The James Bond films have had a lot of cases of Troubled Production — in particular, every Bond's second movie gets hit badly by these.
- From Russia with Love had to undergo an Absurdly Short Production Time because the producers had already set a release date and started filming just six months in advance, and they had to face problems such as a boat full of cameras sinking into the Bosphorus, a helicopter falling into a lake (with the director inside!) while location scouting, and co-star Pedro Armendáriz being diagnosed with terminal cancer and then committing suicide during the shoot.note
- Most of the problems with You Only Live Twice had to do with the scope of the production, and the technical difficulties that went along with it.
- The press intrusion into Sean Connery's life started to become a serious issue. The constant media attention meant that thirty extra private security guards were hired to combat the excess noise and hindrance, but even the guards started to take photos. At one point, a fan began following Connery with a camera, and police had to deal with fan incursions several times during shooting. The final straw came when a journalist followed him into the toilet for an interview. This contributed to his growing dissatisfaction with the role.
- Not helping Connery's mood was his deteriorating relationship with Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. It got to the point where he refused to act if either of them was on set.
- During one interview, Connery offended Japanese national pride at a press conference by stating that "Japanese women are just not sexy" due to their hiding their figures behind kimonos. This faux pas turned out to be based on a mistranslation, on a day when Connery was exhausted after an intensive day's filming.
- Connery was also worried about typecasting and was annoyed that people only saw him as James Bond. The fact that the posters boasted that "Sean Connery IS James Bond" didn't help. One interviewer was aghast that the actor showed up in a casual t-shirt with baggy trousers and sandals, and not wearing a toupée. "Is this how James Bond dresses?" he asked, to which Connery replied tersely "I'm not James Bond, I'm Sean Connery, a man who likes to dress comfortably."
- The volcano set cost almost as much as Dr. No's entire budget. It was so large, it could be seen from three miles away. The final battle required the services of every stuntman in Britain. According to Ken Adam, it required more steel than that used for the London Hilton Hotel. He later said that he must have been mad doing such a complex set.
- Saltzman hired Jan Werich to play the part of Blofeld without consulting Gilbert or Broccoli, and though Lewis Gilbert persevered with Werich, it soon became obvious that he was completely miscast, leading to the role being hastily recast with Donald Pleasence.
- Casting the main girls had its troubles. Mie Hama was originally given the role of Aki, but lost it because her English wasn't very good. She threatened to throw herself off the roof of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo out of shame, so she was given the role of Kissy instead, which required less English (she was dubbed, anyway).
- While scouting locations in Japan, Broccoli, Saltzman, Gilbert, cinematographer Freddie Young, and Adam were booked to leave Japan on BOAC flight 911 departing Tokyo for Hong Kong and London. Two hours before their Boeing 707 flight departed, the team was invited to an unexpected ninja demonstration, and so missed their plane. Their flight took off as scheduled, and twenty-five minutes after take-off, the plane disintegrated over Mt. Fuji, killing all aboard.
- The Little Nellie battle was initially shot in Miyazaki, first with takes of the gyrocopter, with more than eighty-five take-offs, five hours of flight, and pilot Ken Wallis nearly crashing into the camera several times. A scene filming the helicopters from above created a major downdraft, and aerial cameraman John Jordan's foot was severed by the craft's rotor, which required amputation. The concluding shots involved explosions, which the Japanese government did not allow in a national park, so the crew moved to Torremolinos, Spain, which was found to resemble the Japanese landscape.
- The Toyota 2000GT weren't convertibles, but the 6'2" Connery couldn't fit into the tiny car, so the producers had to ask Toyota if they could send one without a roof. Two weeks later, they got a car sans roof.
- Akiko Wakabayashi couldn't drive, so six stuntmen created the illusion of her driving by attaching a cable, and pulling it from outside of the frame. Stuntmen also substituted for her in long camera shots by donning black wigs.
- Hama couldn't dive (allegedly due to stomach cramps), so Connery's wife Diane Cilento doubled for her wearing a black wig.
- Local Japanese girls cast as extras refused to wear bikinis in publicity photo shoots, requiring Broccoli's intervention to gain their consent.
