Location Scouting with Peter Lamont: GoldenEye (2006 Video) User Reviews

Though he apparently did not buy a ticket for the Hermitage . . .

[pixrox1 · 7/10 · 17 September 2014]

. . . Museum near the shooting location of GOLDENEYE's tank chase scene, film production designer\voice-over narrator Peter Lamont DOES seem to get around. (Maybe visitors are not allowed to bring cameras into the Hermitage, though I've seen at least one flick which involves people dashing through the Louvre Museum in Paris, and the "miliary archives" shootout episode which precedes GOLDENEYE's tank chase probably would have been more memorable if the Eon Production Company had seen fit to pony up the fees necessary to make it happen. I saw part of a documentary which suggested thousands of Russian nobles were gunned down in the Hermitage during their Revolution, so it's not as if the place has never been shot up before.) Mr. Lamont does not venture a guess as to WHY the Nene Valley Railroad Museum grounds are used in all the Bond picture train scenes, in preference to the West Highland Railway used by the Harry Potter people. No doubt it is more expensive to utilize the latter, much more cinematic location. But, of course, it is exactly this kind of penny-pinching on the part of Bond's producers that allowed the Potter franchise to surpass to total gross haul of 23 Bond flicks in just 8 Potter films. As they say in England, "penny wise, pound foolish."