Behind the Scenes: A View to a Kill (Glen, 1985) with Roger Moore and Christopher Walken

There were two interesting issues going on. One is the competition over microchips. The idea that someone could monopolize the chip market was a fun idea. And how would you do it when you have that whole Silicon Valley sitting there? You have to have this brilliant, large and light villain, a tremendous caper. We came up with this idea of sinking Silicon Valley under a flood of water by causing a huge earthquake. A villain's caper, in the view to the kill, is one of the best we've had. One of the most unexpected and one of the most exciting. We were in San Francisco on a recce with Barbara Broccoli, Arthur Worcester and myself. And we saw the Fuji ship, so we contacted them and asked them if we could photograph them near the Golden Gate Bridge. As we're looking out to sea, we're on the right-hand side, there's a little kind of hillock around there. Sure enough, the blimp appeared and we were in a position to do shots of it approaching the bridge from various vantage points. It wasn't until it got right on top of us that you could actually reach Fuji. I pulled focus, Alan Hume was operating, John Glenn did the clapperboard, I think. We were the most expensive grips that there had ever been. And we shot footage and the shots was actually used in the film. That was one of the reasons that when we did our model, that we did do the colouring very similar to the Fuji airship, so that, you know, we could use some of those shots. Soon, casting begins. To play the villain, Max Zorin, the producers turned to an Academy Award-winning actor, Christopher Walken. You amuse me, Mr Bond. He's got a sort of a quirky kind of touch to him. Intuitive improvisation, it's the secret of genius. Chris was a very good actor, very interesting actor, funny man too. For the part of Stacey Sutton, former Charlie's Angels star Tanya Roberts is signed. Evidently, Cubby saw an older movie I had done called Beastmaster and he thought I had the right look. As Zorin's henchwoman, Mayday, the filmmakers cast flamboyant model and recording star Grace Jones. Grace is an incredible character. I mean, she's just like a fiery woman. A great performer. She was totally cool. She brought more to the role than was on the page. I remember when I first did the makeup and I thought, oh, maybe he might think it's too strong or something like that. The director, John Glenn. And it was great because he came and he says, oh, put more red down there and more color. I went, oh, wonderful. I couldn't believe it. She was full of life, vitality. A little hard to get from one place to another to get up and get on site. She always showed up. She was always there, but you had to sweat out that last second. But once she got there, she was great. I am completely not the person I'm playing. I mean, I'm a villain sometimes, but on a much, much smaller scale. Also cast in the film is an actor who gained worldwide fame as the star of the TV series The Avengers, Patrick McNee. Barbara Broccoli had suggested me to her father, Cubby Broccoli, for the part of the jockey. He was a friend of Barbara's. And he said, well, isn't he a bit big for a jockey? She said, well, couldn't you change it? And so they made it a racehorse trainer. There's an interesting chemistry between Roger Moore and Patrick McNee. We, of course, we worked on next stages to one another all through the years when I was doing the suit and then he was doing The Avengers. With a cast in place, production starts on the 23rd of June, 1984, as a second unit begins shooting the pre-credit sequence in remote exotic Iceland. We were shooting on a lake that was full of icebergs, any of which could suddenly flip 180 degrees at any moment and cause a massive tidal wave. And you can only survive about three minutes in that water, in that temperature. On a couple of occasions, they had to abandon equipment and just get off as fast as possible. We did lose a bit of equipment. Fortunately, we didn't lose any people. And we had to do the model helicopter crashing into the ice floe. We had three helicopters, very expensive machines. And the first one, they took off to do the shot and the engine failed and it crashed in the sea. The second one blew up on takeoff and they sent the third and final helicopter up and thank goodness it worked. Meanwhile, far off in another part of the world, on the Pispalu Glacier in Switzerland, another unit works under the direction of champion skier Willy Bogner. The scene is capped by an exciting stunt performed by Steve Lincoln. It was always fascinating to me when new things happen in sports and say, well, that's something that nobody's ever really seen. And we just came up to the idea to use the front runner of a snowmobile as a snowboard. And we wrote the whole sequence around that gag. Meanwhile, back in England, production designer Peter Lamont makes plans to build the huge Mindset on Pinewood's 007 Stage as soon as it is vacated by Ridley Scott's film Legend. One lunchtime, I'd gone down to a local pub with, strange enough, a pal of mine who was the production manager on the film Legend. And a phone call came through for him to say 007 Stage was on fire. I remember coming back from London in a car and seeing the fire from the motorway. There was all this smoke blowing down. I thought, God almighty, they've got to fire up on the lot today. The smoke was pouring out of the top of this stage. They couldn't do anything about it. It