- In post-production, the cut that Gilbert and editor Thelma Connell came up with ran at an absurdly long three hours and got universally negative feedback from a test audience. The producers, realizing they had a potential Franchise Killer on their hands, begged former series editor Peter Hunt (who had moved away from editing into handling the second unit, as a stepping-stone to becoming a director in his own right) to re-edit it into something much more manageable, and Hunt agreed, so long as he was allowed to direct the next entry in the series.
- Even recording the title song had problems. Nancy Sinatra, fresh off her chart hit "These Boots are Made for Walkin'", was so nervous about doing it that it took twenty-five different takes (by her own admission, she sounded like Minnie Mouse). The final song used in the film was made up of the best parts from each recording. At one point, she asked the crew, "Are you sure you wouldn't rather have Shirley Bassey?"
- The end product once again proved a critical and commercial hit, but Connery decided enough was enough and temporarily retired from the role until he came back for Diamonds Are Forever.
- While not part of the official film series, the 1967 adaptation of Casino Royale was a trainwreck of epic proportions that had long-standing ramifications on the greater Bond franchise.
- Eon Productions (who are behind the film series) did not have the rights to the novel as Ian Fleming had sold the film rights to Casino Royale separately to Gregory Ratoff, who died in 1960 before he could find backers to fund the film; the film rights then ended up in the hands of producer Charles K. Feldman, who contacted Eon producer Albert R. Broccoli in an attempt to make the film a co-production, but Feldman and Broccoli butted heads over profit divisions and production dates. Feldman broke off talks to seek different backers for the film. Feldman also attempted to sign on EON Bond star Sean Connery, but balked when Connery demanded one million dollars for the role - a significant sum at the time.
- With a script written by Scarface (1932) screenwriter Ben Hecht, Feldman brought the film to Columbia Pictures who agreed to take on the project. Hecht had initially written a straightforward adaptation of the novel but later drafts reportedly differed significantly from the novel. Hecht died in 1964, just two days before he was due to present his final script. With the spy film craze beginning due to the success of EON's Bond films, Feldman opted to change the film into a parody of Bond to seperate it from the pack, bringing in several writers (among them Wolf Mankowitz and Billy Wilder) to rewrite the script before and during shooting, while Peter Sellers ended up in the role of James Bond.
- When filming began, Sellers became increasingly uncooperative toward the production. Allegedly, Sellers had signed onto the film believing it was a serious adaptation of the novel but arrived to the set to find out it was a spoof, greatly upsetting him. Among his antics was having actor John Bluthal fired, ordering a set torn down over a dream he had, bringing in Terry Southern to rewrite his character's dialogue in an attempt to outshine his co-stars, and leaving the set for days or weeks at a time.
- Fanning the flames was the Hostility on the Set between Sellers and Orson Welles, who had been cast as the film's villain. Sellers vocally complained that Welles wasn't taking scenes seriously while Welles refused to shoot scenes with "that amateur". Sources disagree on what caused the rift between the two,note but the production had enough with Sellers and fired him. A number of his scenes were still unfilmed, including the film's ending, and as a result his character in the film was killed off via being gunned down using a Fake Shemp.
- The production scrambled as the plot was hastily rewritten to account for missing and unfinished scenes. Five directors would be credited for the final film (John Huston, Val Guest, Ken Hughes, Joseph McGrath and Robert Parrish. Richard Talmadge also did uncredited directing). David Niven was brought in for new scenes that would wrap around scenes Sellers had been in while other sequences were either cut, dropped or replaced entirely, which eventually led to the film having a bizarre plot about an older, retired Bond (Niven) assigning multiple agents the name "James Bond". The resulting chaos caused the film's budget to run far over what it had began with.
- When the film finally released in April 1967, it was blasted by critics for a long list of reasons, among them being its nonsense plot and choppy editing. While it made roughly three times its budget back, virtually nobody involved in the production had nice things to say about the experience and many who worked on the film saw their careers derailed or killed; of the film's directors, John Huston was mostly unscathed while Val Guest, who handled Niven's scenes, was scapegoated for the mess and reduced to directing films like the Awful British Sex Comedy Confessions of a Window Cleaner for the rest of his career. Charles Feldman developed heart issues as a result of the stress incurred by the film and died two years after its release. The reputation of Peter Sellers suffered thanks to his actions on the set, which led some studios to simply not deal with him at all, though he would bounce back after a string of failures with The Return of the Pink Panther.
