GoldenEye, James Bond, and the huge side effect for the British film industry

When a Sean Connery blockbuster meant that James Bond couldn’t shoot at its usual home – what happened next changed the UK film industry. Simon Brew tells the story…

31st August 1962: Sean Connery enjoys a game of bar billiards at his basement flat in London’s NW8. (Photo by Chris Ware/Keystone Features/Getty Images)

Amongst the 24 James Bond films released to date – with No Time To Die, the 25th, finally set for release later this year – it’s the 16th that sits as something of an anomaly. The movie in question is Timothy Dalton’s second and final outing as 007, Licence To Kill. And it sticks out because it remains, to date, the only James Bond adventure to be entirely shot outside of the UK.

Granted, some post-production work was completed at Pinewood Studios just outside London, the notional home of 007 films. But taxation changes in the mid-1980s meant it was simply cheaper to send Bond elsewhere. 007 had, for want of a better way to put it, emigrated.

Pinewood Studios’ Bond set

Bond is back

Come the return of the Bond films six years later, one of the top priorities was to get the production of the movie back to Britain. After all, Pinewood Studios’ biggest stage is named after James Bond. Thus, with the announcement of GoldenEye, starring Pierce Brosnan, the plan was to bring 007 home.

Spoiler: things did not go to plan.

It’s well known that Bond in the early 90s was in limbo, and it took time to resolve both legal issues and the question as to whether Timothy Dalton would return to the role. When these were resolved, Eon – the company behind Bond – moved swiftly to get a new film up and running.

SEE MORE: The Daniel Craig James Bond Backlash, 15 Years Later

The problem? It all came together too swiftly for Pinewood. Production was going to need to begin in October 1994, with freshly anointed 007 Pierce Brosnan donning the tuxedo. Yet Pinewood simply didn’t have the space for its most famous resident. Ironically, it had been booked up for a film starring Sean Connery, in this case the Arthurian blockbuster First Knight.

Separately, in 1940 an airfield had opened just outside of Watford. 

The land had been requisitioned by the Ministry Of Supply for the construction of planes as part of the war effort. The de Havilland Aircraft Company and the Air Ministry had Leavesden Aerodrome constructed and opened in double quick time, and it was making planes by the end of 1941.

Leavesden Aerodrome, 1983

Once the war was over, the Aerodrome changed owners, with Rolls-Royce taking over the site in the late 1950s. But come the end of March 1994, with British manufacturing output falling, Rolls-Royce cut its losses. The site was set to lay unused.

Little could anyone have known when the doors were shut by Rolls-Royce for the last time, the site would soon sit at the heart of the British film industry.

Counting pennies

Back to 007. It’s often forgotten that, certainly by the standards of blockbuster movies at the time, GoldenEye was quite a frugal production. Granted, its $60m budget could cover a fair few tuxedos and a decent wrap party, but the year before an Arnold Schwarzenegger-James Cameron juggernaut had firmly planted itself in Bond’s playpen. Their film, True Lies, was also a spy-driven action movie, and at the time was the world’s most expensive movie, costing a cool $110m. Give or take.

The Bond team found themselves homeless, at a financial disadvantage, and under threat from imitators. 

Plus, the clock was ticking. As producer Michael G Wilson would admit, they found themselves scouring Europe for a facility large enough to handle a 007 movie as they raced to hit their start date. Turns, they just needed to tootle up the M25, roughly three miles from Junction 19. Perhaps popping into services for a pasty on the way.

Bottom line: the GoldenEye team couldn’t find a studio to house the film. Thus, they built one.

Start to finish

Leavesden as a filming site had immediate appeal. It came with a runway for a start, gold dust for a Bond movie. But still, a movie studio this was not – and work got underway quickly to do something about that. 

Led by production designer Peter Lamont – who had previously overseen the setting up of Licence To Kill at Mexico’s Churubusco Studios – a frantic eight weeks of activity followed. As the excellent book Some Kind Of Hero (by Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury) details, the eventual studio complex that rose in that time was swiftly given the nickname Cubbywood, after legendary Bond producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli. It seems that moniker was used more frequently than the more formal Eon Studios.

