Die Another Day
20th Anniversary 2002-2022

The second unit supervised by Vic Armstrong travelled to Iceland on February 25th, 2002, to capture the car chase between Bond’s Aston Martin Vanquish and Zao’s Jaguar XKR. Filmed over a three-week period on a lagoon that only freezes over for a few weeks of the year, the crew were helped by the coldest period for 60 years, enabling them to complete the sequence before the lagoon ice began to break up. Back at Pinewood on March 8th, shooting began on the interiors of the ice palace set designed by Peter Lamont. The large-scale exterior structure was built on an airfield at Burford, Gloucestershire. The ice palace was also constructed in miniature (below bottom right) in order to achieve the shots of Bond arriving in his Aston Martin Vanquish.

On March 12th, 2002, the title of the 20th James Bond film was finally announced as Die Another Day and a teaser trailer released in cinemas. The working title for the film had been ‘Beyond The Ice’ and the teaser poster had simply shown Bond’s silenced gun lying on a block of ice. Two years earlier several UK newspapers had released the story that British actor Edward Woodward was lined up to replace Judi Dench as she retired as M in ‘Beyond The Ice’. Then, as now, the vast majority of this so-called news is utter nonsense. Long before the rise of social media and internet speculation, the release of information surrounding the production of the latest film was restricted to newspaper gossip columns, and the only way to read actual facts was thanks to the unprecedented access to exclusive news published in 007 MAGAZINE. ‘Die Another Day’ refers to Colonel Moon surviving his first encounter with agent 007. Upon meeting later in the film Bond comments: “So you live to die another day.” The title comes from the poem The Day of Battle by A.E. Housman (1859-1936) published in 1896 as part of the collection A Shropshire Lad. The poem contains the phrase “But since the man that runs away. Lives to die another day.”

The first unit next travelled to Cadiz in Spain on April 3rd, 2002, which doubled as Cuba - however, the crew were initially faced with unusually cold weather which delayed the filming of Halle Berry’s on-screen entrance. The character of Jinx is first seen emerging from the sea in homage to Ursula Andress as the first James Bond girl in Dr. No (1962). Berry’s status in the industry had recently changed due to her Oscar win as best actress for Monster’s Ball (2001). To date Halle Berry is the only African-American actress to win the award, and immediately elevated her appearance in Die Another Day, with the posters giving her almost equal billing and visibility as Pierce Brosnan. Monster’s Ball was directed by German-Swiss filmmaker Marc Forster, who would go on to direct Daniel Craig’s second appearance as James Bond in Quantum of Solace in 2008. After the release and success of Die Another Day, MGM considered developing a spin-off focusing on the character of Jinx that was scheduled for a November/December 2004 release. A script was written by Die Another Day co-writers Neal Purvis & Robert Wade, and Stephen Frears was reportedly keen to direct. The project was mercifully cancelled by MGM because of budget concerns and “creative differences”.

As production continued in Cadiz, the action unit filmed at a cement works in Chinnor, Oxfordshire where the Korean DMZ minefield had been constructed. On April 21st, 2002, a day of filming outside Buckingham Palace took place, with Toby Stephens making his entrance into the film on a parachute sporting the Union Jack – in an obvious nod to Roger Moore’s James Bond in the pre-credits sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). This scene in Die Another Day is intercut with James Bond flying back to London accompanied by The Clash’s London Calling! blasting out on the soundtrack. As Bond is served a vodka martini by an air stewardess, played by none other than Roger Moore’s daughter Deborah, he reads a British Airways High Life magazine featuring an interview with Gustav Graves (by Gregg Wilson – son of co-producer Michael G. Wilson) with the words ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ clearly visible on the page! It is revealed later in the film that Colonel Moon has changed his identity and undergone a painful gene therapy treatment to become Gustav Graves - now played by Toby Stephens. The British actor [son of acclaimed actors Sir Robert Stephens (1931-1995) and Dame Maggie Smith (1934- )], went on to play James Bond himself in the 2008 BBC Radio 4 dramatization of DR. NO. This was followed by a further eight Radio 4 adaptations of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels at regular intervals until 2020, making Stephens the actor who had played the character the most times to date – surpassing Sean Connery and Roger Moore on screen.

The model unit began shooting the Icarus satellite sequences at the end of April 2002, with the main part in miniature, but the opening silver reflectors computer generated. The new millennium had seen a rise in the number of computer-generated effects used in motion pictures, and as with all major shifts in technology many have become dated and less-effective with the passing of time. The later computer generated ‘kite-surfing’ sequence however was already laughable in 2002, with absurd CGI waves and icebergs. The climax of the film featured the destruction of Graves’ Antonov aircraft – the exteriors of which were also largely computer generated. The most recent James Bond film No Time To Die (2021) employed digital enhancement to almost every shot in the film in some form or other, with most of them appearing seamless to the viewer, who even now are probably unaware they were watching a computer-generated image. The technology has advanced so far in the two decades since the release of Die Another Day, that its special effects now appear dated in the same way those in Diamonds Are Forever did 30 years before.

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