We’ve seen the alpine behind-the-scene images, not to mention elusive snippets and the rather excellent first trailer, but now, the Spectre tide of excitement has shifted toward the spy thriller’s opening sequence.
First picked up by Collider, the outlet spoke to one of the unit publicists on set, who offered up a play-by-play breakdown of the explosive, ambitious scene. Boasting an incredible amount of extras — over 1,000, in fact — not to mention a helicopter and a high-octane chase, the segment certainly appears to boast all of the wonderful ingredients that make-up a Bond opener, and it’s said that this dazzling snippet in particular will clock in at around 12 minutes in length.
Daniel Craig will reprise his role as the 00 agent for the fourth consecutive time, and Spectre‘s cast will be rounded out by Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Ben Whishaw, Christoph Waltz, Monica Bellucci, Lea Seydoux and, more recently, Stephanie Sigman.
Spectre will infiltrate cinemas worldwide on November 6. In the meantime, if you’re prepared to have the opening segment spoiled, you can check out the exhaustive anatomy of the scene down below.
This is the opening chase sequence of our film. It starts with Bond and Estrella, who are walking down this Day of the Dead parade. Estrella is played by Stephanie Sigman, who is a Mexican actress. They’re kind of weaving their way through this Day of the Dead parade, they make their way into a hotel—we’ve also shot here once before in The Living Daylights.
They’re going up to Estrella’s room, Estrella thinks she might be bringing Bond to bed but instead he’s looking out the view of her window. He sees two baddies across the way having a conversation, and he stops something really bad from happening, kills one of the guys, the other guy goes running, Bond jumps out of the window and there’s a bit of a chase, he causes a building to explode and they both end up—boom—on the ground, and the foot chase starts.
The baddie’s character is called Skiara, who’s played by Alessandro Cremona, he’s an Italian actor. What we’ve been shooting over the past couple of days is Bond chasing Skiara slowly making their way through the Day of the Dead parade. As the running Skiara is on his mobile phone he’s calling for backup, cue the helicopter coming down the street. Helicopter lands, it’s full of a couple of other baddies. Skiara jumps on, Bond follows, pulls off one of the baddies, Bond jumps on the helicopter, helicopter goes up, and they start to have this fight in the helicopter.
The helicopter is piloted by a guy called Chuck Aaron, who is a stunt pilot. He’s the only person who’s insured to do 360 flips in this helicopter in the world, so we’re doing a bit of the stunts here but kind of the bigger helicopter stuff is happening 10 hours outside the city at a lower altitude.
We’ve got 1500 extras here today. They all kind of file in at 4:30 in the morning to this big convention center. They have their hair and makeup done which takes anywhere from one and a half hours to two and a half hours.