- And as for EON Productions? While they couldn't take direct legal action against the film, it caused them to take a much more aggressive stance in protecting their hold of the Bond franchise. It was also a key factor in EON's decades-long feud and legal entanglements with Kevin McClory, who held certain rights to the Bond novel Thunderball (and who would use those rights to make his own unofficial Bond film with Never Say Never Again). The film's reputation along with legal issues kept the rights out of EON's hands until 1999, and in 2006 they would finally make an official adaptation of Fleming's novel.
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service had a few stuntmen accidents and leading man George Lazenby had conflicts with the director and the producers. On top of that, the press had a field day with the production and created huge stories out of the most innocuous events; lead actress Diana Rigg's off-hand quip about eating garlic prior to a scene resulted in stories that the two leads could barely even stand to work together (which, to be fair, wasn't completely untrue), while the news that George Baker would be overdubbing some of Lazenby's lines — specifically the ones where Bond was impersonating Baker's character, Sir Hillary Bray — ended up being interpreted as Lazenby having proven to be such a terrible actor that the producers had been forced to have Baker overdub his entire performance. These stories naturally made the already-strained mood on the set even worse, and played a part in Lazenby's decision not to return to the role.
- The Man with the Golden Gun saw initial plans to film in Iran abandoned after the Yom Kippur war. Writer Tom Mankiewicz was forced to leave, "feeling really tapped out on Bond", with the producers bringing back recurring screenwriter Richard Maibaum... before having to bring back Mankiewicz again after on-set rewrites were needed, and other work commitments rendered Maibaum unable to fly out to Hong Kong to perform them. On top of that, Ted Moore, who had been cinematographer for all but two of the Bond films until that point, suffered a heart attack after the location filming was complete, and had to be replaced by Oswald Morris for the rest of production.
- The Spy Who Loved Me was fraught with problems from start to finish:
- The previous film, The Man with the Golden Gun not only was not well received by critics, it also had one of the weakest box office of the franchise to date. The situation became even more tense when one of the producers, Harry Saltzman, was forced to sell his interest in the franchise to solve his financial losses (Saltzman was also struggling with clinical depression, while his wife Jacqueline was struggling with terminal cancer). This meant that now Albert R. Broccoli was the sole producer of the franchise, and that the success or failure of the next film would be up to him alone.
- When Ian Fleming originally gave EON Productions the film rights for the Bond books ten years earlier, he told the producers that where The Spy Who Loved Me was concerned, they could use his title but no other aspect of the novel since he wasn't very proud of it, the first time that happened in the series. For that, his name was moved down in the credits. However, this led to one decision that helped the film: the writers chose to write Bond more as Fleming had envisioned him (as they described it, "Very English, very smooth, good sense of humour") and less like the way Connery had been playing him. This helped Moore come into his own in the part.
- The Spy Who Loved Me was rushed into production after another producer, Kevin McClory, decided to create a rival Bond film (which would eventually become Never Say Never Again). The original script treatment for Spy was rejected, and a new screenplay was commissioned that prominently featured Bond's archnemesis Blofeld. Unfortunately, McClory still held the rights to the Blofeld character, forcing the screenwriters to pop in a Suspiciously Similar Substitute in the form of Stromberg. Several writers, including Anthony Burgess, John Landis, and Gerry Anderson, worked on the script at different times.
- The producers cast about for a director and settled on Steven Spielberg, who was still finishing Jaws (itself famously troubled) at that point; he decided to wait and see how that turned out for him instead. Guy Hamilton, who had directed the previous three Bonds, then got the job but left to direct Superman: The Movie.note So it ultimately fell to Lewis Gilbert, who had directed You Only Live Twice, of which the film is essentially a remake (both films involve the villain stealing military technology from both sides in the Cold War to bait them into going to war against each other, and both climax with an assault against a lair protected by steel shutters).
