The Making Of Thunderball — A Timeline

“LOOK OUT! HERE COMES THE BIGGEST BOND OF ALL!” 

So ran the tagline for Thunderball, the fourth adventure to star Sean Connery as 007. Directed by Terence Young, the filmmaker behind the first two missions, Dr. No and From Russia With Love, Thunderball sees Bond travel to the Bahamas to retrieve two nuclear warheads stolen by SPECTRE number two Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), used to hold NATO to ransom for the sum of £100 million. Full of exotic locales and spectacular action (often underwater), the shoot was the most ambitious in the series to date. Here is a timeline detailing how the film was made…

February 16 1965

Filming on Thunderball began at the Château d’Anet, west of Paris, with the pre-title sequence. Bond attends a service for a dead spy, Jacques Bouvar, 007 meeting his widow in a living room. The grieving wife turns out to be Bouvar himself, and a fist fight to the death erupts. The widow was played by stuntman Bob Simmons, who was awoken in his hotel room at 6 am and dressed in a blonde wig, stockings, and high-heeled shoes by the crew.

“They marched me out in full drag in broad daylight, making me cross the hotel foyer crowded with people and down the hotel steps into the car,” recalled Simmonds. “I felt a right Charlie and the last glimpse I had of Terence and Sean was as they collapsed into two huge chairs in the foyer, gulping for air in barely controlled hysterics.”

After filming for two days, the crew moved on to shooting Bond’s escape from the Château via a Q dept. jet pack. The US Air Force had been experimenting with jet packs, so the production contacted Bell-Textron for a demonstration. “It actually worked and was very dangerous because you could only fly for 20 seconds,” said production designer Ken Adam. “Then you ran out of fuel and had nothing.” Close-ups of Sean Connery didn’t show 007 sporting a protective helmet, but when jet pack pilot Bill Suitor insisted on wearing headgear, the close-ups were reshot. 

February 25 1965

The production returned to the series’ spiritual home of Pinewood Studios. Scenes shot here included Bond undercover at the Shrublands health clinic, seducing physiotherapist Patricia (Molly Peters), fighting with a SPECTRE pilot, and a love scene with SPECTRE assassin Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi).

March 24th 1965

Departing on March 22, the crew relocated to Nassau in the Bahamas. Filming began with Bond discussing the aphrodisiac properties of Clam Chowder with Domino (Claudine Auger), continuing with the Bond-Domino dinner at the Casino filmed at the Café Martinique on Paradise Island.

April 12 1965

The crew assembled to start filming on Largo’s yacht, the Disco Volante. Designed by Ken Adam, the vessel needed to separate from the hull and become a hydrofoil to outrun the US Navy. Envisaged as 160 ft long and capable of travelling at 50 knots, Adam bought an old hydrofoil and built a catamaran at the back to increase the size; the two hulls held together by two one-inch slip bolts. A week before the shoot, the team was still struggling to get the two hulls to separate. On the day of filming, Young recalled, “Everybody got ready; we had a helicopter following, we had this fast speedboat, and three cameras mounted on this enormous great Mississippi barge. The boat came by, and clean as a whistle the front came off, the back remained, and that was it! We had nothing else to do, so Sean and I went off and played golf!”

April 26 1965

On a recce, the production decided on a villa at Rock Point to double as Largo’s villa. The abode, belonging to Mr. Livingston Sullivan, hosted two swimming pools, which the crew filled with approximately 16 live sharks ranging from seven to 15 feet long. To achieve shots of Sean Connery in the water with the sharks safely, Ken Adam created a plexiglass corridor so the actor was on one side and the sharks on the other. On the third take, a shark got through, and Connery found himself face-to-face with a predator. “I got out of the water so fast I was dry when I touched the side,” recalled the actor. According to Young, “The shot we have in the picture of Sean Connery is not acting.”

May 10 1965

Shooting the big climactic underwater battle started with close-ups on Connery and Celi. While the main unit returned to the UK, the underwater unit continued working on the sequence, employing 45 divers. With so many stunt people carrying dangerous weapons, rehearsals were undertaken onboard a huge barge and then replicated below the waves.

“You can only retain so much in your mind before you need to talk again,” remembered underwater cameraman Ricou Browning. “And in those days, we didn’t have underwater communication so we had to use hand signals. When it got so complicated you couldn’t use hand signals, you just came topside and rehearsed it again, and went back again. It was time consuming.”

May 31 1965

Shooting the destruction of the Disco Volante. The scene started with special effects supervisor John Stears and his team revamping a floating hull of a boat to resemble Largo’s vessel. Shot at Rose Island, 30 miles from Nassau, the boat was primed with pyrotechnics and sent into the rocks. The subsequent explosion was spectacular, but after a five-minute delay, the debris started raining down on the crew. Stears recalled there was “40 tons of boat coming down on top of us…The engine was the biggest piece, came down in one, and crashed into the coral. The miraculous thing is nothing hit us.”

June 21 1965

Following a week of shooting the fight on the bridge of the Disco Volante, the production moved to Silverstone racetrack on June 21 to shoot the chase between Bond in the Aston Martin and Count Lippe (Guy Doelman) in a Ford Fairlane Skyliner, which ends with Lippe being killed by Fiona Volpe firing rockets from a Lightning BSA motorbike. With the Ford Fairlane prepped to explode, the cars were doing speeds of 70mph, with stunt supervisor Bob Simmons driving for Lippe. 

“The rockets were fired on the motorbike,” recalled John Stears. “It all happened perfectly: the car exploded, went off the track, down the ditch, and we cut. We raced up the track with the ambulances and a fire engine. Bob wasn’t there. We thought he was under the car. Terence and everybody were really panicking, then a voice behind Terence said, “How was that, guv?” and it was Bob. He’d crawled out of the car, up the bank and come around the back of us. Terence said, “You bastard! Don’t you ever do that to me again!”

July 8 1965

The film completed production with key Largo scenes such as the SPECTRE boardroom and torturing Domino. The tank at Pinewood was also employed for close-ups of the Vulcan cockpit — heat from the underwater lights threatened to crack the glass of the tank — and for Maurice Binder’s title sequence. The production wrapped on July 8. 

Dec 9 1965

Thunderball premiered in Tokyo on December 9, with a US release following on December 22. As a marketing stunt, certain cinemas were open 24 hours a day for audiences to experience the new 007. With a budget of $9 million, the film went on to gross £142 million worldwide, with over 58 million admissions in the US alone. Once adjusted for inflation, the film is among the highest-grossing Bond films of all time. Next up: You Only Live Twice.