I was amazed as anybody when Sean Connery decided to return as James Bond after a 12-year absence. The film was Never Say Never Again and I was fortunate enough to work on it. Irvin Kershner directed, and it reunited a lot of the crew behind Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was a great movie: South of France, Bahamas, can’t be bad.
We started off in the South of France, around Nice and Monte Carlo and I got quickly into the action doubling Sean, with Wendy doubling Kim Basinger, in a scene where Bond rescues Domino on horseback and they’re both chased around a castle by Arab baddies. At one point I gallop towards a group of horsemen and burst between two riders, one falling to his right, the other to his left. I burst through, bang, horses flew through the air, but my stirrup caught one of them on the shoulder and it turned my foot completely around, dislocating my ankle. The pain was atrocious. As I rode back, my face ashen white, nearly vomiting in agony because my foot had come out of its socket, I saw a bunch of medics rushing over, but not to me, one of the riders had landed on a wall and broken his back, so that took priority.
By the end of the day my ankle had blown up like a balloon and I couldn’t walk, so the boys took me to hospital. The doctors looked at it and I said, ‘You can do what you like but don’t put a plaster-cast on it because I’m working tomorrow.’ The doctor shook his head, ‘No, you can’t work.’ I said, ‘Of course I can work, I’m only sitting on a horse, that’s all it is for the next few weeks, galloping around the South of France on a horse. I’ll be fine.’ So they reluctantly just put a bandage on it, even though by now my leg had gone black from the knee to the sole of my foot with all the bruising from torn ligaments. I arrived on the set the next day on crutches and every time I got on the horse the doctor had to pump my ankle full of painkillers.
Doubling Sean as James Bond, with Wendy as Kim Basinger, in Cap d’Antibes, France.
The climax of the chase is when Bond and Domino leap off the castle battlements and falls with the horse into the ocean. We decided to shoot that in Nassau, putting the horse and myself on top of a 40 foot tower inside a box that could be tilted forward, just like the old shows on Coney Island where horses slid out of traps into water tanks. But the difficulty was finding a harbour that was deep enough for the horse not to hit the bottom and close to a ramp exit so it could get out quickly without drowning. Also, close to that deep water you had to have enough solid space to build the platform. Nowhere looked suitable until we found this one place that we thought might work, although the riggers were dubious. In the end they agreed to build the thing and we tested it with rocks that weighed the same as the horse and riders, tilting them out to see where they’d land. I was in a boat watching with Rocky Taylor and the first time we tried it the whole box somersaulted into the sea. ‘Look at that,’ went Rocky. ‘If you was in there you’d be fucking dead now.’ I had to agree. ‘OK, cancel that,’ I said, ‘we’ll do it somewhere else.’
By now my ankle was much better and I was able to double Sean running through the jungle in the opening sequence where 007 infiltrates a baddies’ compound to rescue a girl hostage, played funnily enough by Wendy. I also did the shot of Bond leaping off the roof, dropping and swinging through the shutters of the window, which was fun to do. Inside Bond kills a few of the bad guys, sees the girl tied on the bed, cuts her loose... and she sticks a knife into him. So Wendy is the only person ever to have killed James Bond, even though in the film the whole thing is an exercise to test Bond out.
In action as 007, just prior to jumping off the castle with the horse.
While in the Bahamas I also did a bit of scuba diving with the shark team and learnt the awful way they train sharks in films. I found it very cruel. People talk about looking after the welfare of other animals in movies but because sharks are killers, or ‘just’ fish, they don’t seem to have any pity for them. The procedure was this: once caught, a rope was put around their tails and they were tied to rocks so they couldn’t swim anywhere. In order to breathe sharks must have water passing through their gills, without it they fill up with carbon monoxide and end up dying or getting very dopey. It’s like leaving somebody in a car full of fumes and then pulling them out at the last minute when they’re on the edge of dying. So the unit had these dopey sharks and two or three divers would just throw them like arrows through this sunken wreck. It was terrible and they killed a lot in the process, poor old things.
I went diving one day with Wendy, who isn’t too keen on things in the sea, although she’s a great swimmer. Exploring this wreck I looked about and saw two divers carrying a 12-foot shark towards the set to do some rehearsals. I turned round to show Wendy and she wasn’t there, just a stream of bubbles, she was about 30 feet above me going like a rocket to the surface. I carried on and stroked this tiger shark. What a beautiful creature it was, and quite an experience to meet a real man killer up close.
