20 Things You Didn’t Know About The Living Daylights (1987)
8. “Where Are You Going?” “To Drop A Bomb!”
For the scene in which Double-0 Seven hurls a bomb from the Lockheed Hercules C-130 onto a towering bridge spanning a deep ravine, destroying it and allowing Kamran Shah’s forces to escape, the filmmakers struggled to find a suitable bridge in the Moroccan desert.
Peter Lamont and his additional art director and brother, Michael Lamont suggested using a low-lying bridge that stood a mere ten feet above a small creek in the desert. With no workable alternatives, the filmmakers allowed the Lamont brothers to construct a diorama using silicone to represent the river and making the bridge appear hundreds of feet tall. The diorama was placed between the real bridge and the camera, which was fitted with a nodal head fixed to a tripod, allowing John Glen and Alec Mills to film the bridge and the diorama from any angle that they wanted.
The actual height of the bridge also appears in the finished film in the form of bird’s eye view shots taken from the cargo plane.
For the bridge’s destruction, John Richardson constructed a five-foot tall miniature at Pinewood Studios, which could collapse in sections.