Trivia / Tomorrow Never Dies

The Film

• Actor-Inspired Element: It was Pierce Brosnan's idea for Paris to be an ex-flame of Bond's.
• B-Team Sequel:
  • The producers were unable to persuade Martin Campbell to return; his agent said that "Martin just didn't want to do two Bond films in a row." He did The Mask of Zorro instead, though he would return to direct a Bond film several years later.
  • Production designer Peter Lamont was unable to return, as he was working on Titanic (1997).
  • Money issues prevented John Barry from scoring the film, so David Arnold made his debut.
  • Phil Méheux regrettably declined to return as cinematographer in favour of a Martin Campbell project that was ultimately abandoned.
  • Production was unable to film at Pinewood Studios, as it was being used for The Phantom Menace. Leavesden (which accomodated the last film) and Shepperton were also unavailable, so they used a converted warehouse.
  • Rare was offered the chance to make a Tomorrow Never Dies video game after their hugely successful GoldenEye, but turned it down in favour of doing their own thing (the TND game that was released was called one of the "most spectacular failures of gaming" by G4 in 2003). Ironically, one of the fan-made Game Mod for GoldenEye many years later would end up being an adaptation of TND, accordingly released to much more acclaim than the actual PS1 disc.
• California Doubling: Bangkok doubles for Ho Chi Minh City, referred to as Saigon in the film; and London stood in for Hamburg for the carpark chase (which was filmed at Brent Cross Shopping Centre of all places), among other scenes.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Daphne Deckers auditioned for Paris Carver before being cast as Carver's publicist.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • Michelle Yeoh does her own fight scenes.
  • Ricky Jay, as a magician, had an uncanny ability to throw cards across a room, and he had several moments during fight scenes where he'd do this as Gupta, but they were cut (though they were filmed and appear in the deleted scenes).
• Creator Backlash:
  • Pierce Brosnan would go on to admit that while he looks back very fondly on GoldenEye, he isn't so wild about the following films in his run. He singled out Tomorrow Never Dies in particular, saying that he felt while filming that it "wasn't up to speed" with its predecessor, and that he had a hard time promoting the film because he didn't care for it and didn't enjoy filming it as much.
  • Teri Hatcher later expressed her dissatisfaction with the part of Paris Carver, saying it was "an artificial kind of character to be playing that you don't get any special satisfaction from it".
• Completely Different Title: The Hungarian title is A holnap markában (Within the Hand of Tomorrow).
• Deleted Scene: Several of them:
  • There were a few bits cut from existing fight scenes of Gupta throwing cards as weapons, a skill Ricky Jay was versed in. In particular, there were two scenes where this was cut: the first is from early in the film, where Gupta is shown practicing his aim on office equipment when Stamper calls him to report that phase I of the Devonshire operation is complete. Since this bit was cut, it meant that the payoff to this scene, where Gupta used his cards as weapons during the fight Bond and Wai Lin have with Carver's men in Saigon, also had to be cut.
  • M and Robinson's debriefing of Bond was a bit longer, and also outlined Carver's backstory.
  • Right before Q gives Bond his BMW, he opens a crate with a jaguar inside.
    Bond: Jaguar?
    Q: Wrong assignment.
  • There was more dialogue in the scene at his party where Carver is laughing off allegations that he engineered the Mad Cow Disease scare. Namely, revealing that he gained control of several French television stations as a result of the money he took from the French government to keep the stories running.
  • There were a few more lines from the scene where Carver sends his wife to Bond, that were cut because they made Carver look like a jealous husband.
  • Bond returns the keys to his BMW after crashing into the Avis building.
  • With the henchman who falls asleep on duty, after Carver wakes him up with the "What the HELL am I paying you for?!" he tells Stamper to deal with the man, so Stamper beats him to death.
• Denied Parody: While Elliot Carver looks at first glance like a thinly disguised version of Rupert Murdoch, the movie's main writer claims he was actually based on Robert Maxwell (this is supported by the cover story for Carver's death and the public's reaction to it mirroring Maxwell's fatal boat accident).
• Dyeing for Your Art: Götz Otto dyed his hair blond to play Stamper.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • The director told Pierce Brosnan and Michelle Yeoh separately that they were going to be the one driving the bike in the Saigon Chase Scene. Hilarity Ensued.
  • Earlier in the film, Bond's car crashes through a dealership. Members of the public nearby were not told this was happening, so their shock is real.
• Fake Nationality:
  • The Chinese Wai Lin is played by the Malaysian Michelle Yeoh. Yeoh is, however, ethnically Chinese.
  • The German Dr. Kaufman is played by Vincent Schiavelli, an American actor of Italian origins.
  • Bond's BMW AI, which has a German accent, is voiced by English actress Nichola McAuliffe.
• Hey, It's That Place!:
  • The Atlantic Hotel was St. Hodges Golf Club, the setting for the golf game from Goldfinger.
  • Some filming took place in Phang Nga Bay, which was used back in The Man with the Golden Gun.
• Hide Your Pregnancy: Teri Hatcher was three months pregnant during shooting. This meant that a love scene had to be abandoned.
• Hostility on the Set:
  • Pierce Brosnan and Teri Hatcher feuded briefly during filming due to her arriving late onto the set one day. The matter was quickly resolved though and Brosnan apologised to Hatcher after realising she was pregnant and was late for that reason.
