In Kuala Lumpur, in mid-1996, Vic Armstrong stands beneath the Petronas Towers and looks up. He has a sequence in his head. Two figures — James Bond and his Chinese counterpart, Wai Lin — suspended beneath the skybridge that connects the two towers, 170 metres above the city. Wind, altitude, the sheer drop. Armstrong can see every beat of it. He just needs permission to shoot it.

The permission never comes.

Vic Armstrong is one of the most accomplished stunt coordinators and second unit directors in Hollywood history. His CV encompasses the Indiana Jones trilogy, several Superman films, Total Recall, and three consecutive Pierce Brosnan Bond films — Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World Is Not Enough (1999), and Die Another Day (2002). He has broken records and bones in the service of cinema’s most demanding action sequences.

But the Petronas Towers idea would end up in a different film entirely: Entrapment.

The Building the World Was Watching

By the time Armstrong arrived in Kuala Lumpur during pre-production on Tomorrow Never Dies, the Petronas Towers were already one of the most talked-about buildings on the planet — even though the public had never set foot inside them. The spires were completed in March 1996, Petronas staff moved in January 1997, and the official public opening would not come until August 1999. They were structurally complete and globally famous before most people had ever seen them in person.

That was precisely what made them irresistible to Armstrong. The Petronas Towers were the tallest buildings in the world — and the Bond series had always gravitated toward the biggest, the tallest, the most spectacular. The largest soundstage, the widest waterfall, the most recognisable skyline. The Petronas Towers were the defining symbol of Asia’s economic boom, soaring over a city announcing itself to the world. For a Bond villain’s headquarters, they were perfect.

The plan was to use the towers as the Kuala Lumpur base of media mogul Elliot Carver, with Bond and Wai Lin escaping by swinging beneath the skybridge at the 41st and 42nd floors. But the Petronas company made their position clear — their building could not be seen as a villain’s headquarters. MI6, yes. The baddies, no. The permits were denied.

With Kuala Lumpur off the table, the production relocated to Bangkok, Thailand, standing in for Ho Chi Minh City.

Hong Kong and the Banner

Flying on to Hong Kong, Armstrong found his replacement idea. Driving from the airport, he saw buildings covered in scaffolding with giant advertising banners draped across the netting. The image triggered a memory: Errol Flynn in Michael Curtiz’s 1935 swashbuckler Captain Blood, sliding down a ship’s sail by driving a knife into it.

Carver’s banner would be the sail. Bond’s rope would be the knife.

The sequence — Bond and Wai Lin jumping from a balcony and tearing their way down a giant banner bearing Carver’s face — was filmed using the exterior of the Sinn Sathorn Tower in Bangkok, with close-ups of Pierce Brosnan and Michelle Yeoh shot on a five-storey mock-up at Frogmore Studios in Hertfordshire. It is one of the more visually distinctive moments in the Brosnan era.

But it was not what Armstrong had originally conceived for the film. The Petronas Towers idea stayed in his mind.

Another Film, The Same Idea

When Armstrong was brought on as second unit director on Jon Amiel’s 1999 heist thriller Entrapment — starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones — he saw his opportunity.

“Now on Entrapment I went back to my idea of doing some kind of high fall on the Petronas Twin Towers. I revamped it a little bit by having them hanging, then dropping and finally swinging on Christmas lights underneath this huge walkway that connects both towers.”

Armstrong finally had his location back. Or so he thought.

The Problem With Shooting at Night

The production quickly ran into a new obstacle — not permits this time, but physics. The climactic sequence was set on New Year’s Eve, which meant it had to be shot at night. At 1,500 feet, there was simply no way to light the exterior of the towers adequately.

The solution was to build them. A 140-foot segment of the Petronas Towers was constructed on the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios. There is a pleasing irony in that: a sequence born from an abandoned Bond idea, built on the Bond stage. Exterior establishing shots used the real towers in Kuala Lumpur. Everything else was Pinewood.

The location compromises didn’t end there. The Kuala Lumpur skyline was digitally composited over the busy waterways of a village in the state of Malacca, some hundred miles away — presenting the prestigious towers as looming over a distinctly downmarket neighbourhood. The irony was sharp: in April 1999, as the film was completing production, a Malaysian newspaper had announced that the Petronas Towers were set to become a “new cinematic landmark.” Malaysia’s Prime Minister was not amused by what that landmark actually looked like on screen, and publicly condemned the film for the misrepresentation.

The Stunt

The principals were not on the cables. Sean Connery, then 68, was doubled by Gabe Cronnelly, who bore such a close resemblance to Connery that Armstrong had also used him on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Doubling for Catherine Zeta-Jones was Wendy Leech — Armstrong’s wife, and an accomplished stunt performer in her own right. It was Leech, not Zeta-Jones, hanging and swinging beneath the towering Pinewood set.

Zeta-Jones was candid about where she drew the line in the Entrapment: Behind-the-Scenes documentary:

“When I’m up on the wires, I’m fine with heights. It doesn’t bother me at all… But I’m also very honest with myself and anything I can’t do, I don’t do.”

The Pinewood set was actually two distinct constructions — one for the actors, standing on a platform, and a separate rig higher up for the stunt performers hanging from the cable. Director Jon Amiel, in the same documentary, described the gruelling logistics:

“Each fragment — many of them just lasting a second or two of screentime — can take two to three hours to set up because they’re physically very difficult. It involves getting the cameras and the lights and everything else up. Wind machines. So it’s immensely time consuming. And then ten minutes of explosive filming and then another two hours of preparation.”

It was not the first time Leech had worked with Armstrong on a high-rise stunt built around the same core idea. On Tomorrow Never Dies, she had doubled for Michelle Yeoh as Wai Lin, abseiling down 43 stories of the Sinn Sathorn Tower in Bangkok for the banner descent.

Armstrong is unambiguous about what the sequence represented. In his memoir he calls it “an amazing achievement and one heck of a sequence,” adding that “a lot of people have copied that sequence — but that all came from a disused Bond idea that I had and then revamped.”

The Idea That Outlasted the Film It Was Written For

Shelved ideas are a fact of life in filmmaking. Locations fall through, sequences get cut, concepts are abandoned mid-production. In the Bond series specifically, a dropped idea from one film will often resurface in a later one — recycled, reworked, and finally put on screen.

What made the Petronas sequence different is that the idea belonged to Armstrong. It wasn’t EON’s to repurpose on the next Bond film. It was his — and so he took it with him to Entrapment.

It was a fitting home for it. Entrapment was not a Bond film. But it did star the original Bond.

Other than aliens dropping the towers on London Bridge in Independence Day: Resurgence, no film has used the Petronas Towers since as a location for an elaborate set piece.