Blowing Up Bond
Heavy explosions, burning buildings, mid-air chases in vintage planes – SFX supremo Chris Corbould has guided Daniel Craig safely through them all
Appropriately, you need a secret code to breach the tall metal gates of Chris Corbould’s Surrey farm. Chris, special effects supervisor on
Quantum of Solace, is relaxing there after a gruelling schedule of set-building, stunt-supervising and blowing things up.
“There’s a real buzz to creating large-scale special effects,” he enthuses. “There’s a lot of lost sleep and a lot of dreaming about it. By the time you get to film it, you’ve already shot it 20 times in your head.”
Chris became hooked on the art of on-screen illusion after opening 500 gallons worth of baked-bean tins, by hand, for the film
Tommy, while working with his uncle one summer holiday. He’s gone on to far bigger things since.
It was he, for example, who thought up
Goldeneye’s tank chase through St Petersburg, first written as a motorbike chase. “We worked on the principle that a car had to stick to the road, but a tank could go anywhere. Once we’d hit on that, we had enough ideas for two hours.”
Keeping it realChris is a master of mechanical effects, but for a while his skills were under threat as the film industry adopted CGI. The Bond series, however, is committed to keeping stunts as real as possible, and has been the shining example in redressing the balance.
“If you can do something physically, you’ve got all those tiny little things that make something real,” explains Chris. “It’s always easier for actors to react to something they can really see, not just a blue screen. It’s a much healthier marriage these days and the results of that are starting to show.”
It helps if one of your actors likes to fling himself into the heart of the action.
Enter Daniel Craig“It’s very rewarding working with someone like Daniel,” says Chris. “There’s things we did on
Quantum of Solace that few other actors would have got involved in – heavy explosions and burning sequences. Daniel will come in on his day off and spend time with us to get comfortable with what he’s doing.
“There’s a fire sequence in a hotel room in the film, and we built a replica set in our workshops. We put all the flames in it so Daniel could get confident having them around him, so that when we get on to the real set he could focus on his performance. He loves all that, though, being in amongst it all.”
Biggest challengeSo what does “all that” constitute for James Bond this time? One spectacular sequence features Bond in a vintage Douglas DC-3 aircraft being harried by a attack helicopter.
“That was the biggest challenge on the film,” says Chris. “We built this full-size interior on a hydraulic gimble that can rotate as if it were flying, and actually go up and stand vertical. All the time it’s synchronised by computer to the footage of the exterior.”
Such complicated contraptions are “a real team effort”, says Chris. “I’m just a figurehead for a team of about 70 or 80 talented people on a Bond film. They’re the heroes; they’re geniuses.”
Burning eco-centreTheir other major challenge was the climactic clash with villain Dominic Greene in his burning eco-centre. The exteriors were shot in Chile, but the huge interiors were built by Chris’s team, almost filling the 59,000sq ft Bond stage at Pinewood.
“We made six sets for that sequence,” explains Chris. “And they took four or five months to build. You’ve got a parking garage, a staircase, a restaurant area, sleeping quarters… The culmination is the whole thing burning down and exploding, because these cylinders of bio-fuel around the place are all going up. The building’s starting to come down, ceilings are collapsing, walkways are collapsing. It’s full on!”
Burning eco-centres seem a world away from Chris’s idyllic farm, where he prefers “trimming the conifers, driving my tractor and riding my horses”. But as the secret-code keypad at his gate shows, a touch of Bond is never far away.
Story by Titus ChalkQuantum of Solace
is released in the UK on October 31This is an edited version of the original story. To enjoy the full article, subscribe to Sony Magazine
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