I’d had such a great time working on Tomorrow Never Dies that I always hoped they’d use me again on the next Bond film, and when Barbara Broccoli called me up about doing the action unit, I asked who the director was. They hadn’t got one. I said, ‘What if you get one who doesn’t want me?’ And Barbara said, ‘Oh no, you’re part of it,’ which was wonderful of her. Michael Apted finally came on board and he’s a lovely man, I really got on well with him, wonderful dry sense of humour. Simon Crane came on as stunt co-ordinator and we had a good relationship, I think it worked very well.
The first big set piece on The World Is Not Enough was the pre-credits boat chase on the river Thames. When they proposed this chase I must say my heart sank because I thought, my God, the logistics of it all, but I had my regular team with me: Terry Madden, my AD, Jonathan Taylor, my cameraman, and Kenny Atherfold, my grip, and here was a chance to do something really special.
All the script said was that Bond’s boat leaves the MI6 building chasing a female assassin in her boat, that they had to finish at the Millennium Dome, plus a hot air balloon had to be involved. That was the brief. First of all we had to decide what boat Bond should use. Simon had this idea of modifying these jet boats from New Zealand that he’d seen in a magazine, and they turned out to be absolutely perfect. Then we started plotting the chase, and Simon and I would meet every Sunday and go up and down the Thames looking around and getting ideas. Chris Livett of Livett Launches was our guide for anything on the Thames. He is a Waterman to the Queen, and his family has worked and owned companies on the river since 1710. Chris was amazing, and knew everybody and everything there was to know about the Thames; we could not have done it without him.
Overall it was a huge project, with 60 boats on the payroll. One day when we were shooting the chase, I was cruising up the Thames, past the Houses of Parliament, and I just looked behind me and this whole armada was sailing up. There were wardrobe boats, special effects boats, food boats, make up boats, everyone had different boats that could whip in and out, because you couldn’t keep going back to a base. It was phenomenal. We also had to employ people to keep the crowds at bay. When news broke that we were filming along the river, hordes of sightseers turned up every day. In the end I said, ‘Don’t worry, let them in, they can hang around, see what we’re doing, take pictures.’ And once we did that all the pressure was off and nobody was trying to sneak photographs.
Filming the boat chase on the Thames. MPs in the nearby Houses of Parliament complained we were making too much noise.
Maria Grazia Cucinotta (from Il Postino), who played the female assassin, was absolutely gorgeous and such fun to work with. She was so trusting when we set her off down the Thames driving the boat at high speed, with a stuntman crouched at her feet out of shot ready to leap in and take over if things got out of control.
Of course when Pierce Brosnan turned up, the crowds got bigger and wilder. We shot for two days with Pierce, put him in the jet boat and he did quite a bit of driving himself. At one point we were filming right in front of the Houses of Parliament. I was in the lead camera boat and Pierce had to swerve across and shoot under Westminster Bridge, but he got muddled because of some water in his eyes and went the wrong side of one of the pillars. From my camera position it looked like he’d crashed and hit the bridge. My heart almost stopped and I was waiting for the explosion... Everything was OK, but he scared the life out of me. Pierce could really drive that boat though, and was having a great time. The shots like the ones he did for real on the river, not against blue screen in a studio, are what make a movie for me.
With the gorgeous Maria Grazia Cucinotta.
We got a lot of complaints from the politicians in the Houses of Parliament that we were making too much noise, what with boats racing up and down and gunfire, until the then Home Secretary Jack Straw told them, ‘Come on guys, there’s an awful lot of money being generated by all this, the film, and the publicity London will get from it.’ After that they were fine.
On his second and last day with us Pierce had to fly out to Spain, so wanted to finish early that afternoon. ‘Look Pierce,’ I said. ‘If we work on through the scheduled lunch break I can get you out of here, and I’ll tell you what, I’ll buy you lunch because that means we’ve wrapped this whole location.’ ‘Sounds good to me,’ he said. So we shot like mad outside the Millennium Dome, finished, and then six of us jumped into the Sunseeker boat (the one the assassin drives in the movie) and Chris Livett just opened the throttle, stood this big thing on its arse and we went, voom, flat out down the Thames. Now usually on the Thames you can’t go over ten knots... we were doing 35 knots, screaming down the river, banking around the corners and roaring past police launches, but the officers just waved at us – the power of Bond (and Chris Livett). We then pulled up outside this very fancy restaurant near Tower Bridge and had a great liquid lunch. Three hours later we were all still there – so much for finishing early.
