Cameraman John Jordan developed a special helicopter harness for filming aerial shots of the mountain slopes and the film's action sequences. He would hang eighteen feet below the chopper from a large round metal support apparatus.

This is one of the most faithful adaptations of an Ian Fleming novel; virtually everything in the book occurs in the film. Staying so close to the source actually caused some continuity problems due to the different order of the films. For example, in this film Bond and Blofeld seem to be meeting for the first time, despite having met face-to-face in the film version of You Only Live Twice. Some details are different: Count Bleauville is changed to Count Bleauchamp, and Ruby Windsor becomes Ruby Barrett. The situations of Bond's taking a leave of absence, and his discovery by Blofeld, are different. Tracy is not kidnapped. Blofeld is completely different is appearance to Telly Savalas, being described as having long silvery-white hair, an aquiline nose, a wrinkled forehead, a slender body, a nostril that has been eaten away by tertiary syphilis, and no earlobes. Savalas's Blofeld has none of these features - he doesn't even have a European accent. However, his earlobes were clipped back to serve a plot element.

"Nymphalis polychloris," the species of butterfly that James Bond detects at M's home, is a fictional taxon.

The only James Bond movie where both the main villain (Ernst Stavro Blofeld) and sidekick (henchwoman Irma Bunt) survive and are neither captured, nor arrested, nor killed.

The first Bond film in which 007 used skis. As this is a 1960s Bond movie, it is interesting to note that the first and big 60s Bond star Sean Connery never did a skiing or snow sequence Bond movie, his James Bond only ever drives through snow-capped mountains in Goldfinger.