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Octopussy Bavarian village set - where was it from?


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#31 Royal Dalton

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Posted 10 January 2016 - 09:12 PM

It's probably one of the sets from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1982).

 

http://media.gettyim...ure-id108093134

http://media.gettyim...ure-id108093132



#32 stromberg

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Posted 10 January 2016 - 09:25 PM

Not sure about those hitchhiking scenes. The place where they shot the Autobahn scenes is in the middle of a large forrest (Grunewald), so it's possible that they were shot there. On the other hand, were the scenes shot in Germany, they probably would have cast some German actors instead of using English ones (none of those young people in that red Karmann Ghia is German).

 

Would be great to get one's hands on some call sheets...



#33 stromberg

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Posted 10 January 2016 - 09:49 PM

It's probably one of the sets from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1982).

 

http://media.gettyim...ure-id108093134

http://media.gettyim...ure-id108093132

Great find. Looks like a Bingo, I'd say. The houses on the left are a perfect match with the timber frames and the pointed arches, as well as that last house on the right side (the one next to the cathedral).



#34 Leo R.

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Posted 11 January 2016 - 05:48 PM

Nice, too bad they didn't rebuild the cathedral as well :-)

 

I think the whole point is that it was probably cheaper to build a set than to have a very expensive actor, Roger Moore, loose precious time travelling all the way to Germany for a few short scenes.

 

My bet is every shot with a visible Roger was done in the UK, while some of the other shots are in Germany filmed by the second unit. Probably partly Braunfels; after all, they were looking for a place that matched the set they already had. I'm not too familiar with (West!) Berlin but does it have such small town-like streets like the ones seen in the movie? Probably not. The highway scenes later on might be around Berlin however.



#35 stromberg

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Posted 11 January 2016 - 06:20 PM

With this particular cathedral, everyone would have noticed the location cheating :P

 

By now, I don't think there was anything shot in Braunfels at all. Apart from the scene with the Alfa sliding around the corner (which was in Berlin), everything was a studio set. Berlin has lots of small town like streets, especially in the outskirts of West Berlin (don't forget, there was a wall around the city, so there just was no option for the city to develop and grow bigger). But even if you move towards the city centre, there are places in Berlin where you don't think that you're in a Western European capital. And there are no timber frame houses in Berlin.

 

But there has to be a reason why they built this small set in a way that it resembled a real place so much. My theory is that there were probably more scenes planned to play in the non-existant city of Feldstadt (instead of just at the airbase), and that Braunfels (looking like a picture book German city) was meant to double for it. Also possible that the scene with Bond stealing a car was meant to be more elaborate, in a way that it would have required a real location. Some set pieces (like the well and the wall with the hotel name) had already been built for re-shots at Pinwood. Then most of those scenes were cancelled and they used what they had at hand (including some house fronts from "Hunchback") and created this little set instead...

 

The highway scenes were definitely shot in Berlin, that's a known fact.



#36 George White

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Posted 11 January 2016 - 07:06 PM

 

It's probably one of the sets from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1982).

 

http://media.gettyim...ure-id108093134

http://media.gettyim...ure-id108093132

Great find. Looks like a Bingo, I'd say. The houses on the left are a perfect match with the timber frames and the pointed arches, as well as that last house on the right side (the one next to the cathedral).

 

Yes, that was one of my guesses. 



#37 marktmurphy

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Posted 11 January 2016 - 09:21 PM

I think the whole point is that it was probably cheaper to build a set than to have a very expensive actor, Roger Moore, loose precious time travelling all the way to Germany for a few short scenes.

 

Well he's in the Checkpoint Charlie scene so he did go there. I'm trying to think if we see him in Germany at any other point...?



#38 Leo R.

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Posted 12 January 2016 - 09:14 AM

Roger Moore visited Berlin and made some publicity photos with the Brandenburg Gate, Gedächtniskirche, Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie, and a short scene in a car was shot there. Apparently it wasn't so easy to find a place in Berlin where they could shoot a 'small town' scene so they built the set at Pinewood instead. Moore isn't seen in any other real German location throughout the film (the train and the army base are both in the UK).

I guess no footage was shot in Braunfels at all - but they clearly used it as a reference to build their set; cf. the name of the hotel and the fountain in the market place. After all, they had to make a set originally built to resemble Medieval Paris (!) look like a 20th-century small German town, so they needed something to go on.

The only reason we now can identify it as 'Braunfels' is the name of the hotel, Am Solmser Hof, of which there is only one in Germany (and indeed, the world). Clearly the British set designers thought it was a generic name (something like 'The Red Lion') but it wasn't.



#39 glidrose

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Posted 12 January 2016 - 06:28 PM

FWIW, Hunchback's relevant credits are

Production Design by John Stoll
Art Direction by Bill Dennison
Set Decoration by Harry Cordwell

Alan Hume shot both Octopussy and Hunchback.

#40 stromberg

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Posted 22 January 2016 - 09:30 PM

We have a winner. The scene in which the Alfa slides around the corner was shot in Berlin, near the Spandau Citadel. Had an opportunity to see some really good screenshots. The road signs say "Hoher Steinweg" and "Möllentordamm", here's a link to that place: https://www.google.d...534af754e7f6adc

 

Doesn't look very much like it looked back then, but obviously, there's been a lot of house building in the area. But if you go on Street View, you'll notice that little square, which is the place where the Police car and the motorcycle start the pursuit, coming out of the "Kolk" street (it's the houses in the background that give it away).

 

Ironically, this road would take him nowhere else but around the block back to where he started  :P

 

I don't know if this has been documented or mentioned elsewhere before, but I think it's a first  B)



#41 Leo R.

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Posted 23 January 2016 - 10:47 AM

Nice! There's no doubt: you found the place. So basically the film takes us from Paris to Berlin in a matter of seconds :-P

I see the street is actually part of the old town of Spandau. Obviously the filmmakers thought the rest of Spandau wasn't gemütlich enough so they built the village set in Pinewood.

Which also means that actually nothing was shot at Braunfels. Time to edit the wikipedia...



#42 stromberg

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Posted 23 January 2016 - 05:56 PM

I see the street is actually part of the old town of Spandau. Obviously the filmmakers thought the rest of Spandau wasn't gemütlich enough so they built the village set in Pinewood.

Yup, guess they were looking for something that looked like picturebook old-time Germany with timberframe houses etc. Possibly the only area in Berlin where something like this could be found, especially as they couldn't go outside the borders of West-Berlin back then. Maybe they shot more scenes on that little square, then decided that it doesn't look like what they wanted and rebuilt something in Pinewood.



#43 Simon

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Posted 23 January 2016 - 07:21 PM

Well, in Spy, they had James walking around Cairo to meet up with M and co, and had him walking in front of Abu Simbel for a few seconds - which is at the very south end of Egypt.  Bloody miles from anywhere and on the Sudanese border...

 

All part of the movie magic - at least, in that day and age.