20 Things You Didn’t Know About The Living Daylights (1987)
3. “He Got The Boot!”
The climactic fight to the death between Double-0 Seven and Necros was the most expensive scene to shoot, costing $750,000 for five minutes of screen time.
B.J. Worth and Jake Lombard doubled for Timothy Dalton and Andreas Wisniewski respectively for the thrilling cargo net fight, which was filmed over the Mojave Desert, California using a Lockheed Hercules C-123 cargo plane doubling for a C-130. Both stuntmen were equipped with emergency parachutes underneath their costumes; when Worth had to use his, it was the first time that an emergency parachute was used during an actual emergency on a Bond film.
John Richardson and Peter Lamont recreated the Hercules at Pinewood Studios, where Dalton and Wisniewski shot close-up footage of the fight for three days from 20th January 1987 whilst suspended over a plaster model of the desert and its mountains. The cargo net that they used was controlled by a complex system of hydraulics and counterweights to simulate the aircraft’s movements. Wisniewski later described it as an incredibly strenuous sequence to shoot.