Setting Up the Famous Jump

For the movie, I recommended Mt. Asgard for the jump sequence to the Bond team. It’s a double summited peak, 6,600 feet in elevation, 25 miles north of the Arctic Circle on Canada’s Baffin Island. It’s a spectacular land, somewhat resembling multitudes of Yosemite Valleys but before the Ice Age departed. At Asgard I would have no worry of tree encounters, the timber line petering out something like 800 miles to the south.

The stunt, filmed during the brief Arctic summer, reputedly cost around a quarter of a million dollars. The original budget for the film was $14 million but ultimately came in around $21 million. Either way, that stunt, the most expensive ever at that point, represented a huge chunk of the entire budget. And this despite the fact that it didn’t involve constructing any elaborate and expensive sets. It wasn’t even as long as it seemed since the cameras were somewhat over cranked, i.e. it was shot partially in slow motion. Actually, I always thought gravity should have gotten an equal credit.