- To accommodate the set for the interior of the supertanker, a completely new stage had to be built at Pinewood Studios outside London, along with a giant water tank. It was so huge that cinematographer Claude Renoir,note who was losing his sight to begin with, couldn't figure out how to light it and had to secretly bring in Stanley Kubrick for help.
- To film the opening stunt, the second unit travelled all the way to Mount Asgard near the northern tip of Canada's Baffin Island. The fall and parachute jump cost $500,000—the most expensive stunt at that time.note
- Shell offered to loan the production a tanker, but between the insurance costs and the very real safety risks it was too expensive to use and miniatures had to be built instead. Miniatures were also used for the scenes in Giza when the pyramids proved too large to light effectively.
- During filming in Egypt, the cast and crew were upset with the poor quality of food being served to them. So, producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli was able to get a refrigerated truck to bring in food from England. Unfortunately, by the time the truck made it to Egypt, all the food was either spoiled or stolen. But Broccoli came through in the clutch. He sent assistants out to round up tomatoes, cheese, bread, and imported pasta from Cairo. Then Cubby (something of an amateur chef in his free time) cooked up a massive spaghetti feast for the cast and crew. In his honor, the mess hall at the studio was renamed "Trattoria Broccoli" and many involved remember the makeshift pasta night as one of the high points of filming.
- Thankfully, the film was critically well-received, and is still considered one of the franchise's high points.
- Filming of Moonraker wasn't too troublesome compared to its predecessor, but production had to be moved to France due to the crippling taxation being imposed on UK film productions at the time, with production designer Ken Adam being dismayed to find that the French studio workers' unions were even more militant than their UK counterparts. The eyesight of initial cinematographer Claude Renoir, which had already caused problems during production of the previous film, ended up failing completely after only a few days of shooting, putting an unfortunate end to Renoir's career, and necessitating his replacement with Jean Tournier.
- Octopussy had problems in the writing phase after initial writer George MacDonald Fraser's draft contained several scenes that were ludicrously unfeasible to film, in addition to generally lacking the feel of a Bond film, necessitating a rushed overhaul of the screenplay by veteran Bond writer Richard Maibaum and producer Michael G. Wilson. Casting the title character also proved difficult, with close to two dozen actresses being screen-tested — reportedly their original choice was Sybil Danning, but they decided against it after she gave a terrible performance in her screen test — before the producers finally threw their hands up and cast Maud Adams, who had previously been the secondary Bond Girl in The Man with the Golden Gun, while lifting some details from the original Ian Fleming story (the script having been an In Name Only adaptation until that point) to explain her non-Indian appearance. Then, during filming Roger Moore's stunt double was severely injured after an accident while filming the train sequence, which affected morale for the rest of the shoot. Filming also got held up for a few days when Moore collapsed on-set and was mistakenly diagnosed with a heart problem, before Adams brought in her boyfriend, a top cardiac surgeon, who found that Moore actually just had heatstroke.
- The story of the non-EON produced Never Say Never Again spans decades, revolving around a man who believed it was his purpose in life to manage the James Bond film series.
- The story begins all the way back in 1958, when several friends of Ian Fleming, among them an Irish man named Kevin McClory, approached him with the offer of co-writing an original screenplay for a James Bond film. The resulting screenplay, Longitude 78 West, was shopped around but ultimately wasn't picked up for mundane financing issues. Longitude 78 West would have been just a minor footnote in the history of Bond, until...
- In 1961, Fleming released Thunderball, a Bond novel that was a direct adaptation of the Longitude 78 West screenplay. McClory was angered at not receiving any credit for it, and sued. By the time the case was settled in late 1963, Dr. No and From Russia with Love were hits and the Eon Productions James Bond film series was well underway, with an eventual adaptation of Thunderball inevitable. Thus, as part of the settlement, McClory earned the film rights to Thunderball, and he got his chance to produce an adaptation of it in 1965. The film version of Thunderball itself didn't face too many development issues, but what happened afterwards is another story.