Still, it was all a bit rough and ready.

The famous sequence where Bond (Pierce Brosnan) is in a tank careening through the streets of St. Petersburg in pursuit of Colonel Ourumov. Filmed at Leavesden Studios.

The official making of book for GoldenEye (written by Garth Pierce and published in 1995 in line with the film’s release) makes no effort to hide what the production had walked into – and remember, this was supposed to be the official, varnished account. “The sprawling factory site, deserted like a ghost town for the previous eighteen months, has been converted to a film studio with six sound stages, lavish dressing rooms, special effects and model-making areas, carpenter and plaster shops and a viewing theatre”, the included diary section reported. 

On the significantly less posh side, it then tells how Pierce Brosnan reported for his first day of filming on January 16th 1995, pulling onto the site in his studio car and driving past rusty bike sheds, grass poking through the neglected concrete, and a sign for BP Lubricants.

Leavesden was still some way from being a finished film studio, but it had enough for now. Plus, crucially, it worked for GoldenEye. Brosnan for one felt he could go about his work without the worry of tracing the footstops of previous Bonds. Messrs Connery and Moore hadn’t walked these corridors. “There’s no ghosts for me to contend with”, he remarked to Cinefantastique magazine in December 1995. 

There were leaking roofs and stages that were far from perfectly soundproofed. But for now, it all did the job.

Adolfo Celi, plays the role of Emilio Largo during the shooting on set of a SPECTRE meeting scene from the James Bond film Thunderball at Pinewood Studios in England on 24th June 1965. (Photo by McCabe/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Calling Harry

Filming would wrap up on GoldenEye in June 1995, and Brosnan drove past that lubricants sign one last time. The film went on to be a big hit, and Bond was back in business. And that might have been that. 

Yet the rest of the British film industry had taken notice. Here, suddenly, was a huge production facility with strong transport links to London (appreciating the regular train from Euston to Watford Junction was often on the late side). It didn’t take long for others to take advantage of it. In moved George Lucas for parts of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Tim Burton rocked up to use the site for Sleepy Hollow. Even a period piece such as Oscar Wilde tale An Ideal Husband was able to call it home.

Yet it was the film adaptation of the first Harry Potter book that was the catalyst for what came next.

The Hogwarts set at Leavesden Studios

 J.K. Rowling’s series of books had been snapped up by Heyday Films and Warner Bros for the big screen treatment, and both companies were lobbied by the UK film industry to ensure Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone – the first movie in the series, of course – would film in the UK. Strategically, it was a move hard to fault, given that if the first film went well, several others were guaranteed to follow.

But it was no guarantee that the Potter films would shoot in Britain. What’s not often told is how fact producer David Heyman and the studio was casting its net wide. As Entertainment Weekly reported back in 1999, “two of Britain’s top film industry officials flew to the U.S. to make England’s case. They came bearing gifts: assistance in securing locations, long-term use of the spacious soundstages of Leavesden Studios outside London, and a promise to try to revamp the country’s child labour laws”. 

The name of those officials appears lost to history, but the ramifications of their trip aren’t. The labour laws were indeed relaxed slightly to add a few more working hours for young performers each week, and added flexibility to the timing of their on-set lessons. 

As Steve Norris, head of the British Film Commission at the time argued, “the thought that it was going to be made anywhere but here sent shudders down everyone’s spine. It’s like taking Catcher In The Rye and trying to make it in Liverpool”.

Setting up home

The deal was duly done, and it started an initial decade-long residency for the Potter saga at the Leavesden site. Sets were able to be left standing between each movie, and the majority of the available space was given over to the franchise. 

Not exclusively so. Other films during that decade shot at Leavesden too, often making use of the Potter facilities (Tim Burton returned for both Charlie & The Chocolate Factory and his musical-but-not-a-musical-if-you-watch-the-trailer Sweeney Todd & The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street). 

But this was the home of Harry Potter, a franchise that also sparked an explosion in visual effects companies and further skilled film workers in the UK (although that’s a story for another time). There was thus understandable concern as to just what was going to happen when the final movie – Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Part II – wrapped filming, in 2010.

