Behind the scenes on set with latest 007 film, due out on April 2
Of all the reptilian, low-down car crimes a person can commit, few come close to peppering the pristine skin of a 1960s Aston Martin DB5 with bullets.
This is a misdemeanour so vile, the perpetrators should have their eyes stapled open and be forced to watch Matt LeBlanc’s Top Gear segments for the rest of eternity.
And yet that’s what’s happening in plain daylight, right before our horrified eyes. It’s hard to watch. Matt LeBlanc hard.
We’re in the ancient city of Matera, in southern Italy, on the set of the forthcoming James Bond movie, No Time To Die, perched on the precarious balcony of a three-storey terraced house.
Below us, in a small, sandstone-paved piazza, the most iconic 007 car of them all is being turned into metallic Swiss cheese by a posse of machine-gun-wielding scumbags, some of whom have just leapt from a 1980s Range Rover, others a sinister black Jaguar XF sedan. Sparks are fizzing off the DB5’s bodywork.
The front-line noise generated by the gunfire is so hazardous, production staff have given us earplugs.
Performing cameos around the edge of the scene are a Maserati Quattroporte, a Lancia Thesis and, for full Mediterranean narrow-street legitimacy, a tiny Fiat 126 so dainty-looking it’d only take the backdraught of a single stray bullet to send it crumpling into a heap.
The 25th Bond movie is shaping up to be a car nut’s wet dream when it drops worldwide on April 2 – especially for those with an Aston soft-spot.
As well as the DB5, another three paragons of elegant British muscle will be on the end of Daniel Craig’s right foot: a classic V8 Vantage, the latest DBS Superleggera and a sneak preview of the new $1.9 million Valhalla hypercar, which is not even launched in the real world until late 2021.
For today’s shoot, however – and in the absence of Craig, who’s due in town the following week – the DB5 is the undisputed superstar.
And the good news for car conservationists is that those bullets spattering the Aston’s bodywork aren’t real; rather they’re ‘squibs’, pellets of gunpowder used to simulate bullet impacts.
Not that it matters. This particular DB5 here is bullet-proof anyway. Naturally.
It’s not, incredibly, the only DB5 in the vicinity. Another seven stunt cars were built especially for No Time To Die – most of which are currently being stored in the courtyard of an old convent in the piazza.
Each duplicate is completely driveable and powered by a straight-six engine with 268kW.
“Each one is rigged differently,” explains Auto Action Developments’ Neil Layton, who worked alongside Aston’s special-projects division to develop the DB5s, on top of prepping another 140 movie vehicles.
“The DNA of each individual DB5 is the same, but we’ve tweaked different cars for different scenes – depending on if we’re doing a run down steps, or a donut, or a high-speed chase.”
Preparing cars to run down steps is not something most car companies spend much time on, so this is highly specialised work.
To make the Astons fit for action, Layton and his team must first, among a long list of other calibrations, adjust the damping, switch off electronic safety systems, and install hydraulic handbrakes, fire-suppression systems and small-capacity stunt fuel tanks.
The longer you stay on a movie set, the more you realise that they are strange alternate universes, with their own customs, rules and laws of physics.
Time is pliable; bending, standing still, even reversing on occasions (car scenes are often filmed back-to-front).
It takes a whole morning, and multiple takes, to capture the grievous bodily harm committed upon Bond’s DB5 – equivalent to probably no more than 10 seconds of footage in the final film.
Then, after lunch, as the crew attempts to film a memorable sequence where Bond sees off his foes by engaging headlamp-concealed Gatling guns – all while performing a donut, the flash sod – a summer storm interrupts play.
“There’s a lot of hanging around on-set sometimes,” says Mark Higgins, three-time British rally champion, and one of the movie’s main stunt drivers.
“You go from doing nothing to ‘bang’, straight into a big scene, so you have to sort out your adrenaline and be calm, because there’s a massive amount of pressure when you’re doing this.”
Speaking in an attic space just off our viewing balcony, his face is dotted with ‘motion capture’ spots, a digital system used to take facial references, over which Daniel Craig’s features will later be laid by the special-effects team.
Higgings proceeds to reveal some of the other tricks used during the making of No Time To Die; like the tiny ‘pod cars’ placed on top of the action vehicles, in which a stunt driver can sit and take control of the car.
Or how they treated Matera’s slippery, multi-surface roads with $135,000 worth of Coca-Cola to increase traction – a secret piece of hocus-pocus used by Hollywood for many years.
“I was skeptical [when I first found about it],” admits Higgins, “but spraying Coke on the road increases grip levels by about 70 per cent.”
He’ll be putting the soft-drink sorcery to good use tomorrow by drifting into the piazza at around 145km/h.
Right now, in the square, more black magic is being conjured. The DB5, once a thing of beauty, resembles some kind of Frankencar, one flank covered in scaffold poles and ropes, as four sturdy men replicate the donut motion by physically rotating the car through 360 degrees.
It’s not going smoothly. One guy keeps slipping onto his backside. And then a Gatling gun malfunctions; hundreds of bullets spill onto the piazza. It starts raining heavily again.
Considering the technological chicanery available to modern movie-makers, you’d think the director could just yell “It’s a wrap”, head to the nearest bar with the crew, and order the CGI maestros to finish the scene.
Except that’s not how the Bond franchise prefers to roll in 2020, leaning more towards Bourne-style grit than Fast & Furious flamboyance.
“After going down the CGI route, a lot of films are trying to bring back the realness,” says Higgins.
“Now, of course, the CGI will get bigger and better again, but for us this film is about reality, not lairiness.”
It begs the question: does the quest for authenticity ever involve Daniel Craig taking the wheel himself? Has he ever committed car treason by dinging a DB5?
“He can drive,” says Higgins without hesitation.
“We’ve had him flicking the car around and doing handbrake turns. He enjoys all that. But at the end of the day, he lets us do our job.”
And what a job it is.
Watch the trailer for the film below.
Keyword: No time to die for Bond’s Aston Martin