20 Things You Didn’t Know About The Living Daylights (1987)
11. “We’ve Had A Major Gas Explosion. Keep Clear Of The Main Building!”
Stonor House and Stonor Park near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire doubled for the exterior of the MI6 Blayden safe house, whilst its interiors were constructed by production designer, Peter Lamont at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire.
Special effects supervisor, John Richardson and Lamont arranged for the manor house’s 18th Century windows to be removed for the scenes in which Necros, posing as a milkman, hurls milk bottles filled with nitro-glycerine to create a distraction. Richardson arranged explosive charges that only blew outwards, destroying the replacement windows placed by the special effects team, whilst protecting the artworks inside.
For Necros’s brutal battle with one of General Koskov’s MI6 minders (stuntman, Bill Weston), Richardson arranged such precautions as a soft skillet for Andreas Wisniewski to hit Weston with and pumped carbon dioxide through a pipe into a pot of water to simulate it boiling. Nevertheless, Wisniewski accidentally knocked Weston unconscious during the fight!
A Huey UH-1 helicopter that was captured during the Falklands War was rented and repainted white with the Red Cross emblem for filming, much to the chagrin of the Red Cross, which did not like being portrayed as cooperating (however unwittingly) in such a scene of violence.