Yet that’s when a major facility constructed in a hurry to house a Bond film in turn became the first studio complex in the UK for 70 years to be actually owned by a Hollywood studio. This was huge.

Director Lewis Gilbert (far left) talking to actors (L-R) Ronald Rich, Sean Connery and Donald Pleasance while filming a scene for the James Bond film ‘You Only Live Twice’, circa 1967. (Photo by Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Set against the backdrop of the sudden closure of the UK Film Council that had also been announced (threatening the funding of many smaller British productions), Warner Bros moved in and bought the site entire (following representatives of the UK government flying out to Los Angeles once again to make the case). 

It did so with a promise – which it’s made good on – to invest £100m in the site. The name duly changed to Warner Bros Studio Leavesden, and it’s telling that over a decade later, no other Hollywood major has its own studio on British soil.

Mind you, it still took two years to fully refurbish the complex, with the first production to move in being Doug Liman’s excellent sci-fi flick Edge Of Tomorrow, starring Tom Cruise. That wouldn’t appear in cinemas until a couple of years later, though. 

Before then though, there was an even more prominent development on the site. 

Warner Bros. Studio Tour London at Leavesden Studios. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)

For alongside plotting to spin off the Harry Potter films into the eventual Fantastic Beasts movies (two films in that saga have been made to date,, with the third film in production at the time of writing – two more are planned beyond that), Warner Bros – as it had announced at the point it purchased Leavesden – opened the UK’s first studio tour. It was the realisation of an idea that had been talked about since the first film made it to cinemas in 2001. 

Instantly, Warner Bros Studio Tour – The Making Of Harry Potter became something a huge tourism hotspot, a detailed showcase of the craft that went into the making of the films (where you had to book months in advance to get a decent slot), with an incredible Hogwart’s model at the heart of it. 

Just to ice the cake, a giftshop selling overpriced merchandise was thrown into the bargain. Top tip: it’s cheaper to smuggle your own drinks in, too.

Impact

The investment that’s gone into the site has paid dividends. In hindsight, the timing of its sale to Warner Bros couldn’t have been better. Even though British studio space was in demand in 2010 – tax breaks introduced by Gordon Brown’s government had been luring more and more international productions to the UK – the destabilising effect of the Film Council’s unexpected demise felt like a crossroads for the local industry. 

Against that backdrop, the announcement of Leavesden’s future as a soon to be state of the art film production complex wasn’t just welcome good news, it cemented thousands of jobs in the UK creative sector. A real threat of a talent drain was averted.

Furthermore, it offers a long-term pathway for those looking to break into the industry too. Suddenly, the UK was less at the whim of a change in a government tax regime: a Hollywood studio had planted roots, and practically guaranteed a future for the local industry

And that’s how it’s panned out. 

The knock on is less seen, but just as important. When there’s a major factory or industry in an area, an ecosystem of course builds up around it. From local convenience stores to a bedrock of skilled workers, the ramifications aren’t always visible. In this case, it’s been a sizeable contributor to the UK continuing to be seen as a home for international film and television production.

Crucially too, it’s been able to attract productions from outside the Warner Bros empire, as well as plenty within it. Spielberg used it for Ready Player One, Fox used it for Bohemian Rhapsody and Alien: Covenant and Paramount hired the place for Tomb Raider and Mission: Impossible films. Even Cats was made at Leavesden, and what would the British film industry be without that?

Former Prime Minister Harold Wilson, with actors Roger Moore and Barbara Bach, on the new James Bond set at Pinewood Studios, England, December 6th 1976. (Photo by Frank Barratt/Keystone/Getty Images)

Upped and left

In the midst of what’s been a success story for British film, though, it’s worth noting that one major franchise hasn’t been back since. Yep: 007 went back home, and never looked back. 

From Tomorrow Never Dies onwards, James Bond returned to his own stage at Pinewood Studios. Still, what he left behind at Leavesden was a complete about turn for a sizeable piece of land that could have been left to fester. An unexpected fresh way forward for the UK industry. A whole host of investment. 

And a sign for BP’s finest lubricant.