  • Judi Dench got so fed up with the constantly changing script that she complained to Roger Spottiswoode. She later recalled an altercation with the director during an ADR session. Arriving late due to gridlocked traffic, Dench recounted Spottiswoode standing in the doorway calling to her to hurry as she briskly walked through Soho.
    I simply couldn't shake hands with him. So I said, "Did you see me the other day? In Streatham?" "Did I?" "You know you did, I nearly ran you over". At that moment, Barbara Broccoli came out of the back and said, "Pity you didn't accelerate and do the job for us".
• In Memoriam: Dedicated to longtime producer Albert R. Broccoli.
• Multiple Languages, Same Voice Actor: Stamper's actor Götz Otto re-dubbed his lines for the German release.
• No Stunt Double: Michelle Yeoh did most of her own stunts.
• On-Set Injury: While filming a fight scene, a stuntman's helmet hit Pierce Brosnan in the face, which required eight stitches down one side of his face, leaving the crew no choice but to film many of his scenes from one side only.
• The Other Marty: Anthony Hopkins was the number one pick for the role of Elliot Carver and was assumed for the role for most of pre-production. Jonathan Pryce was brought in relatively late due to Hopkins being unavailable.
• Reality Subtext: In the novelization, Jack Wade asks Bond about Natalya Simonova, to which Bond replies that she's now married to a hockey player. Izabella Scorupco really did marry a pro hockey player, Mariusz Czerkawski, in 1996. Unfortunately, Scorupco and Czerkawski divorced less than a year after this movie was released.
• Recycled Set:
  • The Ministry of Defence's exterior is the courtyard of Somerset House, which just two years prior in GoldenEye was used for a St. Petersburg town square.
  • MI6's situation room was also used as Hamburg's media room and the Ho Chi Minh City media command centre.
• Refitted for Sequel: Bond's BMW can send spikes on the road. This was a feature meant for the Aston Martin DB5 in Goldfinger, but was abandoned for fear that children might imitate it.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The original title was Tomorrow Never Lies, the proposed Tag Line of Carver's newspaper Tomorrow. A misspelled fax lead to the one the filmmakers eventually used (which ended up continuing the common theme of life/death in Bond titles).
• So My Kids Can Watch: Jonathan Pryce signed on partially for this reason:
  My children absolutely adored Goldeneye and their response to that probably had a lot to do with me accepting the role.
• Spared by the Cut: The man Carver catches sleeping on the job was originally beaten to death by Stamper.
• Technology Marches On:
  • The characters have to repeatedly exposit what a GPS is, because in 1997 that was obscure military technology. Nowadays, virtually every new car and phone has access to GPS.
  • Notice when Carver lists off all the assets of his media empire — TV, news, radio, books, magazines — the Internet isn't mentioned at all.
• Troubled Production: According to an interview with Michael G. Wilson, the film was given a release date with no pre-production work completed (and intended to coincide with the release of MGM's public stock offering), and things went downhill from there. The script wasn't ready to shoot on the first day of filming, actors supposedly weren't speaking with each other, verbal sparring between director Roger Spottiswoode and writer Bruce Feirstein persisted and the entire production (from the first day of shooting to its release) took a scant six months. One British newspaper summed it up saying, "All the happiness and teamwork which is the hallmark of Bond has disappeared completely," and Pierce Brosnan said that making this film was like pulling teeth.
• Uncredited Role: Several writers worked on the story and screenplay without credit including Nicholas Meyer, Daniel Petrie Jr., and David Campbell Wilson.
• What Could Have Been: Enough for its own page.
• Working Title: The film was originally to be titled Tomorrow Never Lies, which makes more sense than the final title, what with the plot involving Carver creating the next day's headlines in advance before causing those events to happen. However, it was changed due to a typo, oddly enough. Razor Kiss was also considered.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Filming started with a release date set in stone and no finished script. Production was so rushed that Jonathan Pryce and Teri Hatcher were cast days before filming began and the script was constantly being rewritten. Pryce recalled that he had never encountered a production where the screenplay changed so rapidly.
  I will make sure in future that it is written in the contract that the script I agree to will be the script we use.
  • Judi Dench was handed revised pages when she arrived at the studio. She complained to the director, "You know, it was very off-putting indeed to have learnt the script and at a quarter to ten the night before to get a loud knocking on the door by the courier with a new script. That's not fair.
  • Bruce Feirstein finished his final draft three weeks before the end of production.
    I was writing in a tent outside the Bond stage, sending in pages as we were shooting, where Pierce was standing on the deck of the stealth boat, asking "Which way do I go? Do I turn left or do I turn right?" The answer was, "Wait. We'll have the pages in a minute".

The Video Game

• Unspecified Role Credit: The voice actors are credited as a list rather than to their precise roles. This has led to a recurring misconception that Bond is voiced by Adam Blackwood in this game, which has been denied by Blackwood himself.

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