20 Things You Didn’t Know About Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
7. “Next Time, I’ll Take The Elevator!”
Allan Cameron identified the Sinn Sathorn Tower as being the ideal location for the Carver Media Group Network’s headquarters in Saigon. The banner hanging from it depicting Elliot Carver’s face was 16 feet long and 70 feet wide.
A 120-foot-high one-third-scale section of it was also constructed at Eon Studios for close-ups of Pierce Brosnan and Michelle Yeoh, and their stunt doubles, Mark Southwell and Wendy Leech (wife of second unit director, Vic Armstrong) rappelling down the banner.
Brosnan and Yeoh performed the sequence up to the edge of the real tower’s 43rd floor before Southwell and Leech took over, initially falling from that floor before filming the end of the stunt between the 19th and 12th floors. Southwell noted that, with the Thai rainy season fast-approaching, a sudden gust of wind could have slammed them both right into the building.
Vic Armstrong devised the sequence based on seeing safety nets secured to the sides of buildings under construction in Hong Kong and Errol Flynn slowing his fall down a ship’s sail using a knife in The Sea Hawk (1940). However, he asked Spanish stuntman, Jordi Casares to supervise it.