20 Things You Didn't Know About Licence To Kill (1989)
19. Putting Up A Respectable Front
The James Bond films pride themselves on doing as much as possible for real without faking their special effects. Of course, not everything in Bond’s world can be done for real and, whilst CGI is used in the more modern films to achieve some scenes or to enhance them, the movies are still loyal to using miniature effects to achieve what cannot be done entirely for real onscreen.
Alongside Derek Meddings, special effects maestro, John Richardson has been behind a lot of the dazzling spectacles featured in the Bond films. One of his tricks was to use foreground miniatures and forced perspectives to achieve the idea of certain sequences unfolding when they actually never did at all.
For instance, the filmmakers in Licence to Kill were able to film all of the exterior work of the Olimpatec Meditation Institute at the Centro Cultural Otomi in Temoaya, Mexico. Richardson and his team created foreground miniatures to represent both a great seal embedded in the rock lifting up to admit Sanchez’s helicopter and a faux tunnel that Bond and Sanchez’s guests drive through.
The special effects team also rigged gas jets around the location to represent the explosions that destroy the site (and Sanchez's concealed cocaine laboratories) at the end of the film without relying upon any miniature work.