Wendy relaxing between takes with Connery. She played the kidnap victim who ‘kills’ Bond in the film’s opening.
There were more high falls to do over on Paradise Island. This time my old mate Billy Horrigan, dressed as an Arab, had to be kicked by Connery and fall backward 30 feet into water. He planned to count, one, two, and then turn into the dive, but on jumping off he went, one, two, and wham, hit the water flat on his back. I was with the camera looking down and his face didn’t even get wet, he just stopped dead on the surface. He was coughing up blood, having bruised his lungs, and was rushed to hospital. It’s amazing if you go flat into water from any height, like 30 feet, what it does to you.
Suddenly Wendy and I got a call to leave Nassau and fly back to London, where we were urgently needed on the first unit in the studio. Glenn Randall, who was on the stunt team, came with us. Glenn hates flying and I started winding him up about the Bermuda Triangle, because we were going to be flying over it. We took off and lo and behold over the Bermuda Triangle something went wrong with the directional instruments in the plane and we had to land in Bermuda. Glenn was now a complete bag of nerves. We arrived during a terrible storm and made a very heavy landing. As we hit the tarmac the overhead lockers burst open, the luggage flew out and duty free bottles were crashing down on people’s heads. Glenn was climbing the bloody walls.
We sat around the airport while they tried to fix the plane but it was no good, the flight was cancelled until the next day and we holed up for the night in a hotel. The following morning we got on the plane only to experience another hour’s delay. Glenn was sitting next to me with these sleeping tablets and a scotch that he was only going to take when he was absolutely certain we were on our way. More time went by until finally the engines started; great, we’re going. The pilot put the hammer down and we began to roar down the runway. A relieved Glenn popped his pills in the scotch and downed it in one. Then suddenly wrrrrrr, the plane stopped halfway down the runway and we came back in. Something had gone wrong again and we had to wait another night. Of course by now Glenn’s sleeping pills had kicked in and we had to pretty much pick him up and carry him off the plane and back to the hotel.
After glimpsing Sean only briefly on You Only Live Twice way back in 1966, Never Say was the first time I’d really worked with him, and we went on to make several more pictures together. He was great. If you’re a stuntman he’s a fabulous guy to double for because he doesn’t want to do much at all: he does the acting, you do the stunting, the complete opposite of people like Harrison and Tom Cruise. Sean would much rather go and play golf. But he was very professional and he wanted to know how everything was going to work in the action and fight scenes. Famously he doesn’t suffer fools – if you’re wasting his time, which is precious to him, the same as anybody, he gets very antsy, but as long as you’re professional and he knows you’re doing a good job, he’s fine. He was good fun to work with.
From England we moved on to Spain, down in Almeria, filming those jet pack machines that take off from a submarine. To simulate them landing we used a crane and had them suspended on wires. Another perilous moment has Bond in an aqua-lung dive into an Arab well from beneath a helicopter. There was no actual well there, just a hole dug in the ground filled with cardboard boxes, with a stone wall built around it. I had to do the jump, which was from about 40 feet. I sat on this trapeze-type seat and a helicopter picked me up and off we went. I wasn’t strapped on or anything, because I had to do the jump, and I suddenly realized that we were up 1200 feet with a huge wind blowing and the pilot was flying around trying to keep control.
When we came in to do the run I had to work out when best to topple off and dive into the well, but I badly mistimed it. Falling, I saw this solid stone wall rushing towards me and knew that if I tucked in I’d smash into it, so I held my position and went head-first straight into the boxes: crash. The second unit director Micky Moore came running over and gave me such a bollocking. ‘Don’t ever do that again, you could have killed yourself!’ I didn’t know I was going to get that close; it was only when I was in mid-air that I realized I’d got it wrong. ‘Stay there,’ Micky said and took a Polaroid of me. ‘Keep that in your wallet and next time you think you’re going to do anything questionable again, look at that, because that’s how close you came to getting killed. I thought you were dead.’ He really panicked, the old boy. I don’t know where it is now, but there’s a picture of me in this last box right next to the wall; if I’d have tucked I’d have gone into it. But it was just one of those things; in stunts timing is everything, and a split-second decision can mean the difference between life and death.
With Wendy leaping into space. The 40ft final drop was accomplished weeks later. (See picture in the colour section.)
Meantime we’d found a harbour that was perfect for the horse jump shot. I was staying close by and used to look out of my hotel room and it was almost like a hangman’s gallows being built, you’d hear the hammering and see this thing getting bigger and bigger and know, Jesus, one day I’ve got to fall off the top of that with a bloody horse. So the pressure started to build up.
