On Location With Spectre

Spectre represents the longest job of Supervising Location Manager Emma Pill’s career. “I started in December 2013 and finished in August or September 2015. Two birthdays, two Christmases,” Pill says. Responsible for finding and securing the filming locations, Pill had worked with filmmakers Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan before she joined the world of 007, tasked by director Sam Mendes to track down locations as diverse as a remote alpine clinic and a North African base for SPECTRE operations.

“Sam [Mendes] was absolutely brilliant to work with,” Pill recalls. “With Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, you do feel part of a family when you’re working on a Bond film. I hadn’t done one before but to actually get to do Spectre was great. Bond is a British institution.”

Below Pill takes us through the challenges, pitfalls and joys travelling the world to source the perfect locations for Spectre…

Mexico City, Mexico 

Spectre begins with 007, played by Daniel Craig, on a rogue assignment in Mexico City, killing assassin Marco Sciarra during the Day of the Dead festivities. With no such parade of this scale taking place in Mexico City at that time, the production staged its own celebration through Paseo de la Reforma, one of the capital’s principal avenues, and Centro Histórico, the central historical district.

“I sent my colleague Ali James to Mexico City. “She did an amazing job. It was quite a coup to get the area shut down for the entire shooting period,  We had something like a thousand police. It was a big deal and it looked spectacular on film.”

For the key location of Zócalo Square, the production team spent a year negotiating permissions to stage a helicopter fight high above the crowded parade. It’s testament to the power of the Bond franchise that the Mexican government officials said yes, as air traffic in the area was usually not permitted.

“The [James Bond] name opens doors from a location point of view because people are so excited about it,” says Pill. “It’s such an event and nice to be able to phone up and say, ‘Hello. I’m working on this. I can’t tell you too much about it. But can I have a look at your location please?’ More often than not, you get to see amazing stuff that Joe Public doesn’t get to see.”

Rome, Italy 

Bond heads to Rome to attend Sciarra’s funeral. From intel gathered from Sciarra’s widow Lucia (Monica Bellucci), 007 infiltrates a meeting of clandestine terrorist network SPECTRE run by Franz Oberhauser/Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), who authorises the murder of the mysterious ‘Pale King’. Bond is spotted in the shadows and a high-speed chase ensues through the streets of Rome, with Bond’s Aston Martin DB10 chased by Oberhauser’s chief henchman Hinx (Dave Bautista) in a Jaguar C-X75.

“I did the scouting for Rome,” says Pill. “We had to take the DB10 into the streets at night prior to shooting to see what the colour of the metallic body was against some of the streetlights.”

To shoot the pursuit, Pill’s team arranged one of the longest city lock-offs in the franchises’ history, blocking out roughly 3km of main roads entering Rome. On February 23 2015, the unit shot Bond and Hinx speeding alongside each other on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, two of the fastest cars in the world barrelling through the streets at night.

“Everybody takes into consideration the precious, period nature of the city but there is also the public and crew safety aspect,” says Pill. “The planning that goes into chases is insane. They do some crazy things in Bond films, that’s what makes it exciting.”

Sölden, Austria

With Moneypenny’s help, Bond identifies ‘The Pale King’ as Mr. White (Jesper Christensen) and heads to Althuassee in Austria. The scouting for the snowy sequences was Pill’s first job on Spectre, the process starting in December 2013 because it is impossible to choose an alpine location without snow, “it looks completely different,” she says. Pill, alongside Production Designer Dennis Gassner and Associate Producer Gregg Wilson, spent six weeks exploring different European countries to find the perfect scenescape.

“Our first challenge was to look at all the different mountaintops, whether it be France, Italy, Switzerland or Germany,” Pill explains. “We looked at these incredible buildings that are perched on insane peaks and then we went out and scouted them. I don’t know how many ski lifts and cable cars we took but we did a lot of that.”

They landed on the ice Q, a restaurant in Sölden, Austria, that was a perfect space for the Hoffler Klinik. “I remember going up there for the first time,” she says. “It was a clear blue sky at the end of the day, that sort of dusk feeling. It was spectacular. Those moments are what I love.”

Once the ice Q was selected as the key location, it became the lynchpin around which the other locations were chosen in Austria. “You do have to have a bit of a plan for each country,” says Pill. “You start to try and form packages and parcels. We might have had an amazing lake up in Norway, but we weren’t going to go for a lake in Norway and a mountain in Austria.

Gara Medouar, Morocco

Conceiving the film visually, director Mendes wanted the film to play on a dynamic between hot and cold. After the freezing climates of Austria, the action switches to Morocco as Bond and Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) track down SPECTRE’s HQ in the Sahara. Having shot in Tanzania previously, and after recce-ing Morocco, Pill suggested a crater caused by erosion in Gara Medouar near Sijilmasa for Blofeld’s lair. 

“When Sam [Mendes], Dennis [Gassner] and cinematographer Hoyte [Van Hoytema] flew over, we walked out and it’s this flat landscape with an amazing little canyon with a cauldron coming out of it. We were looking for the feeling of heat, big skies, huge scope.”

The River Thames, London 

When joining the project, Pill was convinced production wouldn’t need London locations because Mendes’ previous 007 film Skyfall had made extensive use of the English capital. She couldn’t have been more wrong.  “Sam sat down with a group of us and said, ‘I want to bring it to central London. I want to focus on the river’,” says Pill. “My eyebrows raised knowing how difficult that can be.”

After destroying Blofeld’s base, Bond and Madeleine return to London to stop Max Denbigh’s online Nine Lives initiative going live, with the action centred on the Thames. The conception for shooting the sequence was to close down the river from Vauxhall Bridge to Hungerford Bridge. To accommodate the planning and negotiations for the sequence, it was scheduled for the end of the shooting as it involved cooperation from numerous parties: the House of Commons, House of Lords, MI5, MI6, the Lambeth Film Office, the Westminster Film Office, The Port of London Authority and the Civil Aviation Authority.

With the sequence taking place at night, illuminating the stretch of river was a big undertaking. Huge lights were placed on rooftops from Vauxhall to Hungerford, with lighting cranes in front of Lambeth Palace and Tate Britain, as well as two placed on floating barges by Westminster Bridge.

“When you next watch the film, notice that each arch of the bridges – Lambeth and Vauxhall – is lit by little spotlights underneath. The Thames drops seven metres every tide and it’s never the same time. So, we had a rigging team three weeks prior to the first night shoot, working on flatbed barges with scissor lifts that could only get to certain arches at certain tides. The logistics of that whole sequence were mind blowing.”

Pill had a team of 150 people marshalling crowds, organising traffic closures and logistics, an army that required a separate car park just to serve them. Once filming started, the crew were confined to the river, meaning support boats had to provide food and drink. But, as well as on the water, Pill also had to worry about what was going on in the air.

“With the helicopters, we could only fly up till midnight due to residents – they didn’t want helicopters buzzing around their apartments all night. After midnight, we focused down on the river and the quieter stuff. We sent out 11,000 letters to local residents.“

Having planned the set-piece for months, Pill’s most exciting moment was to see all her hard work pay off and the cast and crew take centre stage. “I think it was 9pm on a Saturday night in May and I was on one of the support boats behind the hero boat. I’m sitting there and everything gets closed down and then the helicopter comes in and we’re off. That for me is like, ‘Oh, we got here’. When it all comes together it’s quite exhilarating.”