was a total disaster. It was just twisted metal and the whole building had collapsed. There's this great thing looking like the Hindenburgs crashed. Somebody asked Cubby if he wanted to go up and have a look around the 007. He wouldn't even look at the stage. It hurt him quite badly. It presented a huge production problem for Peter Lamont, our production designer. Where are we going to find another stage that could house this enormous set? There wasn't one. So now we had a bit of a scheduling problem. Oh my God, you know, what am I going to do? Can we bring the San Francisco location forward? Can we do this? And there's always a problem. There's always a reason that you can't bring something forward. I bumped into Michael Brown, who again had built it. And he said, I can rebuild it in three months from the time the site is clear. He says, we can clear the site in a month and we can start rebuilding the 007 stage. So I said, I think you ought to go and talk to Cubby. So I went in there and I said, well, I think it's like this. Do you or don't you want to rebuild the 007 stage? I want to rebuild it. While work begins clearing the site for a new 007 stage, the first unit travels to Paris to shoot scenes involving spectacular stumps. The challenge is really to put on the screen what is written. I mean, in this case here, in order to escape, the heavy has to jump off the top of the Eiffel Tower. We'd like to go to exotic locations, but when we get there, we'd like to do something different. We'd like to jump off the Eiffel Tower with a parachute. So it's just not see the monument. It's actually engage the monument in some way. Michael Wilson and Cubby wanted to know what was necessary to do the stunt properly. I told them we wanted to make lots of hot air balloon jumps. And I did this with a friend of mine, Don Kaltweep. And he and I made 22 jumps from a hot air balloon over a period of weeks. And we videoed each one. And we would see how far we fell and what our body position did, what the shoot did. The problem with the Eiffel Tower as a jumping platform is that the top is very small, but the bottom is very large. So it slopes away, slopes outwards very quickly. This is only 930 foot tall, and you would be hitting steel at about 450 feet. You needed to get out a ways. Well, Michael's technical background really helped. I did a little integral calculus. 32 feet per second per second and all of this. I said to him, you got about three, tell him you got three and a half seconds. That's about when you're going to pull it. That'll be fine. He's not just a suit back home. He's very much hands on and knows what he's talking about. Pretty soon we had a very consistent way of opening up three seconds down and opening on heading. We were getting all the bugs worked out. The way we ended up doing the timing is the wind in our ears was our altimeter. When it got to a certain pitch from zero and just picked up, picked up, picked up, you knew that's where three seconds was. And I promised my wife I'd do 10 jumps that opened up perfectly before I went to the Eiffel Tower. The question is to get the permission to do it. Being a film unit, we wanted to do everything wrong. We wanted to drive the long way up a one way system and beside the Seine and do stunts there. Authorities in Paris didn't in fact give us permission to shoot in Paris. I was very fortunate in having a French production manager who was extremely adroit and very good at dealing with the local authorities. We had to convince them that we could have a jump from the Eiffel Tower. There were 31 or 32 separate authorities who had to attend this meeting because they had to deliver some input before the sequence could work. So we had the maritime police, the aviation police, the tower police, the park police and the street police. He went down and had it all worked out mathematically. He said, this is what I'm going to pull the thing. I said, fine. So he got permission. We're all set to go. And suddenly two people went up and jumped off the Eiffel Tower, a man and a woman. They leapt off the top of the Eiffel Tower unauthorized and landed and got arrested. And that we thought was going to compromise our position. I had a call from the administration of the Eiffel Tower saying, maybe people have heard what you were going to do. And it already gave ideas. And we can't give you the permission because of that. So everything was cancelled. Put the whole project in jeopardy. And we said, we're sorry, but we don't know who that was. This has nothing to do with us. And we convinced them that we should forget this episode and that we would do it the right way. Filming commences with BJ Wirth parachuting from a helicopter for Mayday's landing on the boat in the River Seine. The first jump, I went down onto one knee and didn't look very graceful, no pun intended, landing on the boat. But the second one, I was able to get over the engines and then drive full speed forward and land on the boat to make a more graceful landing. And over the period of six or seven jumps, I got quite a ways down the river. And they're able to use this where it looks like Mayday is flying along the river and then Bond chases her with his car and then she ends up landing on the boat. A few days later, BJ Wirth goes to the top of the Eiffel Tower to make a leap he's been practicing for months. I probably could have just jumped off the side, but I really wanted to have a little bit of a board to get a running start. We had to put