Die Another Day [2002]

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• Brett Ratner, Stuart Baird and Stephen Hopkins were candidates at various times to direct the movie. Pierce Brosnan reportedly lobbied the Broccolis to hire Ratner, but they didn't like his previous work and nixed the idea; Brosnan later worked with Ratner on the film After the Sunset.
• Following her Best Actress win at the 2002 Oscars, Halle Berry became the first Academy Award winner to be a leading Bond Girl in the EON Productions film series, winning her award while shooting this movie. Kim Basinger who played Domino in the unofficial Never Say Never Again won her Oscar for L.A. Confidential long after she had been a Bond Girl. Judi Dench who plays M also has an Oscar from Shakespeare in Love.
• A knee injury to Pierce Brosnan delayed shooting for a few weeks.
• Only the second [Bond] film to feature James Bond's office. It was last seen in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
• For the sword fight, film makers decreased the film speed to make it look as if the actors were moving faster than they actually were.
• A huge 20,000-watt light array which took a week to construct was used for the Icarus demonstration scene.
• Icarus was originally called Solaris but was changed when the producers found out that Solaris was in production.
• For the first time, the famous gun barrel sequence now includes a bullet zooming by after Bond fires. This idea was suggested by director Lee Tamahori.
• A spin-off was planned, featuring Halle Berry's character Jinx as the lead. Neal Purvis and Robert Wade wrote for two months and even a director was hired (^[?] Stephen Frears). However, after the failure of other female-character-driven action films like Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, MGM pulled the plug on the project. Halle Berry has said that she would love to return as Jinx in another [Bond] movie. She has allegedly said that she would like to do it so much she would do the role for free.
• Some of the actresses mentioned during the production as potential Bond girls were Catherine Zeta-Jones, model ^[?] Kelly Brook and dancer ^[?] Jean Butler.
• The book that 007 picks up from the Cuban sleeper along with a revolver, is A Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies, written by ^[?] James Bond. Ian Fleming, an avid birdwatcher, named Bond after the author.
• When Q (John Cleese) walks behind the invisible Aston Martin in the otherwise abandoned Underground station, due to the light refraction effect, he appears briefly to do a "silly walk".
• The character Wai Lin, played by Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies, was originally supposed to make her return, aiding Bond in Hong Kong, but no arrangement could be worked out with the actress and she was replaced by Chinese Intelligence agent (and hotelier) Chang. Wai Lin's presence is confirmed by an extra on the DVD release concerning the writing of the script: Barbara Broccoli is shown leafing through an early script, and it clearly contains lines for Wai Lin.