Explosion Royale! Looking back on the ‘Skyfall’ location filming in Surrey

The announcement that Sam Mendes had been selected as the director for Skyfall took many by surprise at the time but, given his award-winning reputation for both stage and screen productions, EON had clearly signalled that the franchise was determined to create something very special for 2012, with an emphasis on a strong storyline and attention to rounded characters. Daniel Craig was certainly very happy with the choice of director.

It seems quite a while ago now but back in early 2012, during production of Skyfall, director Mendes and his crew shot some key sequences for the climax to Daniel Craig’s third James Bond movie on location in a peaceful area of the countryside in the county of Surrey in England. Given the storyline, the challenge for the crew had been to find somewhere that could double up as Scotland, but would still be conveniently located within relatively easy reach of London and Pinewood Studios.

After much searching, they found a suitable spot on some Ministry of Defence land at Hankley Common, and set about constructing the Bond family ancestral Lodge (‘Skyfall’), some outbuildings and a mock-up of the Bond family chapel and graveyard located not too far away. the local terrain could also easily pass for a rough Scottish landscape and later on in the the production process CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) was used to put in a background consisting mainly of a cold-looking lake.

Construction work on the Lodge itself started in January, 2012, and buildings and facilities already located in the heart of the Common, used by previous film-makers, were also utilized by EON’s location managers.

The JBIFC takes the opportunity to look back briefly on the Surrey location filming for Skyfall, with (00)7 bullet-points. 007 and Counting…

001: Bond was Back – with a Bang

Local residents in a quiet English village probably thought a small-scale war had broken out on nearby Ministry of Defence (MoD) land at one stage in March, 2012, but it was our favourite spy 007 (together with the main Bond villain Raoul Silva and his henchmen) up to mischief instead. The period March 22 to the night of March 25/26 of 2012 saw Skyfall location shooting enter its final stage at Hankley Common, in the picturesque county of Surrey, which culminated in a spectacular explosion and fire on the main set.

On the evening of Thursday March 22, some night-time shooting saw a version of the fire being staged inside the set of ‘Skyfall Lodge’, a mansion-style Lodge-house which was doubling up as James Bond’s ancestral home in Scotland. A helicopter was also used as part of this of this filming (and played a crucial role in the climax to the fight at the Lodge).

A few days later, on Sunday evening March 25, an even more impressive explosion and fire was carefully staged, with plenty of emergency fire-crew on standby. The tension and excitement was palpable during the daytime hours of Sunday afternoon.

Many hours of careful preparation by the production unit’s pyrotechnics experts had gone into both sequences. Patience and close attention to detail are always the key watch-words when it comes to this type of work. Moreover, it was very important that crew members, support staff and other observers stood well back from the ‘action’ when it occurred. And when ‘action’ was finally called, it had been well worth the wait.

The main ‘bang’ itself, though staged on the Sunday evening at night, was truly spectacular and was heard by local residents from miles around! It certainly lit up the night sky in a truly memorable way. Local Surrey bloggers and the local press carried news stories about this, and recealed that it was James Bond filming (many residents in nearby villages had assumed that it was just another round of army training on the MoD land, something locals had become quite used to in the past).

002: Building Scotland in South-West Surrey

Members of the EON production team (carpenters, builders, and support workers) first arrived at Hankley Common, located on MoD land near the tranquil village of Elstead, in late January, when conditionsw ere quite cold and some ice was on the ground. The Common is a very large area of heathland, with sandy infertile soil and large patches of bracken, together with numerous bridleways and paths. It is also quite hilly in places, with some notably rough terrain. In fact, for the Bond producers, it was perfect for doubling up as a Scottish location. The main bowl of the valley is surrounded by a high ridge, with plenty of atmospheric forest nearby.

During World War Two, the Canadian army built a version of the German Atlantic Wall in the nearby woods in order to train for the D-Day invasion of Europe, and remnants of this can still be seen today. The terrain is still used regularly by the MoD today for training purposes, and in some of the wooded areas near the Common you come across MoD warning signs saying ‘Danger: Do not touch suspicious objects’.

The area has seen regular movie-making, including large-scale films such as Gladiator. The location had also been used by EON in the past, such as for the pipeline explosion scene in The World Is Not Enough (1999), which involved Pierce Brosnan and Denise Richards.

