Octopussy, 1983
Director
Cast
visit the film locations
Udaipur: Flights: Maharana Pratap Airport
Hotel Shiv Niwas Palace, part of the City Palace (tel: 91.294.252.8008)
Taj Lake Palace in Lake Pichola, Udaipur (tel: 91.294.252.8800)
Trivia
Bond returned to the Nene Valley Railway for GoldenEye.
See much more of Berlin in Run Lola Run
Octopussy location: Octopussy’s floating palace: The Lake Palace Hotel, Udaipur, India
Beautifully photographed on Indian locations, but Octopussy is one of the least of the Bond series.
The ‘South American’ Air force Base of the opening scene is Northolt Aerodrome in Greater London, but the spectacular landscapes flown over are Moab, southwest Utah.
The exterior of Sotheby’s, 34-355 New Bond Street, London, W1 (tel: 020.7293.5000), where the Fabergé egg is put up for auction, is real, though the interior was recreated in the studio at Pinewood.
MI6 HQ is, as in John Glen’s two other Bond films (Licence To Kill and A View To A Kill) the Old War Office Building, Whitehall.
Octopussy location: Bond’s Udaipur hotel: Hotel Shiv Niwas Palace, Udaipur, India
Photograph: HRH Group of Hotels
Bond (Roger Moore) travels to Udaipur in India (via the Taj Mahal, naturally, despite its being several hundred miles out of the way in Agra). He stays at the luxurious Hotel Shiv Niwas Palace, part of the City Palace, one of three palaces owned by the Mewar royalty.
A second, also converted into a hotel, became the Floating Palace, the island home of Octopussy (Maud Adams), the Taj Lake Palace in Lake Pichola, both now part of the HRH Group of Hotels. The third, Summer Palace, overlooking the area, is used for the retreat of Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan), where Bond is held captive.
In Berlin, Bond is driven down the main shopping drag, Kurfürstendamm, to the one-time crossing point into East Germany, Checkpoint Charlie.
But not all of these scenes were filmed in Germany. Bond’s escape from ‘Karl Marx-Stadt’ was staged in the Nene Valley Railway yard and station in Peterborough (the railway also appeared in GoldenEye). ‘Feldstadt’, the US Air Force Base in Germany, is the RAF base at Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire.
