Trailer
Plot summary
Drax Industries builds the Moonraker, a space shuttle on loan to Britain, and someone hijacks it in midair from the carrier aircraft ferrying it. The carrier is destroyed, and the shuttle leaves no wreckage behind. M, the head of MI6, puts James Bond on the case and sends him to the Drax manufacturing complex in California. The company's owner, Hugo Drax, receives him on an estate at the edge of a forest that also serves as a training ground for astronauts, and Bond meets Dr. Holly Goodhead, an astronaut working at the plant. Inside a centrifuge he survives an attempt on his life. Drax's pilot, Corinne Dufour, finds Bond in Drax's private office and does not try to stop him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Moonraker (1979)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jaws was written as a villain, but director Lewis Gilbert said he got so much fan mail from small children asking 'Why can't Jaws be a goodie not a baddie' that he had Jaws gradually turned into Bond's ally by the end of the film.
- A Mandela effect debate surrounds Jaws's girlfriend Dolly: many fans recall her wearing metal braces as a joke about Jaws's steel teeth, but the VHS, DVD and Blu-ray releases show she has none, and some believe the theatrical version had them removed.
- For the Iguaçu Falls sequence, the second unit planned to send a real boat over the falls, but it became firmly embedded on rocks near the edge; a dangerous attempt to retrieve it by helicopter and rope ladder failed, so they used a miniature at Pinewood instead.
- For the scene where Jaws bites into the steel cable-car cable with his teeth, the cable was actually made of liquorice, though Richard Kiel still had to use his steel dentures.
- Johnny Mathis began recording the title song with John Barry but could not finish, so producers offered it to Shirley Bassey just weeks before the English premiere; she recorded it at short notice and never regarded the song as her own.
- The skydiving sequence took 88 skydives by stuntmen to complete; the cinematographer shot it with a lightweight Panavision anamorphic lens adapted from an old pawn shop in Paris, and custom-sewn velcro costume seams let hidden parachutes open.
- Hugo Drax was initially to be played by James Mason, but once the film became an Anglo-French co-production under the 1965-1979 film treaty, French actor Michael Lonsdale was cast as Drax, with Corinne Cléry as Corinne Dufour, to meet the agreement's criteria.
- Lois Chiles was cast as Holly Goodhead by chance after she was seated next to director Lewis Gilbert on a flight and he thought she would be ideal; she had earlier turned down the role of Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me.
