The film opens November 6th and also stars Ben Whishaw as Q, Naomie Harris as Moneypenny, Ralph Fiennes as M, Christoph Waltz as Oberhauser, Monica Bellucci as Lucia Sciarra, David Bautista as Mr. Hinx, Léa Seydoux as Madeleine Swann and Stephanie Sigman as Estrella.
Shortly after arriving on set we spoke to Heather Callow (the Spectre unit publicist) and she described the opening chase sequence they were filming in Mexico City. As you can read below, the sequence is absolutely loaded with action, has a helicopter and over a thousand extras (with tens of thousands of additional extras being added using CG in post-production).
Here’s what Callaw had to say:
This is the opening chase sequence of our film. It starts with Bond and Estrella, who are walking down this Day of the Dead parade. Estrella is played by Stephanie Sigman, who is a Mexican actress. They’re kind of weaving their way through this Day of the Dead parade, they make their way into a hotel—we’ve also shot here once before in The Living Daylights.
They’re going up to Estrella’s room, Estrella thinks she might be bringing Bond to bed but instead he’s looking out the view of her window. He sees two baddies across the way having a conversation, and he stops something really bad from happening, kills one of the guys, the other guy goes running, Bond jumps out of the window and there’s a bit of a chase, he causes a building to explode and they both end up—boom—on the ground, and the foot chase starts.
The baddie’s character is called Skiara, who’s played by Alessandro Cremona, he’s an Italian actor. What we’ve been shooting over the past couple of days is Bond chasing Skiara slowly making their way through the Day of the Dead parade. As the running Skiara is on his mobile phone he’s calling for backup, cue the helicopter coming down the street. Helicopter lands, it’s full of a couple of other baddies. Skiara jumps on, Bond follows, pulls off one of the baddies, Bond jumps on the helicopter, helicopter goes up, and they start to have this fight in the helicopter.
The helicopter is piloted by a guy called Chuck Aaron, who is a stunt pilot. He’s the only person who’s insured to do 360 flips in this helicopter in the world, so we’re doing a bit of the stunts here but kind of the bigger helicopter stuff is happening 10 hours outside the city at a lower altitude.
We’ve got 1500 extras here today. They all kind of file in at 4:30 in the morning to this big convention center. They have their hair and makeup done which takes anywhere from one and a half hours to two and a half hours.
Here’s the official synopsis for Spectre:
In SPECTRE, a cryptic message from Bond’s past sends him on a trail to uncover a sinister organization. While M battles political forces to keep the secret service alive, Bond peels back the layers of deceit to reveal the terrible truth behind SPECTRE. Sam Mendes returns to direct SPECTRE, with Daniel Craig reprising his role as 007 for the fourth time. SPECTRE is produced by Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, from a script by John Logan and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade.
Source: Collider
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