- To make Thunderball, Eon Productions licenced the film from McClory for a period of 10 years, during which he couldn't do anything with the rights. Friends and family of McClory describe him as someone who had a singular obsession with the Thunderball rights for decades, believing that it was his ticket to creating a rival Bond franchise that would let him get back at Eon Productions, and that he resented this 10 year wait. Things became more complicated once the lease expired since Thunderball featured many recurring elements of the Bond series that were not under separate copyright, most notably the character of Blofeld and the organization Spectre. Another ensuing legal battle was launched, preventing those elements from appearing in any Eon-produced film despite being important parts of the early films. These legal restrictions began to have their effect on the EON films in the meantime. 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me (the first film made after McClory got the Thunderball rights back) was supposed to have Blofeld as its villain, but had to be replaced with Karl Stromberg. Later, the Cold Open for 1981's For Your Eyes Only featured Bond killing a blatant Blofeld stand-in as an obvious shot at McClory.
- Eventually, McClory got his shot at producing his own Bond film with 1983's Never Say Never Again, a loose remake of Thunderball starring a returning Sean Connery. The troubles on this film didn't end once production began, with Sean Connery taking on many of the production duties with assistant director David Tomblin. Director Irvin Kershner was critical of producer Jack Schwartzman, saying that, while he was a good businessman, "he didn't have the experience of a film producer". After the production ran out of money, Schwartzman had to fund further production out of his own pocket and later admitted he had underestimated the amount the film would cost to make. There was tension on set between Schwartzman and Connery, who at times barely spoke to each other. Connery was unimpressed with the perceived lack of professionalism behind the scenes and was on record as saying that the whole production was a "bloody Mickey Mouse operation!"
- The film directly competed with Octopussy at the box office, which released in the summer earlier that year. The overall result of that duel is a rough tie; Never Say Never Again won the bigger opening weekend, but Octopussy grossed more overall. Critics at the time were generally a bit warmer to Never Say Never Again, but the film never managed to get big enough to create a rival Bond franchise, despite Kevin McClory continuing to try for much of the rest of his life.
- Kevin McClory passed away in 2006, and his estate finally allowed the Thunderball rights to be acquired by Eon Productions in 2013, who would go on to make Spectre, a film that reintroduces Blofeld and Spectre to the Bond films for the first time in decades.
- Licence to Kill was hit by a writers' strike, tax issues making it too expensive to film in the UK, and severe heat while filming in Mexico.
- The pre-production phase of GoldenEye was defined by a deep journey into Development Hell that resulted in a six-year gap between films.
- Pre-production on the seventeenth Bond film had started in 1990 with the alleged title Property of a Lady, but ceased when MGM and Eon Productions became entangled in lawsuits caused by new MGM owner (and notorious fraudster) Giancarlo Paretti's intent to sell the broadcasting rights to the Bond franchise at cut-rate prices. The legal wrangling took over two years to sort out, with Paretti getting ousted from MGM and eventually sentenced for fraud.
- With the legal issues resolved, pre-production on the film finally restarted in 1993, but the end of the Cold War and the new geopolitical situation left the franchise in an uncertain role in the world, with several commentators openly questioning if the Bond franchise could still be relevant at all. It was decided that the new film would tackle the new political situation directly, with a new screenplay written by Michael France. Meanwhile, Albert R. Broccoli stepped down from his long-time position as producer due to declining health, leaving Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson taking over lead production duties.
- Pre-production hit further snags; Bond actor Timothy Dalton, whose contract had expired in 1993, opted to retire from the role. While Dalton was very interested in coming back for one film, he was unwilling to commit to the multi-film deal Albert Broccoli insisted on. Production was pushed back to recast the Bond role, eventually settling on Pierce Brosnan. Michael France's screenplay went through multiple hands, being rewritten by Jeffrey Caine with further work by Bruce Feirstein and an uncredited Kevin Wade, which resulted in France getting a mere "Story By" credit in the final film. France would later grumble
about the process, feeling that he was not properly credited and that the rewrites did not improve on his draft.
