LEAP OF FAITH

I think there’s always the question when you do a Bond film of, ‘What hasn’t been done, when everything has been done?’” muses director Martin Campbell a quarter of a century after he made viewers’ jaws plunge in symmetry with James Bond as the MI6 superspy dived 720ft off the Contra Dam in Switzerland. “What is the thing that makes everybody go, ‘Oh my God?’ If you go back over the Bond films, there are some terrific opening sequences. And ours was him jumping off the dam, which was, by the way, not digital. We did it for real. The genius of that dam is, it’s straight down. A lot of dams float outwards, in which case the stuntman [Wayne Michaels] would kill himself by hitting it. It’s one of the few dams that is pretty much vertical. And I said, ‘Well, why not? Let’s do this’. So we did.”

Back in November 1995, when opened, it was essential to make viewers sit up and fast – and not just because and had changed the cinematic landscape. The 17th movie in the Bond series, arrived after a six-year hiatus during which much had changed.