothy Dalton arrived in Tangier in October 1986 to shoot the sequence that included a nifty gag in which Bond evades his pursuers via a ‘magic carpet ride’. 

“We had planned to have Bond escaping across the rooftops, grabbing a carpet, throwing it over some wires that he sits on as it slides down like a magic carpet,” recalled Glen. “And it worked reasonably well, in fact, but the scene got a little over-long, and it was one of the tough decisions we made during the edit.”

7. UP IN THE AIR

The climax of The Living Daylights takes place high above Afghanistan as Bond and Necros fight on a cargo net full of packages of heroin hanging from the back of a Hercules aircraft. Shot during the rainy season, meaning the sequence had to be captured in short snatches, the fight, doubled by stuntmen B.J. Worth as Bond and Jake Lombard as Necros, was made more difficult by the winds buffeting the cargo net, slamming it against the fuselage.

“After I had kicked Jake off the net, I started to crawl up the net but now with very little weight on it, the net started to go wild, flopping about very violently,” recalled Worth. “I wasn’t sure what to do as it was so unexpected. Eventually, I just had to let go, jump off the net, and use my hidden parachute – which was a first for me.”

The sequence was completed by close-ups of Dalton and Wisniewski captured against a painted backdrop at Pinewood, augmented by miniature mountaintops. The effect recreated action at 15,000 feet with the actors being just six feet off the ground. 

8. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

By the time filming had finished on February 13, Glen had shot around 389,530 feet of film. With a theme composed by Norwegian band a-ha and John Barry (who, for his last Bond film, fittingly has a cameo in the film as a conductor), The Living Daylights opened in the UK on June 30 and a month later in the US on July 31. The film earned $51,185, 000 at the US box office and $191,200,000, firmly establishing Timothy Dalton as the right choice for 007.

“I think Timothy was wonderful in The Living Daylights,” said John Glen. “The script suited him, he portrayed all the smouldering qualities we were trying to introduce at that time, and he was equally good in the love and action scenes. I thought it was a remarkable debut considering he was thrown in the deep end.”