20 Things You Didn't Know About SPECTRE (2015)
4. I Never Understood All These Elaborate Tortures
Despite Ian Fleming’s premature death, authorised writers have continued to write about the remarkable exploits of James Bond, starting with Kingsley Amis, who penned the 1968 novel, Colonel Sun under the name of Robert Markham.
The Bond filmmakers have used the novel as inspiration before, such as for M’s kidnapping in The World Is Not Enough and for the name of Colonel Tan-Sun Moon (Will Yun Lee) in Die Another Day (2002). They also paid royalties to the Fleming Estate to obtain the film rights to a chapter from Colonel Sun when filming a key scene in SPECTRE.
In Amis’s novel, Colonel Sun Liang-tan tortures Double-0 Seven, explaining that his punishment is also an experiment. He theorises that a man’s soul rests in his brain and that any successful attack should be launched there. Sun mentions witnessing the torture of an American prisoner in Korea at which the victim was deprived of his eyes, after which Sun observed that "He'd gone, though he was still alive. There was nobody inside his skull".
Sun's dialogue was closely adapted for the scene in SPECTRE in which Ernst Stavro Blofeld tortures James Bond, even though Blofeld's methods are far more hi-tech - something that SPECTRE agent, Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) likely would not have approved of...