Gary Powell has the kind of job that kids fantasise about. When James Bond needs to drive a tank through a city, flip an Aston Martin over or crash a plane in Her Majesty's (secret) service, it's to Powell, the film franchise's stunt co-ordinator, that the film-makers turn. "I've always been of the view that if you can do it for real, then do it for real," says Powell, 51.
It's May 2015, and WIRED is on a night shoot for Spectre, the 24th James Bond film and the fourth outing for Daniel Craig. A Jaguar and a Ford SUV smash into each other at high speed. The wreckage is brutal, but both drivers emerge unscathed - the cars have been modded with fuel cells, gel batteries, hidden roll cages and harnesses. "Anything the cast has to go in, I'll put myself or one of the guys in, to make sure it is safe," says Powell. "That means we get to play with all the toys first."
Powell has worked on Bond productions since 1995's GoldenEye. "In that film I was driving a tank," he says. "I had a police escort as I was doing 65kph through the centre of St Petersburg." Each new film presents its unique challenges: among those for Spectre, a fight scene on a helicopter just a metre or so above a crowd of extras in Mexico City, the sequence included an in-air barrel roll (above).
There was also a chase sequence that required crashing a twin-propeller Britten-Norman aeroplane into an Austrian mountainside. "You always want to better yourself, but it has to make sense in the story," says Powell. "It's not just 'Let's do a massive explosion for the sake of it.'" For the sequence, a plane was suspended from two cranes; the crew also deployed 50,000m<sup>2</sup> of fake snow. "We were 3,000 metres up, 150cm deep in the snow," says Powell. "Each stunt has its own challenges and its own danger." (Days earlier, two stuntmen were injured filming another scene.) After sliding the plane down the mountain, the crew built a cannon to fire the plane chassis through a purpose-built wooden cabin, built just for the shot.
Such visceral scenes, Powell says, illustrate both the risks and the rewards of pulling off practical effects in an age of CGI. "It'll look amazing," he says, "It looks real because it is real. But most importantly, everyone's safe."
Spectre is out on Oct 26
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
