Where to watch You Only Live Twice (1967)

Trivia & production notes

• Roald Dahl was hired to write the screenplay despite having no screenwriting experience beyond an uncompleted script, and he considered the source novel so weak that he had to create an entirely new plot while retaining only four or five elements from Ian Fleming's book.
• Dahl's plot was inspired by the real-world story of a missing nuclear-armed U.S. Air Force bomber over Spain and the Soviet and American spacewalk programs of the mid-1960s.
• Harold Jack Bloom's screenplay was rejected, but ideas from his work—including Bond's fake death and burial at sea and a ninja attack—were incorporated into the final film and he received a credit for additional story material.
• Sean Connery, who was tired of playing James Bond and concerned about typecasting, agreed to return only after the producers significantly increased his fee.
• Actor Jan Werich was originally cast as Blofeld but was replaced after several days of filming when director Lewis Gilbert and producer Albert Broccoli decided he resembled a benevolent Father Christmas rather than a menacing villain.
• Mie Hama, one of the two female leads, struggled with English so severely that producers initially planned to fire her; she kept her role only after her co-star Tetsurō Tamba suggested she might commit suicide if dismissed, leading producers to swap her role with the more English-fluent Akiko Wakabayashi.
• Cameraman John Jordan had his foot severed by a helicopter rotor while filming the aerial battle sequence involving the Little Nellie gyrocopter and was able to have it surgically reattached, though it was later amputated in London when the surgery proved flawed; he continued working on Bond films with a prosthetic foot.
• The SPECTRE volcano base set constructed at Pinewood Studios stood 148 feet tall and cost $1 million to build, and was so large it could be seen from over three miles away and attracted crowds from the surrounding region.
• The final helicopter battle and explosion sequences were initially filmed in Japan but had to be relocated to Torremolinos, Spain, because the Japanese government prohibited explosions in a national park.
• Editor Peter R. Hunt was brought in to re-edit the film after test audiences rejected editor Thelma Connell's nearly three-hour cut, and his successful revision led to him being offered the director's chair for the next Bond film.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article You Only Live Twice (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.