These are some of the key dates behind the making of the James Bond movies.

• January 16, 1962: First day of shooting on the first 007 film, Dr. No. The crew went on location at Jamaica’s Palisadoes Airport to film Bond (Sean Connery) arriving on the island.
• April 1, 1963: First day of shooting on From Russia with Love. Director Terence Young shot the scene in M’s office in which Q (Desmond Llewelyn) familiarizes Bond (Sean Connery) with the many special features of his field-issue briefcase.
• March 19, 1964: Sean Connery’s first day of shooting on Goldfinger. He reported to Stage D at Pinewood Studios, which was set up as the El Scorpio nightclub in South America.
• February 16, 1965: Principal photography on Thunderball began at the Château d’Anet in France.
• July 4, 1966: The first day of shooting on You Only Live Twice. Director Lewis Gilbert filmed the sequence in which Bond (Sean Connery) is apparently murdered in the Hong Kong apartment of Ling (Tsai Chin).
• October 21, 1968: The first day of shooting on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The location was the mountaintop Piz Gloria restaurant in Switzerland, where filming began at 7:45 am with new 007 George Lazenby and ten gorgeous women.
• November 6, 1973: The first day of shooting on The Man with the Golden Gun. Director Guy Hamilton and a skeleton crew motored out to Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong, to film the wreck of the Queen Elizabeth I ocean liner. For this early sequence, actor Mike Lovatt doubled Roger Moore, who wasn’t due in Hong Kong until the following April.
• September 27, 1982: The first day of shooting on Never Say Never Again. The location was Nice, France.
• August 10, 1982: The first day of filming on Octopussy. The sequence follows James Bond (Roger Moore) as he arrives at Checkpoint Charlie in West Berlin.
• June 27, 1984: Date of a disastrous fire that destroyed the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios and changed the production plans for the fourteenth James Bond film, A View to a Kill. Fed by exploding gas cylinders that had been used to fuel some campfires on a large forest set for director Ridley Scott’s fantasy film Legend, the blaze leveled the structure. Despite costing more than 1 million pounds to rebuild the stage, the disaster added little to the budget for A View to a Kill, although it did extend the film’s shooting schedule for three weeks. The set for the abandoned Main Strike silver mine was actually constructed simultaneously with the laying of the roof on the newly reconstructed stage.
• July 18, 1988: First day of shooting on Licence to Kill. Working in Mexico City’s Churubusco Studios, director John Glen filmed the interior of the love nest on Cray Key in the Bahamas where Lupe Lamora (Talisa Soto) and her lover (Gerardo Albarrán) are surprised by Sanchez (Robert Davi) and his henchmen. A second location that day was the interior of the bedroom of Felix Leiter (David Hedison) in Key West, where James Bond (Timothy Dalton) finds the body of Leiter’s bride, Della Churchill (Priscilla Barnes).
• January 14, 2002: First shooting day on Die Another Day. The location: the office of Miss Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) on Pinewood Studios’ Stage B. Scene 135 begins with MI6 operative Charles Robinson (Colin Salmon) passing through on his way to see M (Dame Judi Dench).
• July 30, 2006: Date when the 007 Stage burned down for a second time, only a week after shooting ended on Casino Royale. Crews were dismantling a huge replica of Venice featured in the film when the fire broke out.
• November 15, 2013: Date of a joint announcement by MGM and the estate of producer Kevin McClory, announcing that the studio had acquired all the rights to the James Bond novel Thunderball, previously controlled by McClory, who cowrote the original story treatment with Ian Fleming and screenwriter Jack Whittingham. This agreement officially brought Blofeld and SPECTRE back into the Eon Productions 007 universe.