Behind The Scenes Filming The First James Bond Film, 'Dr No' In Jamaica.
- May 18, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 12
Everyone knows Dr. No launched James Bond onto the big screen in 1962. What's less well known is how close it came to never happening as a film at all, how little money the whole thing was made for, and how many of the people involved in getting it onto Jamaican soil had personal connections to Ian Fleming that went well beyond a writer-producer relationship.
Fleming Had Already Tried and Failed to Sell This Story Once
Dr. No wasn't a new idea for Ian Fleming by the time it reached cinemas. Back in 1956, he'd written a pilot script for an American TV series called James Gunn: Secret Agent, and his episode, titled Commander Jamaica, never got made. Fleming recycled the plot and setting a couple of years later as his sixth Bond novel. Even the film rights had a rocky road before Dr. No got anywhere near a camera. A 1954 TV adaptation of Casino Royale had been badly received, and Fleming, by most accounts, came out of that experience bitter and unwilling to trust Hollywood with his character again. He eventually sold the film rights to producer Harry Saltzman for a modest $50,000, at a point when the whole project was still being talked about as little more than a tourism film for Jamaica.
Saltzman partnered with Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, and together they formed Eon Productions and pitched the project to United Artists. Most studios had already passed, put off by how British and how sexually frank the material was for the era. UA's Arthur Krim eventually agreed to fund it, but only with a budget of around $1.1 million, worth roughly $10 million today and genuinely tight even by 1962 standards. UA was cautious enough about the material that the finished film wasn't allowed to be advertised in the United States, and Dr. No didn't recoup its production costs during its initial theatrical run there. Nobody involved was making this expecting a six-decade franchise.
Casting a Superspy Nobody Had Heard Of
Fleming had his own ideas about who should play Bond, and none of them were the man who got the part. He favoured David Niven, and also lobbied for his own cousin, Christopher Lee, who wasn't cast either. Cary Grant was approached and wanted nothing to do with a franchise commitment. Patrick McGoohan reportedly turned the role down on moral grounds, put off by Bond's womanising.
Producer Cubby Broccoli, for his part, had his eye on a relatively unknown Scottish actor named Sean Connery, largely on the strength of his wife Dana's reaction to Connery's supporting role in Disney's Darby O'Gill and the Little People. She told Cubby, in no uncertain terms, that Connery was their Bond.
Connery never had a formal screen test. He turned up to a lunch meeting with Saltzman and Broccoli looking dishevelled, in unpressed clothes, and by most accounts made his case with confidence rather than polish, at one point reportedly banging the table to tell the producers exactly what he wanted from the role. What actually sealed it, according to Saltzman, was watching Connery walk back to his car afterwards. He moved, in Saltzman's words, like a jungle cat. Fleming himself wasn't initially convinced, privately dismissing Connery as an overgrown stuntman who lacked the polish he'd imagined for his character. He came around once he saw the finished film, and reportedly liked Connery's performance enough that he gave Bond a Scottish ancestry in the novels that followed, essentially rewriting his own creation to fit the actor.
The Villain Who Said No Three Times
Before the role of Dr. No went to Joseph Wiseman, Fleming tried to get his neighbour and friend Noël Coward to play the part. The two men lived a few miles apart on Jamaica's north coast, Fleming at Goldeneye and Coward at his own retreat, Firefly, and they'd known each other for years; Coward had even been a witness at Fleming's wedding and was godfather to his son. None of that persuaded him to put on a supervillain's metal hands for the cameras. Coward turned the part down by telegram, in a reply that's become one of the most quoted lines in Bond production history: "Dr. No? No! No! No!" Fleming's backup plan was Christopher Lee, but by the time that suggestion reached Saltzman and Broccoli, they'd already settled on Wiseman, whose performance in the 1951 film Detective Story had impressed them.