Plotting out the boat chase I thought it would be great to shoot and see all the iconic tourist sights and beauty shots on the Thames, and then get off as quickly as possible into the Docklands area, where things were more controllable. So after Bond goes under Tower Bridge, he turns right up a little narrow chute that in reality was a dead end – though the audience wouldn’t know that – which brought him out into the Docklands. We shot at the Victoria docks, near London City Airport. That’s where we blew up all those boats. I recall this guy turned up on the set one day from some environmental agency. ‘Who’s he?’ I asked. ‘Oh, he’s fish preservation,’ I was told. He had sonic boom speakers to put in the water, to scare all the fish away from where we were shooting, because explosions underwater can kill fish. So we explained everything to him, where the explosions were going to be. ‘OK, fine,’ he said. Next morning we turned up and this guy was at the completely wrong end of the dock. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ And it was a four-hour setup to get all this shit in place. ‘This is where we’re shooting,’ I said. ‘This end, you have to bring all your stuff down here, but I don’t know if we can wait.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, my equipment doesn’t really work anyway.’ So we just carried on, but technically he had to be around to scare the fish away.
Before each take we also had to phone the airport. We could see the end of the runway from where we were shooting and the planes took off almost over our heads. So we had to time all our takes in between the landing and taking off of aeroplanes. All the tourists flying into London must have thought they’d got into a war zone, with these great fireballs blowing up beside their plane.
I have to say the jet boats were phenomenal, and because they only needed a few inches of water and could literally skim over the surface, I came up with a sequence where Bond vaults out of the river and hits London’s streets. I made it so Bond is able to manoeuvre the boat through back alleys and the like because of a burst water main. That idea was ultimately scrapped, but instead we had him smashing through a fish market and a restaurant; it was just to add variety to the chase and it worked very well.
I must mention here Sarah Donohue, who doubled for Maria Grazia Cucinotta. She and Simon Crane went off and they rehearsed all those boat manoeuvres, how tight they could turn, all that stuff. Sarah was an amazingly gutsy girl and a brilliant race boat driver. She actually nearly died a couple of years later in Italy doing power boat racing. One engine came off and her boat crashed and went under, and she was trapped inside. She was clinically dead for a couple of minutes. But she’s back racing again now.
Travelling up the Thames in style with Maria at the controls.
Overall the boat chase took about three weeks to do, which was fantastic because the potential for going over schedule on a thing like that was massive, but it worked out brilliantly, and it’s still one of my favourite action sequences, it’s so unique. And the whole thing was done for real, the only CGI in it was the torpedoes that Bond fires, because the authorities wouldn’t let us put actual torpedoes in the water, but the rest was real. We did some amazing stuff on it. Someone came up with the idea of doing a barrel roll, turning the boat 360 degrees in mid-air. I said, ‘Wow, yes, if we can do it.’ As usual Dave Bickers came up with the solution, of outfitting the rear of the boat with two jets – one pointing upward, one downward – and firing both simultaneously as the craft ramped out of the water. They tested it and it worked perfectly and Gary Powell, give him his due, went out and performed the stunt on the Thames, which was a hell of a dangerous thing to do. If he’d got his timing a split-second wrong it would have had terrible consequences.
The boat chase was originally three or four times longer than what ended up on screen. Obviously sequences like that always start out longer and get chopped down at the editing stage, as they try to reduce the running time in order to get other parts of the movie in. But this is where you’ve got to dig your heels in and fight for the bits you want, and then the arguments start. On the boat chase the editor, who was a lovely man, actually wanted to take out the barrel roll. ‘No fucking way,’ I said. He said, ‘You don’t understand Vic, you might like it, but you are too close to it, having shot it.’ ‘But it’s great, it’s unique!’ I argued. And thank goodness they left it in.
That boat chase was a fantastic sequence, one of the highlights of my time doing the Bond films. And Vic was a top man, he saw that I could equip myself, saw that I could handle the jet boat and let me do it. That’s when it gets down to trust and confidence between the stunt guy and the actor, and Vic has a sixth sense about people’s abilities. You have to have that intuition when you’re dealing with such big action sequences and stunts.