a platform to run out and jump off. Just as the subject leaves, you can see that platform. I thought that I could run fast enough and far enough and leap off where I could get out over the grass so I would have my 960 feet to fall. If it was windy or stormy or anything at all, we wouldn't be able to jump. And so we scheduled it for this first Monday morning, about 630 in the morning. It was set up a possibility of three times. And BJ was the major stuntman. And I stood there thinking, my gosh, this is, are you sure you really want to do this? Standing next to his wife and his baby, I suddenly felt so personally involved with this person standing up there. I just concentrated on doing the best job possible and yelled out, this one's for Cubby. I'm running off the board and just threw my chest out to the horizon. I was on the camera right underneath him as he goes away from us. It was one of the longest three seconds of my life, waiting so I could start the shoot opening and seeing the girders coming up at a very rapid rate. He didn't have a spare pole. It had to be right because there was no time for a second parachute. So I waited as long as I could. And when my ears heard the pitch of wind, knowing that it was three seconds, I threw the pilot chute out. And then suddenly, that was up. I flew across the little garden that I saw that I thought I might land at, flew over to the river and landed right next to my wife and my daughter. BJ did such a good job on the first take that they didn't need me. We offered to let him jump after I did so we could have two takes on the same jump. I had the full suede leather suit to double as Grace Jones. But Cubby said, no, we've got it in the can. We don't want to take any extra risk. We don't need anything else. We're done. I told anybody and everybody, you know, that I'd do it for free or I just wanted to do it. He had been BJ's backup and felt miffed that he hadn't been able to jump off the Eiffel Tower. It was fashionable to go without any permit to any tall building in the world and jump without being called by the police or by anybody. About three o'clock in the morning, I called my friend Bill Sweeney at another hotel and said, Bill, I think we can get up to the top tomorrow and make a jump off. Nobody's going to be around. We should be able to hop right off land and be out there before anybody even knows it. For them, it was such a unique opportunity to do something exciting that I'm afraid that their enthusiasm ran away with them. By the time they were ready to jump at seven, what they didn't know is all the crew had come up to set up for the shooting halfway up the tower that day. The director was actually up picking out camera angles and was three fourths of the way up the Eiffel Tower and was going, well, I think we should go there and just then I screamed by him in free fall and my parachute opened a big crack like that. It was my bloody hell that looks like. And before I could even get my name out, Sweeney goes screaming by in free fall. If you're a professional, you don't do unauthorized jumps. I really thought we were going to just pull it off and just very few people would have seen it. The police get involved, the mayor gets involved. We've got other material to shoot in Paris. We don't want to sour our relationship with the city. They were close to withdrawing our permission. So it was a very foolish thing to do. I wasn't very happy about it because he was part of our team. I was told that I had jeopardized quite an investment for the movie company. And in hindsight, looking back, oh, I definitely did. BJ was very apologetic, but I mean, it was too late. It's done. I had to fire him on the spot and I wasn't able to ever get him back on another Bond film. I'm reminded of it every time because I always get a phone call saying thanks, Tweet, for making that jump off the Eiffel Tower. I got your job now. We're having fun. After careful negotiation, shooting continues on the Eiffel Tower with actors Roger Moore and Grace Jones. Grace Jones literally throws herself into her character's role. She did some of the stunts herself. We did some shots of Grace Jones where she looks as though she's diving off. Actually, at the top of the Eiffel Tower, we put boxes in and she was very good. She sort of flew through the air. It was lovely because we had a camera right on her and she dives through and she goes up a picture. She was a gutsy little lady. Meanwhile, Bond veteran Remy Julien and his precision driving team lend their expertise to a truly smashing scene filmed along the banks of the Seine River. Remy actually drove it and literally ducked down and came up again after we'd gone. I mean, the timing on that is terrifying. Remy Julien is, of course, one of the great stunt drivers of the world and, of course, is the primary stunt driver in France. Although Remy's English wasn't very good and my French was even worse, we managed to communicate through drawings. He put together a great stunt sequence down by the Seine River. He was a very, very good stunt coordinator and very creative in what he was doing. That was actually something he came up with, the leap onto the roof of the bus and off the other side. It was all done precisely with stopwatching. The bus had to travel quite slowly because, you know, it's only six metres long and so as a landing platform for a car travelling at speed and the car had to travel at speed in order to get the lift off the ramp, that's not a lot of space to put