20 Things You Didn't Know About Die Another Day
11. “Let There Be Light!”
Gustav Graves’s Icarus satellite forms the core of his plot for North Korea to dominate the South and then attack Japan. Whilst ostensibly being developed for humanitarian purposes, it is a deadly space weapon that uses a large mirror to harness the Sun’s ray and produce a focused beam of destructive energy.
It was hardly a new concept for a Bond film, but it did set a trend for the British film industry.
For the sequence in which Graves unveils it for its peaceable purposes during his grand party in Iceland, the filmmakers brought in an 160,000 Watt light array of pod lights to simulate the effect of Icarus’s mirror reflecting down on the ice palace from orbit.
It was the largest lighting array ever used in a British film at the time, illuminating an area on Pinewood Studios’s backlot that was even larger than Wembley Stadium.