SkyfallGreg Williams has covered the last four Bond films, beginning with Die Another Day, and his work here on the set of Skyfall is jaw-dropping. He has an instinct to find the most compelling take on each of the scenes and he captures the candid moments between takes uncovering a light-hearted element in what is a very serious, and often very dark, Bond film. Roger Deakins’ work on the film has been rightly praised and the Blade Runner neon dazzle of the Shanghai sniper sequence is caught perfectly here.

Williams takes us through the production chronologically, albeit with a Pre-Production album at the end of the book, and the books kicks off with perhaps my favourite image – that of Daniel Craig filming the iconic gun barrel sequence, something which, ironically, appears at the end of the film. Shorn of its familiar graphics the sight of Daniel Craig captured mid-turn with a deadening and serious look in his eyes is something special, the vast white screen behind him and the studio backdrop combined with the slight distance of the photographer underlines the voyeuristic thrill repeated many times in the book.

The Floating Dragon Casino sequence in Macao is particularly stunning from a lighting and production design aspect, the shots of Daniel Craig leaping down the escalators on the Tube convey the speed and the danger of the stunt. Williams seems to have floated around the set like a ghost, capturing the epic scale and the intricate details of the film beautifully.

It’s not a book for everyone, there’s barely any text other than the scraps of script to contextualise the scene or explanatory captions. As a pictorial document of a film many of us thought we’d never see (and few of us though would be as good as it turned out to be) this is an astonishing work.