FAQ

All of the James Bond movies are based, in some part, upon novels or stories by British author Ian Fleming (1908-1964). The title, The Living Daylights, comes from the short story The Living Daylights, included in Fleming's 1966 posthumous anthology, Octopussy and the Living Daylights. The short story was the source for the early scenes in which Bond assists with the defection of a KGB officer and avoids killing a female sniper whom he knows to be an amateur. The remainder of the film is from an original screenplay crafted by American screenwriters Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum.

The Living Daylights is the 15th film in the EON Bond film series and the first to feature Timothy Dalton as James Bond, 007.

The title song, The Living Daylights, is performed by the Norwegian pop group a-ha. They'd enjoyed a large amount of success a few years before with their song Take On Me which featured a groundbreaking conceptual video.

When Bond fails to kill the female sniper set to shoot defecting KGB officer, General Georgi Koskov (Jeroen Krabbé), and is accused of purposely missing her, Bond explains that she was obviously an amateur and adds that his shooting the rifle out of her hands must have scared the living daylights out of her.

In the context of the movie, the Mujahedeen are opposition groups who are fighting against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In the eyes of some, they are considered to be insurgents, while others consider them to be freedom fighters. During the Soviet-Afghanistan war of the 1980s, the United States supplied the Mujahedeen with weaponry to fight the Soviets, most notably Stinger missiles, which the resistance used to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships. Stinger missiles were actually a weapon used in the next Bond film, Licence to Kill, which was Timothy Dalton's 2nd and last appearance as Bond.

"Smiert Spionam" (meaning "Death to Spies"), when contracted, became SMERSH, a precursor to the KGB created by Lavrentiy Beria. Their purpose was to eliminate all forms of treachery, both within the USSR and abroad. SMERSH really existed and operated in Stalinist and post-Stalinist society and is credited with orchestrating the assassination of Leon Trotsky in 1940. Beria was executed by approximately nine months after Stalin's death, and SMERSH died with him. Fleming's early novels featured villains from SMERSH, although General Pushkin says that SMERSH stopped operating some 20 years earlier. This is why M gets so upset when the words start appearing whenever one of MI6's agents is murdered, and General Koskov alleges that Pushkin has re-instituted SMERSH again.

The commentary on the DVD says that, in previous movies, General Gogol (Walter Gotell) has always been depicted as M's counterpart, and M would not be working out in the field. Consequently, the General Pushkin character was created to fill that gap. As it works out, Gogol does have a cameo at the end of the movie when it is revealed that he has taken a position with the Soviet foreign service and has arranged for Kara to have free passage into and out of the Soviet Union. This is what allows her and her cello to make a world tour.