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GOLDENEYE
filming locations
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CREDITS
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The
increasingly moribund Bond series was on the verge of
retirement when it got a new lease of life with Pierce
Brosnan.
The
opening teaser, Bonds spectacular bungee jump,
at the Arkangel Chemical Weapons Facility
USSR, is actually the Tusker
Dam, Lake Verzasca, at Hittnau
in Switzerland.
Bonds
race with Xenia Onatopp (Famke
Janssen), supposedly in the hills above Monte
Carlo, uses the mountain roads around Thorenc,
about 20 miles north of Grasse,
way to the northwest. Nevertheless, Bond arrives at
the Casino de Monte Carlo,
Monaco, and its from the bay at Monte
Carlo that Onatopp steals the Stealth helicopter.
Ms office is, finally, MI6s real HQ, Vauxhall
Cross, the spanking new building at 85
Albert Embankment on the Thames by Vauxhall
Bridge. It turns up again, at the start of the river
chase in The World Is Not
Enough, and Pierce
Brosnan turns up at the HQ as a somewhat shabbier,
seedier agent in John
Boorman's film of John Le Carre's The
Tailor of Panama.
Although
there is some real filming in St
Petersburg in Russia,
much of the tank chase was filmed on a massive set,
built at the old Rolls Royce aircraft plant in Leavesden,
Hertfordshire.
Many of the other Russian locations were filmed around
the southeast of England: 'St Petersburg Airport',
where Bond is met by Jack Wade (Joe
Don Baker), is actually the Queens
Stand, Epsom Racecourse, Epsom, Surrey.
Despite those Russian flags, the 'Grand Hotel Europe'
is the Langham
Hotel, 1c Portland Place W1, at the top of Regent
Street opposite the BBC's Broadcasting House.
The
'St Petersburg' square, where Wade uses a sledgehammer
to fix his motor, is the courtyard of the recently restored
Somerset House on
the Strand which
later became the 'Ministry of Defence' in Tomorrow
Never Dies. This popular filming location can
also be seen in Tim
Burton's Sleepy Hollow
(as turn-of-the-century Manhattan), Billy
Wilder's superb The Private
Life of Sherlock Holmes
(as the 'Diogenes Club' where Holmes meets his older
brother Mycroft (Christopher
Lee)) and in Shanghai Knights
(where Jackie Chan invents the kung fu movie at the
end of the film).
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The
'St Petersburg' square: Somerset House, The Strand (before its renovation)
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The interior of the 'Russian' church is St
Sofias Greek Cathedral, Moscow Road, Bayswater,
W2 (seen also as a Russian church in The
Music Lovers, Ken
Russell's biopic of Tchaikovsky). The exterior is
the rear (Fulham Road side) of the 1839 chapel in Brompton
Cemetery, Old Brompton Road, Earl's Court, SW5.
You might recognise this as the cemetery where Rowan
Atkinson disrupts the funeral in Bond spoof Johnny
English. This extravagantly Victorian
graveyard also features in arty horror pic Afraid
Of The Dark, Iain Softley's
Henry James adaptation The
Wings of the Dove, and
bittersweet romantic comedy Jack
and Sarah, with Richard
E Grant.
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The
'Russian' church: Brompton Cemetery, Earls Court
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The 'St Petersburg' council chamber, where General Ourumov
learns that Natalya (Izabella
Scorupco) has survived the GoldenEye detonation,
is the grandiose architecture of Drapers
Hall, Throgmorton Street, EC2 in the City
of London (which also became 'Russia' for the Val
Kilmer version of The Saint).
The railway scenes wewre filmed on the Nene
Valley Railway, Peterborough.
The
massive radio telescope dish is the Arecibo
Observatory, Puerto
Rico, seen also in Robert
Zemeckis' Contact
with Jodie Foster.
HARD
COPY:
For the details of the filming locations of 1,600 of
your favourite movies, check out The
Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations. 464 pages
of fascinating facts, illustrated with over 1,000 original
photographs.
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