Ian Fleming intended his 1955 novel Moonraker to become a film even before he finished writing it, basing part of it on an original screenplay idea he had held in mind for years.
The producers had originally planned to make For Your Eyes Only next, but switched to Moonraker to capitalize on the science-fiction craze sparked by Star Wars and NASA's concurrent Space Shuttle test flights.
In 1978 Steven Spielberg offered to direct Moonraker following the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but producer Albert R. Broccoli turned him down.
Because Moonraker's screenplay diverged so much from Fleming's novel, Eon authorized screenwriter Christopher Wood to write a novelisation titled 'James Bond and Moonraker' to avoid confusion with the original book.
Hugo Drax was initially meant to be played by British actor James Mason, but once the film was structured as an Anglo-French co-production, French actor Michael Lonsdale was cast instead, along with Corinne Cléry, to meet the treaty's qualifying criteria.
Lois Chiles had earlier turned down the role of Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me, and was later cast as Holly Goodhead simply because she happened to sit next to director Lewis Gilbert on a flight.
Jaclyn Smith was originally offered the role of Holly Goodhead but had to decline due to scheduling conflicts with Charlie's Angels.
After receiving fan mail from children asking why Jaws couldn't be a 'goodie,' director Lewis Gilbert gradually transformed the character from villain to Bond's ally by the film's end.
Richard Kiel insisted on rewriting Jaws' girlfriend Dolly, who was originally meant to be even taller than him; producers only agreed to cast the much shorter Blanche Ravalec once Kiel told them his own wife was the same height as Dolly.
Due to high UK taxation at the time, most filming moved from Pinewood Studios to the Epinay and Billancourt Studios in France, with Ken Adam's sets becoming the largest ever built in France, requiring over 222,000 man-hours to construct.
During filming of the Sugarloaf Mountain cable car sequence, stuntman Richard Graydon slipped and narrowly avoided falling to his death.
For the scene where Jaws bites through a steel cable, the cable was actually made of liquorice, though Kiel still had to wear his real steel dentures.
The second unit originally tried to send a real boat over Iguaçu Falls for a stunt, but it became stuck on rocks and could not be retrieved even with a helicopter and rope ladder, forcing the crew to use a miniature model at Pinewood instead.
The opening skydiving sequence took weeks of planning and required 88 skydives above Lake Berryessa, using a hidden parachute pack sewn into costumes with velcro seams that separated to release the chute.
Since NASA's Space Shuttle had not yet launched, special effects supervisor Derek Meddings had to invent the rocket launch footage from scratch, using models attached to bottle rockets and signal flares, with salt used to simulate the smoke trail.
The climactic destruction of the space station model was achieved by Derek Meddings and his team physically shooting the miniature with shotguns.
Frank Sinatra was originally considered for the theme song, and Kate Bush was asked but declined; Johnny Mathis then recorded much of it but couldn't complete the project, so it was offered to Shirley Bassey just weeks before the UK premiere.
As Bond arrives at the pheasant shoot, a trumpet plays the opening notes of Also sprach Zarathustra, referencing 2001: A Space Odyssey, and later in Venice a keypad is unlocked using the five-note motif from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Moonraker became the highest-grossing James Bond film at the time, earning $210.3 million worldwide, a record that stood until GoldenEye in 1995, despite its then-record production budget of $34 million.
Sean Connery, after seeing Moonraker with Roger Moore, criticized it for having departed too far from the reality of his own Bond films and relying too heavily on special effects with 'no substance.'