When the time came we manoeuvred the horse up this tower, which had walls built on the side and around the box so he never saw where he was, and I clambered on the saddle next to Tracey Eddon, who’d taken Wendy’s place because she was ill. There were cameras above us, cameras beside us. I heard, ‘OK roll cameras,’ and my heart rate started picking up. One of my worries was that the horse might go forward and tip over on top of us, breaking our pelvises, so I grabbed a big handful of mane and rein ready to keep his head up as we came out. The cameras wound up to speed, the heart started thumping ever louder as I prepared for this thing to start slipping. Suddenly I heard a voice, ‘Cut, cut.’ I looked over and the cameraman Paul Beeson was scanning the sun through his Pan glass: ‘No, no, the cloud’s coming over.’ Oh God. We broke for 20 minutes. The horse was taken out. I still had my wetsuit on and was sweating in the trailer. 20 minutes turned into two hours, and then the call came, ‘We’re going to wrap it for today, we can’t do it, the light’s gone.’ I got changed and went back to the hotel.
It was another two days before the light was right again, then back we went. All of this was of course building up the tension. I walked the horse up, got in the box, climbed on, same thing, roll cameras, they got up to speed and the old heart started pumping. On ‘Action’ the box was designed to tilt forward, sliding the horse down and these doors at the front were to open to release us into space. But everybody was so highly strung that hearing ‘Action’, the guy operating the doors panicked and pressed the button too early. The horse had been quite calm until this moment, then suddenly saw where he was and went, whoa, no way José, and backed off completely.
Now, of course, the box wouldn’t tilt because all the weight of the horse was in the back. The crew reached over to try and chase him forward but all they did was beat Tracey and myself over the head. In the end everyone manually lifted the box up and as we slid out the horse’s last reaction was to try and rear up in a bid to go over backwards, so I held his head forwards as we went down absolutely vertically. Almost immediately Tracey jumped clear while I rode him all the way down, stepping off as we smashed into the water. I deliberately stayed underwater as long as I could because I didn’t want the horse trampling on my head, but when I broke the surface he’d already swum ashore. We’d spent two weeks training him so that when he swam under the tower he knew automatically where to get out of the water. So he was fine. His name was Toupee, a lovely horse that I’d ridden for years.
The worse thing about the stunt was as we walked Toupee up the ramp all these holidaymakers watching us started booing and hissing, thinking we were being cruel, when in fact the horse was perfectly safe. We’d done all the precautions, given him endurance training so he had enough energy to swim properly.
Apart from horses there were a lot of car and bike stunts. In the scene where Barbara Carrera gets a snake and throws it into an open-topped car driven by a villain, I had to perform a barrel roll through a wall. We were also lucky to have Mike Runyard handling the motorbike stuff in the South of France, which I co-ordinated. Mike was thrilled to work with Dave Bickers, because years earlier Mike had been an unpaid mechanic for Dave when Dave was in his heyday racing in America with Bud Ekins, who was Steve McQueen’s double.
The famous shot in the big chase sequence is when Bond’s bike leaps over a car from behind. We did that by fixing a ramp on the back of the car which slowed down so Mike could hit it, jump over and land on the other side. But the art department put so much crap onto this bike, rockets and stuff in a bid to make it look futuristic, that when Mike hit the ground it was so heavy the front wheel just disintegrated. He managed to pull it into a wheelie, and then slowed down until he could actually put the bike down to step off it. The wheel had totally gone. Dave Bickers was up all night rebuilding it for the next day.
While shooting around Antibes I noticed this lovely old boat. I’d just read a book by Errol Flynn called My Wicked, Wicked Ways and worked out that this boat was in actual fact the Sirocco, Flynn’s old yacht. When I asked in the town people said, ‘Yeah that’s the Sirocco.’ We used to love to sunbathe on top of it and just imagine the debauchery that had taken place on those very decks. Before I left I got a tiny hook off one of the hatches, just to keep as a piece of movie history.
A lot of controversy surrounds Never Say Never Again because it was made outside of the Broccoli family and the official 007 series. There was a lot of politics involved, first it was on, then it was off, and then it was back on again. Later, when I worked on the Pierce Brosnan Bond films, I was never allowed to mention Never Say. Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson always frowned when I spoke about it. ‘Don’t swear in front of us,’ they’d say.