60 YEARS OF BOND PRODUCTION.
Bond turned 60 last month. To celebrate, Definition asked Chris Corbould OBE – the man responsible for visual effects on 15 of the movies – to select his favourite scenes WORDS. Will Lawrence IMAGES. 007 logo and related James Bond Indicia © 1962-2022 Danjaq and MGM. 007 logo and related James Bond trademarks are trademarks of Danjaq. All Rights Reserved. Special (effects) agent
F or Chris Corbould, it all began with rock ‘n’ roll. While still at school he secured work on Tommy , director Ken Russell’s 1975 satirical operetta based upon The Who’s 1969 rock-opera album about a “deaf, dumb and blind kid” who “sure plays a mean pinball”. Corbould was 15, just beginning to explore film: “I was really into rock music, especially The Who, and my uncle did special effects at the time,” he begins. “During my summer holidays he asked me to come down to the set of Tommy . My initial introduction through my favourite rock band opened up this whole world of explosions and hydraulic rigs.” The world has proved an abundant professional playground for Corbould, whose career now encompasses almost
“I was working for an SFX company at the time,” remembers Corbould, “and we were subcontracted to do ski poles that turned into guns. Then Moonraker (1979) was my first freelance job. That was a wonderful experience. I was 19 and had never been abroad, yet we were off to France, Venice, Argentina, Miami. “Then I got A View to a Kill (1985). John Richardson, the special effects supervisor, was a great mentor of mine, and he invited me to come and be part of a big sequence with the airship, which we fabricated out of steel and did the Golden Gate Bridge sequence.” Corbould has worked on every Bond film since, from The Living Daylights to No Time to Die , snatching several Guinness World Records on the way…
50 years and has included multimillion- pound blockbusters, ranging from the second and third Christopher Reeve Superman movies – through Alien 3 , I nterview with the Vampire and The Mummy to Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and Inception (for which he won an Academy Award in 2011) – as well as an X-Men movie and a pair of Star Wars films. He has also been honoured with an OBE. Yet, his most famous body of work comes with the James Bond film series. Corbould has worked on all of Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig’s 007 movies, although his first contact with the series came even earlier when he was still a teenager – courtesy of 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me , arguably Moore’s greatest Bond outing.
007. NOVEMBER 2022
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