Too Bad Skyfall Didn't Use Real Shanghai Locations
Gassy Man
USAPosts: 2,972MI6 Agent
I'm leaving the city today, the last leg of a two-week tour of China. While Hangzhou is my favorite of the cities we visited, Shanghai is pretty remarkable, too. As with Beijing, the skyscrapers, lighting and giant TV screens, and hazy skyline give the city a Bladerunner feel at night. The real Shanghai has enough atmosphere to have worked well, and there's a scam around every corner. I imagine the cost of location filming was a factor, but I could easily see Bond walking around this metropolis.
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The G20 outdoor program we saw in Hangzhou was as good or better than anything I've seen in the States. Literally a cast of hundreds and with the west lake transformed into a stunning nighttime stage. It could have as much interest as the opera scene in QoS, and there are bullet trains and the like here. I suspect westerners who still think of China as some communist enclave out of a 1950s movie would be stunned to see just how advanced it is. At the same time, there are still the dank alleyways and picturesque waterfronts that gave films from that era their intrigue.
Though it's been an exhausting two weeks, I'm actually thinking about more travel now. I have a trip in a few weeks to Florida but who knows after that. This side of the world definitely impressed me.
Something that was interesting, too, was that most of the obvious westerners I saw were blond haired. It's very international here, but somehow Craig wouldn't stick out any more than so manh of the people touring about this part of the continent.
China was going to be used for Licence To Kill but they couldn't because they wanted many changes to the script etc.
Highly doubt it, but the same could've happened for Skyfall which is why they went for fictional locations.
It's nice to see that SPECTRE went to some good locations for a change.
I really get that. I don't understand enough about the financial/logistical constraints, but it strikes me that Bond movies are major releases yet behave as if they are shoestring affairs in some ways. If it's set in Shanghai I'd like to see it for real, not some cheapskate generic lookalikey. Having said that Bond films are best when budgets are smaller. Spectre was bloated with millions wasted on the dullest non car chase in cinema history, and a very big bang which added nothing.
I particularly liked in A View to A Kill where landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and the bridge I can't remember the name of were used as part of the action.
Another part that I loved was in You Only Live Twice (which I'm currently working on as a review, BTW), when locations like the harbor were destroyed in 1995 due to earthquake but they were immortalised in YOLT.
That is absent from modern Bonds.
If Italy and Turkey are locations again in Bond 25, I'm going to use strong language or at least angry emojis.
Etc etc etc and if I'm not mistaken the actual floating casino in Macau, unlike Skyfall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh-5BS7ecgs
Why did they insist on creating "Bondenegro"s when they could use the locations that they have filmed in.
It's truly astonishing how stubborn some people can be.
I was in Egypt some years ago and I met a guy who had worked as a film liaison person there (this was before there was a major security issue there). They used to make lots of major movies in Egypt, then the government slapped on hugely expensive taxes and fees and most productions moved to Morocco or Tunisia and added in a bit of CGI where necessary. The guy I met lost his business and went into tourism instead. He said that the Egyptian government had knowingly lost hundreds of millions in revenue through greed.
It doesn't matter how big your budget is, why would you spend $10 million to film in Montenegro when you can film in Prague and pretend it's Montenegro for $2 million? (I have no idea if Montenegro does things like that, I'm just using them as a random example). An even bigger problem is government meddling, demanding changes to the script in exchange for filming permission etc. I'm sure China wouldn't make it the easiest place to film in given their repressive control of the media etc.
So yes, producers and scriptwriters could change their script from Montenegro to Prague when they film in Prague, but for many people Montenegro is more exotic. Most people know where Prague is (or have at least heard of it), whereas Montenegro they may well have to look up on Wikipedia and that can help with a film's authenticity and allure for many people.
Governments - federal and local - need to realise that the movie industry is a great way to create jobs and a lot of money and to stimulate tourism. If they don't get that, then I would rather a production company film elsewhere than have to censor their product and give in to government meddling.
Montenegro may sound more exotic to people who aren't familiar with it and aren't familiar with how beautiful Prague is, but ultimately the choice to call it Montenegro is poor because it limited what they could do with filming in Prague. Pretending it wasn't Prague prevented the film from showing Prague's beauty, let alone make it look as exotic as people might imagine Montenegro to be. Where were Montenegro's mountains, medieval villages and beaches? What's the point of people thinking it's exotic when they hear the name when they don't see an exotic location on screen? Meanwhile, I think it's stupid to sacrifice using the beautiful location they had surrounding them for one line of dialogue. The "Montenegro" scenes were visually underwhelming. It may sound exciting for Bond to go to the black mountain, but there's no payoff. There could have been a great payoff if they had just used it as Prague and took full advantage of one of Europe's most beautiful cities, even if it doesn't sound as exciting at first. Prague is still a popular tourist destination, so I think it would have sounded exciting enough for Bond.
To be accurate the Norwegian authorities don't make it expensive per se. The prices and wages do. What they do is not make filming affordable because they don't offer enough tax cuts etc. the way Iceland, the UK and many other countries do.
Thanks for the clarification, Number24, that's what I was attempting to say.