Before Timothy Dalton was cast, several actors auditioned or were considered for Bond, including Sam Neill, Pierce Brosnan, Mel Gibson (proposed by MGM/UA chairman Jerry Weintraub for a two-picture $10 million deal), Bryan Brown, and Antony Hamilton, though Broccoli was reportedly hesitant to cast Hamilton because he was gay in real life.
Pierce Brosnan was actually offered the role, but because he was still contracted to Remington Steele, NBC exercised a contract option to keep him for another season just before it expired, causing Broccoli to withdraw the offer since he didn't want Bond associated with a current TV series.
Actor Robert Bathurst auditioned for Bond in what he believed was mainly a ploy to pressure Timothy Dalton into accepting the role by making him think other actors were still being considered.
Timothy Dalton finally accepted the role over the phone from a hotel room at Miami airport while travelling between flights, still undecided until the last moment.
Morten Harket, lead singer of a-ha who performed the film's title song, was offered a minor henchman role but turned it down, feeling the producers wanted him for his popularity rather than acting talent.
The role of the KGB general was originally written for the recurring character Gogol, but actor Walter Gotell was too ill to take on the larger part, leading to the creation of the new character Leonid Pushkin, with Gogol reduced to a brief final appearance.
Maryam d'Abo, cast as Kara Milovy, had previously auditioned unsuccessfully for the role of Pola Ivanova in A View to a Kill; she was later spotted by Barbara Broccoli at a health club with a new look, which helped her land the role of Kara.
Composer John Barry made an uncredited cameo appearance in the film as an orchestra conductor.
The pre-credits Land Rover stunt was filmed across multiple locations: the Rock of Gibraltar for most shots, Beachy Head in the UK for the moment the vehicle becomes airborne, and trial parachute jumps were tested in the Mojave Desert, though the final cut used a dummy for the actual escape.
During three days of filming a fight scene between Andreas Wisniewski and stuntman Bill Weston, Weston fractured a finger and was knocked unconscious once.
Although the aircraft in the film is marked as Royal Air Force, it actually belonged to the Spanish Air Force and was reused later in the film repainted with Soviet markings for the Afghanistan sequences.
Bratislava exterior and interior scenes were actually filmed in Vienna, using the Volksoper for exteriors and the Sofiensäle for interiors, while the border chase was filmed in Carinthia near the Austrian/Italian border.
The Living Daylights was John Barry's final James Bond film as composer, and its score introduced sequenced electronic rhythm tracks overdubbed with orchestral music, an innovative technique at the time.
The band a-ha and composer John Barry disagreed creatively on the title song, resulting in two different mixes: Barry's version used in the film and soundtrack, and a-ha's preferred version released on their own album Stay on These Roads.
This was the first Bond film to use different songs for the opening and end credits, with The Pretenders performing both 'If There Was a Man' for the end credits and 'Where Has Everybody Gone?', which is heard on a Walkman in the film and whose melody was used in the score to signal the henchman Necros.
The film's use of Red Cross-marked vehicles and drug packets for the villains' operations angered several Red Cross Societies, with the British Red Cross attempting legal action against the filmmakers, leading producers to add a disclaimer at the start of the film.
The Living Daylights set a record for the biggest 3-day opening weekend for a Bond film at the time, grossing $11 million in the US, surpassing Octopussy's previous record.
