Filming in Venice presents its own problems, not the least of which is the fact that the city’s fabled canals dictate that everything must be moved by boat or by foot. Fortunately, only one set had to be built in the ancient Italian city. “In St. Mark’s Square (Piazza San Marco), we were allowed to use an empty building as the bank where Bond looks for Vesper. Of course, it is one of the busiest tourist destinations in the world, and as soon as we had completed the work and opened the door, we were inundated with tourists trying to change money. This also happened to us at Prague airport, where we were shooting interiors for Miami airport. We set up an exchange booth and had lots of potential customers, some of whom couldn’t understand why we had no currency for them.”
A challenge of a different kind was to design the prototype jet that Le Chiffre plans to have blown up so he can make a fortune on the stock exchange. Lamont and his team visited airplane manufacturers but says the production wasn’t able to base it on an actual plane. “They keep their new models under wraps and probably wouldn’t want to be associated with a storyline such as this,” he says, “so we had to come up with an original design.”
An old 747 was located at Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey, where the production filmed the Miami airport tarmac chase scenes with Bond and Carlos. “The plane had no engines, but it was in fairly good condition, and we could use the body of the 747 to save us the huge expense of building something of that bulk. I looked at many references of airplane construction and decided our Skyfleet should look like the B-52s, with pairs of tandem engines, and an altered cockpit profile. I don’t know if my design would fly, but the B-52s managed!”
Asked to choose a favorite from the many sets and locations, Lamont cites Bond and Vesper’s double suite at the Hotel Splendide, built in Barrandov Studios. “The challenge there was to match the rooms to the reality of the Grand Hotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary, which is a very classic hotel of its type, and to include two bathrooms for the scenes where Bond cleans himself up after the fight, and comforts Vesper in the shower.”
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