‘As a rule, the first thing I did when I went on a location scout was go to a local store and look at the postcards. And that’s how I selected all those special places for the film.’
John Glen, Director
The creative decision to pin the 007 films to the the geographical contours of the globe was as key to their initial game-changing artistry and lure as any title sequence, song anthem or car gadget. In a world that did not travel the Bond films were a crucial and immediate jet-set passport to countries, cities, global textures and palettes audiences could not experience.
As the global travel industry evolved so did where Bond had to go to ring the changes narratively whilst practically navigating the differing tax, political, access and infrastructure contexts that came into play.
In the age of social media and pop cultural prowess, film location fever has amplified. Part of the travel emancipation that the Bond films helped usher in throughout the 1960s and 1970s has made the world both enough and accessible. And that includes a love of 007 film locations.
Combining these histories and documenting the location wanderlust of a spy is the new book Darker than The Sun – An Atlas of James Bond Movie Locations. With Bond historians, scholars and authors Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury as travel agents, Darker Than The Sun is a vital road map to the global reach, style and locations of Commander Bond.
With each chapter clearly and vividly focusing on each of the twenty-five Bond movies to date, this rich atlas is a captain’s log of global locators, city blueprints, iconic landmarks and backstreet curios. This is about production practicality and rescinded permissions over story needs, and narrative over budget. It reminds of how a Bond production is a complicated circus of many moving parts made up of constant discussions between the script, the producers and the locations.
Directors, production designers, location managers, cinematographers and first draft recces all feature here as the lush history of Bond film location work is laid out like signage on a fascinating highway. It is a detailed radar of the physical reach of a franchise. Field and Chowdhury have crafted both a vital satnav and historical compass to the global choices of a spy. As their previous publications Some Kind of Hero and Spy Octane have already proved with deft style, no production stone is left unturned for these authors, no trivia is taken for granted and local laws and traditions are often support characters.
As The Man with The Golden Gun (1974) heads to Thailand and Asia, Field and Chowdhury remind of the primitive nature of an untouched land about to be forever metaphorically land-grabbed by the 007 phenomenon. By the time of Octopussy (1983), Darker Than The Sun and designer Rueben Wakeman graphically cite the palaces, markets, jungles, lakes and temples that stitch the film together before director John Glen recalls how the locations of the world would always house a Bond story before there was ever a script.
Darker Than The Sun is indeed Bond’s rich history of ‘Where next?’, but more crucially it is the story of ‘Why there next?’ Be it story needs, audience expectations, budget, safety practicalities and political timings – a myriad of luggage checklist factors affect where our man James takes his audiences. And as tourist boards, city bosses and even governments became wise to the PR opportunities a Bond film represents, this is also a chronicle of how access, incentives and global partnerships continue to shape the cinematic story of 007. But not every town wants Bond. And that is where personalities enable creativities and luck is a factor too.
As all good espionage capers go, Darker Than The Sun is also about those location double agents – the movie doppelgangers that enable a 1960s Bond to exploit every location corner and quirk in the Home Counties radius of Pinewood Studios, how the atlas expectancy Sean Connery gifted Roger Moore saw a real financial push to fly audiences to genuinely never before seen backdrops, how On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) first uses its alpine geopins as actual character, and how the days of the British Home Counties masquerading as North Korea, Jamaica, the Highlands, Shanghai and Russia return in the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig eras.
With Darker Than The Sun representing the third published flight of its authors into Bond’s history after Some Kind of Hero – The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films (2015) and Spy Octane: The Vehicles of James Bond – Volume One (2024) this new work echoes Chowdhury and Field’s in-flight commitment to providing a richly sourced travelogue and historical document that is loaded with brilliantly heavy luggage, duty free treats, and real global insight.
This is the story of how a new road can change Bond location history and onscreen immortality, how Britain in a cold January can easily double up for North Korea, how fragile location recces, business pals and social friendships can decide an iconic Bond location, how the character of Bond cannot just go anywhere, how Bond location concepts often straddled various films and how mid-century architecture is as key to onscreen 007 as an Aston Martin DB5 ever was.
Darker than The Sun – An Atlas of James Bond Movie Locations
by Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury
Ivy Press
Hardback
£25 / $30