your wheels down on. So it's a great little sequence. Apparently, the duke who built the palace was convinced he would be reincarnated as a donkey in a future life. So he built the stables befitting a duke who became a donkey. When you go into Chantilly, of course, all the gates, all the pictures on the walls, they're not of human beings at all, they're horses. Just like a first-class hotel for horses, amazing. Really, really beautiful. He was supposed to be acting a role as his chauffeur and so he thought it'd be fun in the movie to kind of rub it in. At Chantilly, Patrick McNee drives a very special car, Cubby Broccoli's own Rolls-Royce. It was his real car which he'd driven from London to Paris in. We wanted a Rolls-Royce that was elegant and obviously Cubby's was kind of the real choice. So it was an early silver cloud and it was a great Rolls-Royce and we still have it to this day. We actually shot that with a real Rolls-Royce going into a gravel pit in Denham near Pinewood Studios. But of course, when it gets sunk, we didn't want to sink Cubby so we bought a duplicate. We used a real Rolls-Royce. What else does one do on a bond? The horse racing in the film was kind of surfaced because Cubby was interested in breeding at that time and racing horses and he had quite a stable himself. Of course, it wasn't really horse racing going on at the time but we put on Ascot. We recreated it and had everyone get on the tails and the high top hats and it turned out to be one of our easier locations. Within minutes of meeting this wonderful man, I'm sitting in a jacuzzi with very little on playing that hot tub scene with him. It took a whole day to shoot the jacuzzi scene and from the moment I got into the hot tub with Roger to the moment I got out, I guess we were in the water about eight or nine hours so you can imagine the state of our skin when we got up. What a wonderful place to shoot San Francisco. Nice climate and at that time Dianne Feinstein was the mayor. She wanted to really promote the city. She wanted to promote filmmaking there. She made things happen. I was just lucky and fortunate enough that she was one of the rare people that preferred me as Bond instead of Sean and so we got all sorts of permits. I was terrified to meet Roger Moore and he was sweet. He was a sweetheart. The biggest problem I realized was crowds. I mean, you got into Fisherman's Wharf and they set all this up but there were literally thousands of people wanting to see the filming. Beginning in early October, the second unit spends three weeks filming the exciting fire engine chase. Arthur Worcester was given the task of shooting a lot of the night material of the fire engines. It did something like four weeks of nights. I mean, I was directing and photographing it. I was lighting a quarter of a mile a night. The fire department, once they got over the initial shock of doing a chase with one of their engines, were very cooperative. Had great fun driving fire engines. That gives you such a sense of part. We'd go to drive that thing with a MWOWS! Driving a fire truck, I mean, it's every kid's dream, isn't it? I had visions of the fire truck leaping the bridge when it's virtually up to its highest. You had to do the jump at a very high speed, just about as fast as that fire engine could possibly go, which is about 80 miles an hour. We all had our fingers crossed. It flew across and the suspension just shattered on it when it landed the other side. When I finished that, I was on my knees. It was a very tough shoot, actually. Meanwhile, on October 6th and 7th, the first unit set San Francisco's City Hall ablaze. When you go to a mayor or city officials and you say, oh, by the way, we also want to set the City Hall on fire, that can cause quite a stir. The trickiest part of the whole operation was convincing everybody out there that we could actually, you know, set fire to City Hall, but not really, but just make it look that way. While they were setting up, I took a walk around. It's a beautiful building. And then they said, well, yeah, you know, we're going to set fire to it. We had a fire up there that you could literally, you know, sort of turn on and off. Put huge gas burners up there and what we call danties, which emit a huge amount of flame. Everyone was convinced that the City Hall had burned down. You know, I mean, people were totally convinced there was so much fire coming from the roof. And you think, oh my God, this is amazing, you know. We were able to hose the front of the City Hall down. She'd given instructions, everybody should close their windows. One didn't. So you got a very wet desk the next morning. While the first unit continues filming in San Francisco, the model unit filmed shots of Zoran's airship at the Golden Gate Bridge in England at Pinewood Studios. We built some full size pieces on the back lot of the Golden Gate Bridge. We built sections of the bridge on a fairly large scale, four to one, with a balloon attached to it. We built sections of the bridge on the lot full size. We did sections on the stage. It was a real sort of jigsaw puzzle. Physically, you can't shoot those angles. I mean, we'd have to build rigging for cameras that would be impossible to do. So that was all reconstructed in the studio. Probably about 5% was on the Golden Gate Bridge and the rest was on a replica of the top section. But even so, in the studio, we were up high. Charles Staffell, who was the front projection expert at Pinewood, did a fantastic job for