Bond On Bond (26 page)

It was then on to Venice and the delightful Hotel Danieli (although I prefer the Gritti Palace, personally) for the action sequences, spread between the city’s 118 islands. The Venetian glass museum, in which Jimmy and Chang fought it out, was actually shot at Boulogne Studios – in a building that had once been a World War II Luftwaffe factory during the occupation. The sequence still holds the record for the largest amount of breakaway sugar glass used in a single scene.

After spending a family Christmas in Paris, the cast and crew travelled to Rio de Janeiro on Concorde. Unfortunately, I suffered an attack of kidney stones and had to spend a few days in a Parisian hospital before flying down to Rio, where I was immediately whisked off the plane to hair and make-up, before re-boarding to film the sequence of 007 arriving.

It was there one of the most challenging stunts ever took place, atop two cable cars on Table Mountain, two-thousand feet up in the air, with Dickie Graydon and Paul Weston doubling for Jaws and Jim Bond.

No visit to Rio would be complete without seeing the carnival. Scenes were recreated with some 700 extras to cut into footage previously shot by the second unit in the previous summer.

We then travelled inland to film at Iguassu Falls, the second largest waterfalls in the world – and perhaps the toughest of any location I’ve been on. There was no way of transporting equipment there, apart from carrying it on our backs from the bottom of the valley. The top of the falls was often cloaked by clouds, and Lewis suggested I should follow one of the bevy of Drax’s girls across the top of the falls and inside to the hidden HQ. When I looked at the said girl I was rather taken aback – she was totally cross-eyed, and looked to my left as she spoke to me, with her eyes drifting ever further sideward. I had to follow this girl across the top of a sheer drop! I raised my concerns with Lewis that she couldn’t even see straight. ‘That’s OK, dear,’ he said. ‘We’ll tie a rope to your feet.’

The scene culminated in a speedboat plummeting over the top of the falls, but, due to the weather and spray, several attempts failed, so the scene was eventually shot with miniatures at the studio.

Of course it was one film where Jim also left terra firma and headed into space. The hotels there were awful. If I were you I wouldn’t bother.

From the wondrous scenes of Rio and Venice, the opening sequences of
For Your Eyes Only
took us to Stoke Poges cemetery near Slough and Becton gas works. Very glamorous! The Becton site had previously doubled for Vietnam in Stanley Kubrick’s
Full Metal Jacket
, but now my brave stunt double Martin Grace held onto the outside of a helicopter, not trying to evade any military action, but rather that of a crazed bald man with a penchant for white cats.

Fortunately, we then moved on to Corfu, Cortina d’Ampezzo – the latter to film snow scenes, but ended up having to truck the white stuff in after it failed to materialize naturally – and Greece, which was slightly more exotic than Becton, though none the less problematic.

The mountaintop monastery at Meteora, two kilometres north of Kalambaka in central Greece, was to be the scene of the film’s finalé. Like twenty-three other monastries in the area, Aghia Triatha was built in a pretty inaccessible location during the Serbian–Byzantine wars of the fourteenth century, where the only access was by removable wooden ladder.

A deal was done in advance with the monks to allow us to film, though I’m not quite sure our man told them it was going to be a Bond film, as once they realized such a womanizing, gambling and ruthless character was due they protested by hanging out their washing and huge tarpaulin sheets all over the roofs. It was not the panoramic scene our cameraman had envisaged.

I tried to reason with them, saying I’d once been a saint, but that didn’t go down too well. Cubby intervened and made a charitable donation, which seemed to placate their worries more readily.

The monastery can be visited today by tourists with a good head for heights, and suitably restrained clothing – but don’t worry, it can be hired when you get there. Those enterprising monks think of everything.

Cortina was another interesting location we moved on to, chosen primarily for the abundance of snow. The only thing was, there wasn’t any when we turned up! However, we had a wonderful stay, and filmed at the Miramonti Majestic Hotel. I remember Jim’s room was number 300. It doesn’t actually exist, though the balcony he is seen on does and belongs to room 108.

Octopussy
was a lovely shoot. We started on 10 August 1982 at Checkpoint Charlie in West Berlin. The Berlin Wall was still in place and the Cold War had yet to defrost. In the scene, Bond and M are in a car heading to the border, and while M gets out Bond continues across to East Berlin. Of course, we couldn’t do it for real and so the car drove a few yards into no man’s land before John Glen called, ‘Cut!’ Happily, the curious East German guards didn’t have time to react, as we turned around and drove back quickly.

After six days in Berlin, it was back to Pinewood Studios and UK locations, including Wansford in Cambridgeshire, for the Nene Valley Railway and the majority of the train sequences where Bond infiltrates and faces off against Orlov. The same location doubled for Russia twelve years later, when director Martin Campbell filmed the train-vs-tank sequence in
GoldenEye
along stretches of the six-mile private track.

RAF Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire, doubled for a West German Air Base where a huge circus was staged and, as mentioned earlier, RAF Northolt then doubled for Cuba, with the addition of a few carefully placed palm trees.

We then moved to India, and in particular Udaipur, the city of sunsets. There, the Lake Palace Hotel, which is spread across a four-acre island and constructed from marble on Lake Pichola, became Octopussy’s floating palace. The interiors and courtyards of the palace were shot back at Pinewood, much to the relief of cast and crew, who were struggling in the high temperatures; in fact I needed a new shirt and suit jacket almost every take. As you know, of course, James Bond does not sweat, and the wardrobe and make-up department constantly touched me up in order to keep Jim looking cool and collected – no mean feat when temperatures ranged from 48 to 65 degrees Celsius.