20 Things You Didn't Know About Licence To Kill (1989)

In some respects, Licence to Kill is the first James Bond film not to be based on an Ian Fleming title. Nevertheless, key elements of the film were still drawn from the Bond creator’s stories.

The sequence in which Felix Leiter is brutally attacked by a great white shark was taken from the 1954 Bond novel, Live And Let Die, which saw the CIA agent losing an arm and a leg to a shark. The script also lifted the lurid note describing Leiter's maiming directly from Fleming's prose: “He disagreed with something that ate him”.

The film also adapted Milton Krest, the Wavekrest marine research vessel, and the use of a stingray’s tail as a means of chastisement from The Hildebrand Rarity, a short story from Fleming’s 1960 collection entitled For Your Eyes Only. Additionally, Sanchez’s girlfriend, Lupe Lamora recalled the kept women of Fleming’s books and the earlier Bond films, particularly Domino Vitali from the 1961 novel, Thunderball.

Daringly, even though MGM/UA did not hold the film rights to Fleming’s 1953 book, Casino Royale, Robert Davi took inspiration from the author’s descriptions of Le Chiffre and chose to portray Franz Sanchez as a dark reflection of James Bond himself.

However, the scenes between Davi’s Sanchez and Timothy Dalton’s Double-0 Seven also share more than a passing resemblance to those between James Bond and Francisco “Pistols” Scaramanga in Fleming’s final Bond novel, 1965’s The Man with the Golden Gun.