Bond On Bond (18 page)

The cars were problematic in the extreme. During filming, their engines overheated and batteries ran down quickly. Their low driving position made elegant exits from the car an issue, and all this made the action location in Sardinia a little fraught.

When we heard later that publicist John Willis was due to drive the car from London to the Cannes Film Festival in May 1977, we took bets on whether he’d make it. He did get as far as Lyon without issue, before ending up on the back of a tow truck heading for a local garage. It then limped into Cannes, was positioned outside the Carlton Hotel and duly refused to move again thanks to a flat battery. If only the world’s press could have snapped the team of mechanics at work during the dead of night, it would have made terrific headlines – ‘James Bond’s car breaks down’.

Though the Lotus transformed into a submarine on screen, a combination of miniatures and body shells were used to achieve the effect of the conversion. It could be driven underwater, but only in a full wetsuit, as the interior was not air-locked. Consequently it was dubbed ‘Wet Nellie’.

The scene where the car emerges from the ocean onto a beach, was shot in two parts: with an Esprit shell being pulled on a tow rope to the point at which the car was to emerge, and then a cut to the real car in the surf. The little toddler who watches the car come out of the water and points is Richard Kiel’s son, RJ. He’s now a thirty-six-year-old doctor.

I thought it might be a giggle to wind down the window and drop a fish out as we drove onto the beach. Cubby wasn’t at all happy, and said we should re-shoot; he felt it was a little too flippant and therefore not funny. I said OK, but when we ran both versions in rushes the next day my prank got a huge laugh. Cubby conceded.

In
For Your Eyes Only
the Lotus returned, twice. The first one, a white Esprit Turbo, was destroyed when a thug tripped its self-destruct system by breaking the driver’s-side window. The second one, a red version of the same model, was driven by
moi
in Northern Italy, though you didn’t get to see many of the gadgets in operation, I’m afraid, as a wonderful scene with John Moreno as Luigi – where he tampered with a few buttons – was unfortunately cut due to time constraints. If you listen carefully, when I leave him in the car to go into the ice rink I tell him not to play with any of the buttons.

The wet bike was another brilliant innovation first seen by the public in a Bond movie – again, in
For Your Eyes Only
. I was given a little time to get used to it on the beach at the Cala di Volpe and, in my bathing trunks, leapt aboard and mastered the controls, swishing around in the surf thinking it was all rather like a jet boat. Then I was told in the scene I’d be wearing full Naval Commander uniform for the ride to Stromberg’s lair, and I had to arrive immaculate and dry, without a hair out of place. OK, I thought, I’ll give it a whirl.

Fresh from the hair-and-make-up truck, I hopped onto the bike, started her up and made my way out to sea. It was all perfectly fine until I heard the ‘chop-chop-chop’ of the helicopter above, obviously filming. Just then, a huge downdraft created by its rotors took hold and started pushing the bike down into the sea. I had no way of contacting either the helicopter or the boat behind, but knew if I fell in it would mean a complete wardrobe change, hair, make-up, the lot – and that would take a very long time. More by steely determination and grit than anything else I managed to keep the bike going at no more than a forty-five-degree angle to the surface. Sometimes being brave is pretty tough going.

As well as kitting Bond out with the best thing on four wheels, the writers sometimes turn an idea on its head and say, ‘Let’s try him in a …’ Well, if a Lotus is one of the most powerful cars, the direct opposite would be a Citroën 2CV, with its mere two-horsepower engine, yet another vehicle that featured in
For Your Eyes Only
. It was huge fun to drive down through olive groves in – it just goes to show, it’s more about the driver’s skill than it is the size of his engine, or so the Bond girls say.

But what on earth could be even less powerful than a 2CV? How about an Indian Tuk-Tuk motorized rickshaw? With the pull of a lawnmower engine, and manoeuvrability of same, it was used to great effect in
Octopussy
as an escape vehicle.

Oh, and I shouldn’t forget the ‘Bondola’ from
Moonraker
. That was all rather tongue-in-cheek, but why wouldn’t Jim have a supercharged gondola? Filming in Venice is never particularly easy, especially with the vast crowds looking on, but shooting around the canals was fairly straightforward as there was nowhere for people to watch – aside from a few bridges – and it all happened so fast, they didn’t really know what it was all about anyway as we were there under stealth.

Once we reached St Mark’s Square for the scene where the gondola converts into a hovercraft, however, we were confronted with 20,000–30,000 tourists, largely Oriental, all armed with Nikon cameras.

There were two gondolas used in the sequence: the first inflated and raised out of the water, then we cut to a second on land, which was built around a Ford chassis. I arrived in my lovely light-grey silk suit for the first take, sat in the boat and the air was switched on – but seemingly only on one side, thus toppling me out and straight into the Grand Canal. Cue much laughter and snapping of Nikons. I trotted off to dry, change, have my hair and make-up done and, thirty minutes later, returned.