- According to an interview with Michael G. Wilson, Tomorrow Never Dies (like From Russia With Love) was given a release date with no pre-production work completed (and intended to coincide with the release of the company'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.
- Quantum of Solace was stalled in pre-production by a writers' strike. Based on various accounts, screenwriter Paul Haggis was frantically finishing a first draft hours before the strike deadline and/or Daniel Craig and director Marc Forster rewrote script pages themselves during production. In addition, the fragmented nature of the production (due to the strike) led to a rushed and nearly incoherent plot.
- The Sony Pictures leak in late 2014 revealed that Spectre suffered from a ballooning budget and serious production problems, which made it an infamous case of this before it came out.
- The genesis of the film only came about after copyright issues were settled with Kevin McClory in November 2013 for the film rights to Thunderball. Although Sam Mendes had previously stated his intent not to return for the next film after the success of Skyfall, he and production designer Dennis Gassner stated their intent to helm the film just a few months prior. The cast and crew quickly ballooned to more than 1,000 people.
- Though most people in the public eye assumed production was progressing normally, the November 2013 Sony hack revealed that there were significant production problems — namely, screenwriter John Logan's early script. According to leaked e-mails, the executives were having significant problems with the film's third act, which involved Bond and Madeleine being held in a desert prison by the villain, Heinrich Stockmann (a.k.a. Hans Oberhauer). Discussions over the third act's problems persisted for months (and well into filming), with Skyfall writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade still running into problems. The final script would include contributions from both men, along with Mendes and British playwright Jez Butterworth.
- As a result of this, the film began to balloon over budget. Not helping matters was that a discussion about Product Placement (namely, a Sony Xperia phone) resulted in arguments between Mendes (who was resistant to the idea), co-owner Barbara Broccoli and Sony Pictures executives. This eventually culminated in Sony Japan CEO Kaz Hirai having to step in personally and order them to include the placement.
- Filming began in earnest in December 2014, but several accidents occurred that caused slight delays on production. Daniel Craig suffered a knee sprain while shooting a fight sequence, while three crew members were injured by a filming vehicle (one seriously).
- Going into 2015, filming continued to progress, but the crew faced difficulties from authorities and special interest groups in Rome when they attempted to film a car chase scene in the city, as well as reports from media outlets in Mexico that the script had to be altered to accommodate the needs of Mexican authorities (in order to portray the country in a positive light and thus get some funding from there).
- The final production budget was roughly $245 million (though some sources estimate it to be more than $300 million), making it the most expensive Bond film ever made. However, the film did gross $880 million worldwide at the box office. In the publicity junket, Craig joked that he would rather slit his wrists than make such a film again (he later had to make clear that this was very much his exhaustion talking).
- No Time to Die:
- The troubles began surfacing with Danny Boyle's abrupt departure from the project over reported Creative Differences with Craig and the producers. The film's release date was pushed back twice from October 2019 to April 2020, and the script was repeatedly being re-written by committee well into shooting in what one anonymous source described as a "well-polished shitshow."
- Furthermore, Craig injured his ankle during filming in Jamaica (after a reported argument with director and co-writer Cary Fukunaga), which led to the London shoot being delayed. Then, Grace Jones' planned cameo had to be nixed after she quit within minutes of arriving on set upon discovering how small her part was. In post-production, Fukunaga's regular composer, Dan Romer, was fired due to a reported dispute with the producers, with Hans Zimmer being hired to re-score the entire film in just a couple of months.
- And then, its premiere was hastily pushed back six months to November 2020 over concerns about the COVID-19 Pandemic, as the most affected countries accounted for almost half of the previous film's worldwide box office. It was pushed back to the following April as the pandemic continued, and pushed back again to October 2021, meaning that it was two years late. Rumors claim that before the shift to October 2021, the studio offered the film to streaming services such as Netflix, but none of them would pony up the $600 million asking price (a quantity the movie did earn at the box office, so Eon was not wrong in not going cheap).
- The chronic delays wreaked havoc with the film's marketing and Product Placement deals. In January 2021 it was reported by insiders that because of the contracts that various companies signed with the film, scenes were having to be digitally edited or reshot to account for now-obsolete products.
