Hi all,
This seems to be the best place to put this?
This week marks the 60th anniversary of the start of Principal shooting on Dr No at Palisades Airport in Kingston, Jamaica, on 16 January 1962.
After my plans for an epic 2020 European related Bond adventure were delayed, I was stoked that some of my late 2021 plans were able to go ahead and I shot into Jamaica, the spiritual home of James Bond and more pointedly the home-away-from-home for Bond creator Ian Fleming. Jamaica is after all where Fleming wrote all of his published James Bond thrillers as well as presumably his originally unpublished Bond TV series treatments; some of which were reworked into his For Your Eyes Only collection of short stories, another 2 have subsequently made their way into Anthony Horowitz’s Bond novels and apparently, another 3 exist.
Jamaica is referenced across Fleming’s Bond book series and five Bond stories had events taking place in Jamaica. The film versions of Dr No (1962) and Live and Let Die (1973) featured Bond in Jamaica as well as of course most recently Cary Fukunaga’s No Time To Die (2021).
With this preamble and some time to kill, I managed to visit some Jamaican locations with connections to Ian Fleming and Bond. These places included the “secret” location of James Bond’s retirement home as featured in No Time To Die also sometimes referred to as – the James Bond Villa.
James Bond’s return to Jamaica is some kind of homecoming, not only bringing Daniel Craig’s chapter of Bond to an end but full circle back to Bond’s cinematic introduction in Terence Young’s Dr. No which was mainly set in Jamaica. Jamaica’s role is also a homage to Ian Fleming, his love of Jamaica and the creation of Bond, as well as a nod to previous Bond story elements from the books and film, as the other Daniel Craig era films have done.
The full report with photos and video can be found here: I visit the Location of James Bond’s No Time To Die Villa – Field Report | THE ESTABLISHING SHOT