The JBIFC was told that that EON had paid a six-figure sum in a deal with the MoD for use of the Common as a Skyfall location, and in return the MoD also provided some policing support during the main filming in March, 2012.

Over the course of February, technicians and carpenters began work on constructing the main Lodge-house out of wood, together with a separate outbuilding, false trees, and (across the far side of the valley) a very authentic-looking Chapel (also made out of wood), complete with a small Bond family graveyard. Strangely, by the time the main location filming had started in March, the weather had turned unusually warm, almost like summer.

003: The DZ

The eerily realistic buildings were constructed in the bowl of the valley, known as The DZ (Drop Zone). The crew also built a stone-walled gate entrance at the beginning of a track which leads down into the heart of the valley, with a small but eye-catching statue of a stag with antlers on top of one of the stone gate-posts, above the now-famous sign ‘Skyfall’.

At the bottom of the track, close to the Lodge itself, a low stone wall had been built and this is where Bond parked his Aston Martin, something that would prove to be a key plot-point in the movie as 007 fights back against the surprised henchmen, and the Aston’s secret front machine-guns were let loose on Silva’s team of thugs. Indeed, Bond’s ancestral Scottish home was, in many ways, the star attraction for many observers. It was a highly impressive gothic-style home, despite the fact that, in reality, it was mainly built from wooden false-front walls and held up by support scaffolding. As ever, the production’s carpenters and other technical crew had paid close and loving attention to every little detail to create the illusion of reality.

The surrounding heathland perfectly supported the necessary illusion that this was a remote part of Scotland. The magic of the movies, eh?! Interestingly, director Sam Mendes was also there again quite recently when he used the site for his war movie 1917. Eagle-eyed observers also spotted an oblong door-shaped hole dug into the ground not far from the Lodge-House, and covered up with wooden planks; this was actually the ‘exit’ for the secret passageway that allowed ‘M’ (Judi Dench) and gamekeeper Kincade (Albert Finney, in what was sadly to be his final film role) – and later James Bond himself – to escape from the building.

004: For Their Eyes Only: The Main Unit Filming

EON (as ‘B23 Ltd’) also sent a letter to local residents, informing them that an ‘action sequence’ would be filmed on the Common, and apologising for any inconvenience from noise. After quite a bit of rehearsal time and preparations, together with the placing of trailers, lorries and a giant marquee in a unit ‘camp’ area adjacent to the main valley, the main unit filming at Hankley Common started on Tuesday March 13, under the thoughtful eye of Sam Mendes.

The location filming lasted just under two weeks, and a member of the JBIFC was able to regularly watch some of the filming. Most of the morning of March 13 was taken up with filming Dame Judi Dench and Daniel Craig arriving at the walled gate entrance in Bond’s famous Aston Martin and driving down the track into the main bowl of the valley towards the Lodge. Other sequences shot over the two weeks involved Javier Bardem and his henchmen, a Merlin military-style helicopter, and plenty of scenes involving small-arms and machine-gun fire-fights in the grounds surrounding the Lodge.

At one point, Craig was filmed entering the Chapel in daytime, although this was edited out of the final movie. In fact, Mendes became well-known for filming plenty of shots on Skyfall that would not make it to the final edit of the movie. It would be fascinating to see some of those edited shots.

Security was very tight at times at the location, with both MoD police and private ‘wardens’ (or marshals), placed at strategic positions on the ridge overlooking the valley or patrolling the bridleways, actively discouraging interested onlookers from taking any photographs.

005: From Hankley, With Love

This was particularly the case during the first week of shooting, with MoD police officers sometimes threatening onlookers with prosecution under military bylaws for ‘loitering’ on the Common. A spokeswoman for EON, speaking to local newspaper the Surrey Advertiser (on March 16), refused to provide details of what was going on and said they were trying to keep the set as private as possible in order to ‘get the job done’. Over the first weekend of main shooting (March 17-18), however, numerous locals and other onlookers clearly took this attitude as a bit of challenge and went ahead and took photos and video-footage anyway.