A Teenage Location Scout Who'd Go On to Build His Own Empire
One of the more unexpected names in Dr. No's production credits belongs to a young Jamaican who wasn't yet 25: Chris Blackwell. Blackwell's mother had been close friends with Fleming, Coward, and the actor Errol Flynn, all of whom moved in the same small circle of British expatriates who'd made Jamaica their part-time home, and that connection got him hired as a location scout and production assistant on the film. Blackwell knew the island's coastline, its music scene, and its people in a way the visiting English crew simply didn't, and he put that knowledge to direct use, introducing composer Monty Norman to the Jamaican musician Byron Lee and his band the Dragonaires, who ended up performing the calypso and ska numbers that appear in the finished film. Within a couple of years of working on Dr. No, Blackwell would go on to found Island Records, the label that later brought reggae, and Bob Marley specifically, to a global audience. He co-founded it alongside another Jamaican music figure, Leslie Kong, the ice cream vendor turned record producer who was reshaping Jamaican music at almost exactly the same moment Bond was being filmed a few miles down the coast.
Six Weeks in Jamaica, Then a Retreat to Pinewood
The Eon crew flew into Jamaica on January 14, 1962, and started shooting two days later. Filming took in Palisadoes Airport and Kingston's waterfront, with Morgan's Harbour doubling as the fictional harbour scenes, and pushed on to locations around Ocho Rios, Port Royal, and the Green Grotto Caves, which became the entrance to Dr. No's underground lair. Production leaned heavily on local talent to fill smaller roles. Dolores Keator, cast as Miss Strangways' secretary, got the part largely because she happened to own the house the crew was using as a filming location. A relative of the film's costume designer picked up a small role as a bartender.
Because so much of the shoot took place just down the coast from Fleming's own home, he became a regular visitor to set, at one point bringing along Coward and the poet Stephen Spender to watch filming near Goldeneye. The Jamaican leg of the shoot ran for roughly six weeks before deteriorating weather forced the production to relocate, with the crew still short of footage. Five days after leaving Jamaica, they were back at work at Pinewood Studios in England, finishing the picture on soundstages built to stand in for Dr. No's lair and the rest of the film's interiors.
The Beach Scene That Became the Film's Signature Image
The most enduring image to come out of that Jamaican shoot is Ursula Andress walking out of the sea at Laughing Waters Beach, near Ocho Rios, in a white bikini with a knife at her hip. It's the moment that introduced Honey Ryder, and by extension the entire idea of the "Bond girl", and it was shot only a short walk from where Fleming was staying at the time.
The photographer Bunny Yeager was also on the island that year and managed to get close enough to the production, during a break in filming caused by cloud cover, to take her own set of photographs of Andress by the same stretch of coast. Yeager later wrote about the session in her book Camera in Jamaica, describing having to work fast with a tripod and a strobe light as the light faded in the early evening:
“The photos of Ursula wearing a bikini and shirt, posing besides some roots were made a few feet away from the scene of the film. The cinematographer and crew took a break because cloud was overhead so I was able to sneak in a few shots. Exposure was 1/50 sec at f8 as the area was in shade in addition to the sun being hidden. The photo near the centre by the boats and fish nets show Ursula wrapped in a towel. Here I used a strobe light to balance the lighting in the background. The other shots were taken after work about 6pm on the beach near the hotel. The light was terribly dim, making it hard to see focus. I used a tripod shooting at 1/10 sec at f8, then I used strobe to help lighten face and figure.”
A Film Nobody Expected to Launch a Franchise
Dr. No opened in the UK on October 5, 1962, and eventually took in around $59.5 million worldwide against that original $1.1 million budget, a return nobody involved had banked on given how uncertain UA had been about the material. Connery went on to play Bond another five times for Eon across the 1960s, later returning twice more outside the main series. The Jamaica shoot set a pattern the franchise stuck to for decades afterward: exotic real-world locations standing in for a villain's private domain, stunts built around whatever the setting could offer, and a sense that Bond's world was only a slight exaggeration of somewhere you could actually visit.
That approach to shooting real, sometimes dangerous, sequences on location rather than purely on a soundstage carried through the series for years, and occasionally produced moments as unscripted as anything in Dr. No's own production, like the crocodile farm stunt in Live and Let Die, filmed more than a decade later, that came far closer to going wrong than the finished footage ever let on.
Fleming didn't live to see how far the franchise would go; he died in 1964, two years after Dr. No's release. His own life before Bond had its share of real intrigue too, not least through his older brother Peter Fleming, an adventurer, wartime intelligence officer, and travel writer whose own exploits fed directly into the version of espionage Ian eventually put on the page, and then, thanks to a low budget, a stubborn location, and a handful of people with personal ties to Fleming himself, onto the screen.