us. He made a rig where he had the front projection machine suspended from the ceiling. And we had Roger Moore and Tanya Roberts doing their stuff where he's holding it by her fingertips, suspended over the traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. There was no fear or anything. You were like three feet off the ground instead of 300. That was the section of the bridge we shot on the stage. We also had a miniature bridge constructed on the lot. And then there was full scale of the North Tower, you know, where the actual gondola hits. I was part of a team under John Richardson who fabricated this whole half of the underside of this blimp, which we hung on a big crane. And that was more controllable because you could bring in the cameras and the equipment and get the actors up and get the actors off. It took us two to three months to build, fabricating steel, the underside of the blimp, which we then put polystyrene sections in. Apart from that airship, we had some 20 footers that were always inflated and permanently hung from a crane. We built a 40 foot long one, which we could fill with helium. And then we also have some little four foot ones for the, you know, sort of more distant shots where you wanted to look as though there was an airship a long way away. And all of that had to be integrated into the live shots that we had. That involves all of the, you know, the usual problems of filming with fire, added to which you're in a natural funnel being an elevator shaft and all the hot air goes up. Roger Moore came up to me and he said, when he saw Tanya hanging by her bootstraps in the elevator shaft and the flames licking all around her, he said to me, are you sure about this? Because it wouldn't look too good in the morning if something had happened, you know? And I said, well, we've been very careful, Roger. There was a lot of hanging and there was a lot of smoke and there was a lot of heat and it took a long time. I must say that Tanya was fantastic. She was very, very brave. Eventually, the filmmakers shoot all they can on the other stages. Now they need to build sets and get the final shots on the new 007 stage, which is still under construction. You know, we were trying to build a new set at the new stage being built, but we were stopped because it was a repair to an existing building and the new rules demanded that we had to wait until the roof was in position. We did what we could in postponing, you know, shooting what we could before getting onto that sequence. I had to go to Copley and say, look, you know, we've run out of sets. There's nothing we can do. You know, there's nothing I can do. The set will be finished in about eight days. So he said, fine. There was a big set to build, so it was a fantastic effort on everyone's behalf. On January 7th, 1985, after filming has already commenced inside it, a ceremony is held for the official reopening of the new 007 stage. Pinewood proposed calling it the Cubby Broccoli 007 stage in honor of Cubby and his long association with them and the film industry in England. We invited the world's press and we had the cast of View to a Kill out there. It was a very exciting day. Here we go. This is it. And I suppose it's nothing to do with Cubby's gut that it is being called the Albert R. Broccoli stage. It's because of the size of his heart. In mid-January, work begins on the mine flood scenes, the final to be shot. We had a full-size set that we flooded with tip tanks and hoses. And it was flooded with great force. It was an enormous wall of water which came down. I had to be swept into a little hut and it was unbelievably powerful, this current of water. It swept me right past the hut. I would put people on cables so you could pull them and get that feeling of they were really being driven by the water. On the set, Grace Jones gets more than she bargained for. I didn't warn Grace when the mine was flooded that I'd put in various sparking effects which are supposed to be electrical cables hitting the water and arcing. She screamed. All the screams you hear are perfectly genuine. She was convinced she was going to be electrocuted. And afterwards, she said, you so-and-so, blank, blank, blank, you didn't warn me that you'd fix those things. And I said, well, you know, we got the reaction, didn't we? I had a check for $100,007 and I made a jump from a helicopter, flew into City Hall and landed there and was going to give the check and did to Roger Moore and then he gave it to Mayor Feinstein. So it was quite a day. With the film finished, Roger Moore makes a bittersweet decision. When they start running out of actors old enough to look as though they could be knocked down by Bond and leading ladies are your mother's age when you started making Bond, then it's time you move on. Roger felt more than anyone else that the time had come to gracefully say bye-bye. I think that it was Roger's decision. It was not Cubby's or MGMUA's or anyone else. It was Roger who said, I think I've had enough. I think this is the end of the road. Let's part friends. He'd been saying for some time, I'm getting a bit long in the tooth to be doing this James Bond stuff. He was well over 50 at the time. I think Roger is the great man of the Bonds. He'd walk on the set and just do it. Roger keeps the atmosphere very relaxed. Whenever he walked on the set, the whole crew would be lifted because he was just a carefree sort of guy. He was a pleasure to work with. He had a great sense of humor, a lot of charm.