Daniel Kleinman explains how the title design process comes together

"It’s pretty much always the case that I have to start working on the ideas for the titles way before I hear the music. The first time I get involved, I read the script, and that’s quite early on, sometimes before they’ve even started filming — even who the artist is going to be singing the main song is not tied down. It’s quite a laborious process — which I’m not involved in at all — choosing that artist, getting the song written, demo’d, approved, mastered, mixed, and edited to the special arrangement it needs to be for the movie, rather than the single that’s released," Kleinman tells EW.

Kleinman was first welcomed into the Bond family when he designed the titles of Brosnan's debut 007 film, "GoldenEye", and he did so for five consecutive Bond films before Marc Forster brought design studio MK12 into the hot seat for "Quantum of Solace". But, on Bond's 50th anniversary and the release of "Skyfall", Kleinman returned to design the gritty, haunting and iconographic title sequence.

"Usually, I’m about halfway through before I hear at least a fairly finished version of the song. At that point, I usually have to maybe change a few things and swap things around to make it work. There’s a slightly hair-raising moment when I have to put the final mix of the song against the image that I’ve created and hope that they all work together. They seemed to work reasonably okay this time, so it was good."

"I knew from the beginning, from the script, that it starts with Bond being shot and falling into the water. That was my kick-off point to come up with the ideas for the sequence. It felt kind of appropriate that a lot of it seemed to be a sequence where you feel he’s in some sort of underworld, or perhaps his life is flashing in front of his eyes as he thinks he’s going to die."

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