When the report had appeared in the Surrey Advertiser, word spread fast locally that major shooting was ongoing. On Sunday March 18, for example, some extensive sequences with the Merlin helicopter, shot by another helicopter fitted with a ball-camera on the front, drew quite a crowd of curious onlookers and walkers, who gathered on the ridge of the valley, despite whole areas of the Common being roped off to prevent members of the public wandering into shot.

Many of the onlookers were just naturally curious, or just out to walk their dogs along the bridleways. At one point, the occupants of the main helicopter waved at onlookers as their machine swept past and around the valley, something that was both ear-piercingly loud and spectacular to watch. EON location managers were not very happy at times, though, with some of the coverage of the location shooting that appeared in the UK’s national media and on the internet, especially when a local blogger sold some of her photos of the preliminary construction of the set to a national newspaper’s website.

The JBIFC also gathered that there were also some problems, during the first few days of the filming, with some paparazzi photographers using flash on their long-range cameras while hiding in nearby trees. One, in particular, had arrived very early in the morning (probably before dawn) and hid himself high up in a tree, before he was spotted and asked to come down! Freelance photographers are often determined to get their ‘money’ shot, which they can then try and sell to national newspapers.

006: Live and Let Fry

Over the course of the two weeks of main unit filming, however, the interest of the public trailed off significantly and the general atmosphere and policing of the area relaxed considerably, perhaps helped by some unusually hot weather for that time of the year. Many of the surrounding bridleways on the ridge, together with the main tracks in the main bowl of the valley, became very dusty. But it was also evident that some members of the production team still retained their sense of humour. On the afternoon of Friday March 23, for example, after the previous evening’s night-time ‘fire’ sequence, and as members of the production crew prepared some further intricate shooting work in the run-up to the ‘big bang’ on Sunday March 25, the sound of the song ‘Atomic’, sung by Debbie Harry of ‘Blondie’, could be heard being played in and around the Chapel, and it drifted across the far end of the valley, much to the amusement of the JBIFC’s sole visitor. After the ‘big bang’ and fire on the Sunday evening, main filming wrapped, and work commenced to begin clearing up.

007: The Big Clear-Up

Despite claims in the press, the Skyfall Lodge was not completely destroyed in the main explosion – the SPX experts had staged it to create the illusion that it was completely destroyed (such is the power of film). The Lodge had ended up with a large hole in its side, and the surrounding ground looked scorched and was littered with lots of burnt wood, (false) bits of stonework, and other post-fire debris, including the shell of a burnt out Aston Martin (which was eventually wrapped up in a tarpaulin and transported away). A very strong and pungent smell of smoke hung in the air around the Lodge for at least three days afterwards. It certainly looked like something out of a war zone.

According to a clearance guy the JBIFC chatted to on the set, the deal was that EON would return the heathland on the Common back ‘to its original condition’, i.e. as good as when they found it (this was also confirmed in a local Farnham newspaper). When the JBIFC also probed a little further, he reckoned the film company were pleased with how the Hankley Common shoot had gone and were a little ahead of their original schedule.

Meanwhile, pyrotechnics specialists began the process of retrieving a lot of their equipment and cables from within the building. A worker at the site told the JBIFC that the process of dismantling and fully clearing the Lodge site would take about two weeks. Across the valley, a 3-man team also began work on dismantling the Chapel set on Wednesday March 28; it was surrounded by a high metal-grilled fence and a small mechanical digger started the clearance process by breaking up the small graveyard area (the headstones had already been removed, apart from two still propped up against the Chapel wall).

All in all, it was very evident to the JBIFC at the time that the Hankley Common Skyfall sequences would be emotionally very moving and very atmospheric, with some gritty and exciting action sequences set at the Bond family home. And so it came to pass. The finished movie made some great use of the location, and reinforced Surrey’s reputation as a popular location for movie-makers.

Did You Know?

Sadly, in July, 2022, it was reported that a ‘major incident’ had occurred at Hankley Common, as wildfire took over 20 acres of the Common. Firefighters and 19 firefighting vehicles had to be called in to tackle the huge blaze. Surrey Fire and Rescue services were helped by crews from the nearby counties of West Sussex and Hampshire, and local people were instructed to stay ‘far away’ from the fire as it spread quickly and local roads were closed. Smoke from the fire spread far and wide, and residents from across West London complained of the smell and smoke. Inevitably, press coverage of the fire mentioned that it was the parkland where Bond was filmed.