So I had the boat all to myself, there was no interference from anybody; Vic just let the cameras roll. Of course, there was the possibility of things going wrong. I was strapped in with two oxygen tanks and scuba gear either side of me, because if I did flip the boat at 30 mph it was going to be a hard impact. But I remember Vic’s beaming face on the camera boat as we would do certain passes and takes. The House of Lords got pissed off with us and complained bitterly that we were assaulting their ears. But who cares, it was such a great stunt sequence to be part of.
Then we went out to the ski resort of Chamonix, below Mont Blanc in the French Alps, to shoot the scene where Bond is terrorised by parahawks, propeller-driven Russian army snowmobiles that could fly through the air using a paraglider chute to stay airborne. With Bond you’re always trying to come up with original vehicles. Simon Crane and myself searched everywhere for something that could both fly and move along fast on the snow. In the end we customised snowmobiles and I think they come over very effectively. In any action sequence the main concern is to vary things, to keep the viewer enthralled in what’s going on. Before you get bored with these things in the air, let’s land them on the ground, they unhook their parachutes and away we go on a different kind of chase.
There’s a lovely moment where Bond suckers one of these machines over the edge of a cliff; a several thousand foot drop. Bond thinks he’s triumphed until he sees a second parachute open and the chase is back on. My idea was to have a black parachute with a red hammer and sickle on it; a homage to the scene in The Spy Who Loved Me when Bond’s parachute opens to reveal the Union Jack. It would’ve been great, and I think that was the right moment for a laugh. But for some reason or other the producers didn’t go for it; pity.
The flying parahawks in Chamonix.
We did a lot of intricate stuff in that sequence and working in snow always presents problems. But it was a fabulous location, just awe-inspiring. I got such a kick out of being there. But it was dangerous too. While we were there, a huge avalanche wiped out three chalets that had been in the region for 100 years, and families were killed, it was horrendous.
Probably the film’s biggest set piece was the helicopter attack on a caviar factory owned by Robbie Coltrane’s character Zukovsky. I think that was the largest outdoor set ever constructed at Pinewood. We extended the water tank and had a 300-foot tower crane on which we suspended a full-size helicopter. That crane was so big I could actually see it from my bedroom window 22 miles away. The helicopter had no rotors, but the chainsaw blades dangling underneath were real, and operated by someone from special effects. The idea to use these chainsaw blades came from back in the GoldenEye days. Michael G. Wilson had seen them in a documentary somewhere; they’re normally used in America to trim back tall trees where they might interfere with power cables. So the producers had wanted to use this idea for years.
Production designer Peter Lamont and his team built this amazing set with factory buildings, huts and wooden walkways and there were explosions galore. Everything was going fine but I soon realised that we needed some upward shots of real helicopters swooping around, not just the mock-up hanging on the crane. ‘We can’t Vic,’ the producers said. ‘We can’t fly real helicopters at the studio; also we can’t fly them at night.’ But I was insistent, and they’re very good Barbara and Michael, they listen and they think. ‘So what do you suggest?’ they asked. I wanted to take a few roofs and huts over to Aldershot, where we could fly at night because it’s an army training ground, and Peter Lamont, who’s fantastic, said, ‘No, when we’ve finished here let’s take everything down there.’
Amazingly they re-built about two thirds of that set over at Aldershot on stilts and walkways so I could drive underneath and shoot helicopters coming over the top and swirling round, and when you look at the sequence today that’s what gives it such a terrific sense of realism. Marc Wolfe, my helicopter pilot and friend for many years, did some amazing flying with these great chainsaws hanging 20 feet beneath the chopper. He had to land it on a specially designed platform with a slot cut out, which he had to position the saws in as he landed. I’ve got to say, once again, the Bond producers did what I asked of them. They’re brilliant like that, the Bond people. They really look after you and make you feel like you’re part of the firm.
It was also my idea to have Bond’s BMW Z8 cut in half by one of the chainsaw-packing helicopters. I set the gag up where Bond runs and escapes and gets his key out to start his car by remote control. I wanted everyone to think, here we go, it’s another Brent Cross car park chase. Bond gets in the car, shoots one of the helicopters out of the sky with a stinger missile and then sees these blades behind him and dives out just in time as the car is sliced in two. I thought that would be a nice little throwaway gag. And for me that’s what the essence of Bond is, you’ve got to keep throwing those little funnies in.