Skyfall
10th Anniversary 2012-2022

The board of enquiry scenes were filmed at Pinewood Studios in the first two weeks of January 2012, with the late Helen McCrory playing MP Clair Dowar. A day of location shooting in Glencoe (below top left), Scotland on February 9th captured the footage of Bond and M travelling in the Aston Martin DB5 to ‘Skyfall Lodge’, with the interiors of the house filmed at Pinewood from early February to mid-March. The final confrontation between Silva, Bond and M (pictured below) was filmed on March 30 and April 2, 2012. The death of M was the end of a 17-year relationship between Judi Dench and the James Bond films, and marked her seventh successive appearance as the head of MI6 [although she would make an uncredited cameo appearance in Spectre (2015)]. Although her appearance in the Daniel Craig films was somewhat incongruous as they represented a reboot of the series, Judi Dench remained the only tangible on-screen link between the Pierce Brosnan era and the new iteration of the character.

The exterior of ‘Skyfall Lodge’ was constructed on Hankley Common (above top right) in Surrey with a full-scale house, chapel and graveyard created for the production. The destruction of Bond’s ancestral home was achieved with a third-scale miniature of the house and Silva’s helicopter (below left), supervised by special effects wizards Steve Begg and Chris Corbould.

The introduction of Javier Bardem in the computer room of the dead city on Silva’s unnamed South China Seas Island was filmed at Pinewood Studios on 28-29 March 2012. Director Sam Mendes chose to film the meeting between Silva and Bond in a continuous one-minute-45-second take, as Bardem exits a lift and makes his way towards Daniel Craig - all the time delivering a monologue about his grandmother’s rat-infested island.

Also filmed at Pinewood in early April were the scenes involving Silva’s escape from the MI6 bunker, and the spectacular train crash on the ‘007 Stage’, which dove-tailed with Second-Unit live action footage captured at Charing Cross Station. Mid-April saw the production move to the ‘Floating Dragon Casino’ set where Bond meets Sévérine (memorably played by Bérénice Lim Marlohe). Roger Deakins’ [inset below top left] masterful photography enhanced the night-time shooting on the large exterior water tank at Pinewood Studios.

The sequence also included another in-joke where Bond escapes his attackers by jumping across the back of a Komodo Dragon - a nod to Roger Moore’s escape from a small crocodile-infested island in Live And Let Die (1973). The Komodo Dragons and much of the set featured in Skyfall were entirely computer generated.

In April 2012 production moved to Istanbul, marking the third time a James Bond adventure had filmed in the historic Turkish city. Previously, Istanbul served as a backdrop for scenes in From Russia With Love (1963) starring Sean Connery, and The World Is Not Enough (1999) starring Pierce Brosnan as James Bond. Whilst in Turkey the first and second unit filmed the spectacular pre-credit sequence with Ola Rapace (as Patrice) and Naomie Harris (as Eve Moneypenny), along with Daniel Craig and an outstanding stunt team coordinated by Gary Powell.

Daniel Kleinman (below left with Daniel Craig) started shooting his memorable opening title sequence from May 28, 2012, as Skyfall went into post-production with director Sam Mendes and editor Stuart Baird [who also edited Casino Royale (2006)] shaping the film ahead of its scheduled October 23rd premiere.

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Skyfall FACT FILE