Quotes of the Day

"All Bond films are logistical nightmares," says producer Barbara Broccoli. "Even if you've been doing them forever, you always come up against something." Or many somethings — from uncooperative skies to thin ice — in the making of Die Another Day. But someone sitting in a movie theater should never have a clue what the Bond team went through to get the big bangs, thrilling chases and spectacular stunts that are integral to the 007 experience.

Making it look easy is part of the movie magic. Bond is perhaps unique in the film business in that the team behind the films has, for the most part, worked together for years. Going back to a Bond set "is rather like going back to school and seeing your old mates again," says Roger Moore, who still keeps an office at Pinewood Studios, where much of each Bond movie is shot. The names and faces on the cast may change s ignificantly from film to film, but on the crew side, they are largely the same every time. Broccoli and her stepbrother Michael Wilson grew up on Bond, which has been the mainstay of the family business since EON Productions was set up in 1961.

Executive producer Tony Waye — master of the shooting schedule — started as an assistant director on For Your Eyes Only. Production designer Peter Lamont's first Bond was Goldfinger, on which he was a draftsman. You could consider Chris Corbould, the special effects guru, a relative newbie; he's been in charge of that department since GoldenEye in 1995. "So many of the people here have established relationships," says Broccoli. "There isn't that sense of wondering if people will have huge egos. We've worked through those dramas already."

Which leaves the team to deal with the dramas of putting the films together. Perhaps the biggest challenge with Die Another Day was to work with the one element completely beyond everyone's control: the weather. The trickiest sequence was Bond's showdown with Zao, villain Gustav Graves' loyal henchman. Director Lee Tamahori decided to put the car-to-car battle on ice, on the frozen lagoon outside Graves' Icelandic lair. Lamont found a glacial lagoon called Jokulsarlon, on Iceland's southwest coast, that was perfect — as long as the ice froze solidly enough to support Bond's Aston Martin Vanquish V12, Zao's Jaguar XKR, and all the other vehicles and equipment needed to capture the conflict on film.

That was a big if. They needed 30 cm, and on their first trip up to Iceland last winter, Lamont recalls that they found precisely zero. The evening they landed "was wild. It was the wettest day they had known in living memory," he says. The team flew back to London to regroup. Several people were even sent to Alaska to scout out possible alternates to Jokulsarlon, but the cost of getting everyone and everything to a location there would have been monumental. Then came a surprise call from Iceland in early February — no more rain, just clear, bitter cold and ice that was freezing up perfectly. By the time all crew and equipment arrived in Iceland, the ice was just thick enough and lasted the three weeks they needed to shoot all the required sequences.

Lamont, whose eye had been caught by photographs he'd seen of Jokulsarlon's icebergs, found an eerie, otherworldly lake with the bergs frozen in place. "It was unique," he says. "I've never seen blues like those in the ice." And we've never seen a car chase like this one. For once, the bad guy has more weaponry on his wheels than Bond himself, but the old man does have some tricks of his own. Many people have already heard about an invisible car. Lamont says that's not exactly right. The technology is based on an idea developed at the Jet Propulsion Lab in the U.S. It's intended for tanks, and it's called adaptive camouflage. How does it work? We're not telling — Lamont wants audiences to go, see for themselves, and say, "How the hell did they get it to do that?"

It's a question you could ask of several other sequences as well. For instance, Bond surfs into North Korea — but that big wave was actually filmed in Maui, the only place in the world that gets the rare giant big enough for three people to surf at once. Executive producer Tony Waye took a unit out to Hawaii over his Christmas "break" last year just to wait for one that size. Weeks of planning netted the one minute of film they needed for the final cut.

On July 10, all the drama of production finally came to an end, with one last close-up shot of Brosnan, redoing in good weather what had been done in bad conditions just two weeks into the shoot. "It came to an end very suddenly," Waye says — almsot sadly. "For 24 hours, 7 days a week, Bond is all you do. You don't stop thinking about it. Then suddenly you don't have 400 people hanging around the studios, and you miss that." But if you're part of this slightly odd family called Bond, it's not as if the work is ever done. All you have to do is think: Until next time.

• JEFF CHU
• A behind-the-scenes look at some of the production challenges in Die Another Day