page_title: Billion Dollar Brain
section_title: Shooting
hierarchical_section_title: Billion Dollar Brain / Production / Shooting
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of the film producer André de Toth, director Ken Russell, and actor Michael Caine in Helsinki during the cinematography of Billion Dollar Brain, here on Sofiankatu, near the old police station.
context_page_description: Billion Dollar Brain is a 1967 British-American Technicolor espionage film directed by Ken Russell and based on the novel of the same name by Len Deighton. The film features Michael Caine as secret agent Harry Palmer, the anti-hero protagonist. The "brain" of the title is a sophisticated computer with which an anti-communist organisation controls its worldwide anti-Soviet spy network.
  Billion Dollar Brain is the third of the Harry Palmer film series, preceded by The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin. It is the only film in which Ken Russell worked as a mainstream 'director-for-hire', and the last film of Françoise Dorléac. A fourth film in the series, an adaptation of Horse Under Water, also to be released by United Artists, was tentatively planned but never made. Caine played Palmer in two later films, Bullet to Beijing and Midnight in Saint Petersburg.
  The film's credits show the title as "$1,000,000,000,000,000,000.00" and "BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN". The dialogue is clear the Brain cost a U.S. billion dollars, yet 1 followed by 18 zeros is actually one quintillion in the short scale, and one trillion in the long scale.
context_section_description: Principal photography took place from 30 January to the end of May 1967.
  Approximately five weeks later, on 26 June, Françoise Dorléac was killed in an automobile accident in Nice, France. It is unclear whether or not her voice was dubbed by another actress, due to her death.
  Location filming for Billion Dollar Brain took place in Helsinki and other parts of Finland, including Turku. The Riga scenes were filmed in Porvoo, also in Finland. Scenes involving "The Brain" were filmed in Honeywell facilities and featured a Honeywell 200 mini-computer. The remainder of the film was shot in the United Kingdom. Scenes on the ice were filmed on a disused airfield which was covered with a layer of salt. All other scenes were shot at Pinewood Studios, including the scene where Midwinter's convoy falls through the broken ice - this was done in a giant tank with slabs of polystyrene used to represent the ice itself. The large size of the tank was deemed necessary because of the decision to use real vehicles instead of miniatures.
  Otto Heller – who had photographed the first two Harry Palmer films – was supposed to shoot the film but would not submit to a medical examination and so the production could not hire him.
  The final battle on the ice was inspired by Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film Alexander Nevsky.
  Michael Caine's brother Stanley made his film debut as a postman in the opening sequence.
  Russell later said "it was a mistake" to make the film. "I was working with people I did not know. I was not enjoying them. One felt all the time they were working for the producer against me... It was a pity. But only because of the time wasted. You lose a year of your life when you could have been doing something better." However the film was liked by David Picker at United Artists who later hired Russell for Women in Love.
  Andre De Toth worked on the film as a producer and said Russell ultimately "did a fine job on the film."
caption: André de Toth, Ken Russell and Michael Caine in Helsinki, February 1967, when the shooting began there.
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