From Hankley With Love: On location with ‘Skyfall’ in Surrey

The EON James Bond films carved out a reputation for exotic location shooting and international glamour, with key scenes often shot in places across the globe. But a surprising amount of filming, often for budgetary reasons, was carried out in parts of the United Kingdom.

Daniel Craig’s third adventure as 007, Skyfall (2012), directed by Sam Mendes, was a good case in point. Some important sequences were shot in Britain including in areas not too far from Pinewood Studios.

Director Mendes was especially keen to utilise locations in London, and used the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, Westminster Central Hall, Charing Cross tube station, the former building for the famous Smithfield Meat Market, areas of the embankment near the River Thames, and, in particular Vauxhall Bridge (near the real-life MI6 headquarters).

Bond’s family home, the austere Skyfall Lodge, was located in Scotland and, indeed, Craig and Judi ‘M’ Dench went to Scotland for some scenes with the Aston Martin car. However, much of the ‘Scottish’ location shooting actually took place in Surrey, which doubled up for Scotland. The JBIFC takes the opportunity to look back on the location shooting for the film that took place in Surrey, fourteen years ago this March.

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 in March, 2012, but it was our favourite spy 007 (or, rather, the main Bond villain Silva) up to mischief instead. The period March 22 to the night of March 25/26 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, and on Sunday evening March 25 an even more impressive explosion and fire was carefully staged, with plenty of fire-crew on standby. Many hours of careful preparation by the production unit’s pyrotechnics experts had gone into both sequences.

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, 2012. 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 rough terrain. In fact, 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.

The local area is very popular with ramblers and general walkers. During World War Two, the Canadian army built a version of the German Atlantic Wall in the woods nearby 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 on near the Common you come across MoD signs saying ‘Danger: Do not touch suspicious objects’. The area has seen regular movie-making, including large-scale films such as Gladiator. The local Surrey area location had also been used by EON in the past, such as for the pipeline explosion scene in The World Is Not Enough (1999).

The JBIFC was told at the time that EON 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. Over the course of February, 2012, technicians and carpenters began work on building 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. 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 valley, with a small statue of a stag with antlers on top of one of the gate-posts (a now famous and iconic image).

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 main 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, a suited Craig was filmed walking over to the stone-steps up to and entering the Chapel in daylight, testing out a bunch of old keys, but this was not used in the final version of the film. 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. From EON’s point-of-view, they did not really want any key scenes leaked to the media, which was understandable.

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 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. And, inevitably, this brought a number of curious onlookers into the area, especially when the sound of gunfire could be heard in the valley (Mendes shot quite a few pieces of footage of the ‘storming’ of Skyfall Lodge by Silva’s hendchmen, but not all of this ended up in the final cut of the movie).

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. The sheer noise of the helicopters alone, as it swept back and forth over the valley, was something one could never forget.

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. 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 understood, at the time. that there were also some problems, during the first few days of the filming, with some freelance paparazzi photographers using flash on their long-range cameras while hiding in trees!

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 visitor.

It was also clear that some members of the crew enjoyed themselves in the unexpectedly hot sunny weather racing around using the mini-tractors normally used to pull camera lighting cables and scenery trailers. After the ‘big bang’ and fire on the Sunday evening, main filming wrapped, and work commenced to begin clearing up and to return the the valley back to the way it had been (environmental considerations were part of the orginal permission-to-shoot agreement).

The Big Clear-Up

Despite claims in the press, the Lodge was not completely destroyed in the 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 in a tarpaulin). 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.

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 expanse of 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 digger started the clearance process by breaking up the small Bond family graveyard area (the headstones had already been removed, apart from two still propped up against the Chapel wall).

All in all, as we now know, the Hankley Common sequences proved crucial to the moving, gritty and exciting climax to the finished movie. It was beyond doubt that Mendes had proved that a ‘serious’ take on Bond was possible while retainng all the traditional elements to a 007 movie that audiences so loved and, in fact, Skyfall proved to be a massive box-office hit around the globe. It was Bond at his best.

Did You Know?

The role of Kincade, the elderly Scottish game-keeper still overseeing the Skyfall estate, and so brilliantly played by the late Albert Finney, was originally a role for which Sir Sean Connery was considered. But Sam Mendes quickly dropped the idea, as he felt it would be too much of a distraction from the emotional power of the later stages of the storyline.