American Cinematographer - July 1987 - 60

sized
tary
face.

wax effigies of famous mili¬
leaders - all with Whitaker's

The

change in mood from

past Bond films is also reflected in
the art direction. There are no sets
in The Living Daylights on the scale
of the space station in Moonraker,
or the interior of the blimp in A
View To A Kill or Octopussys float¬

ing palace. Instead, there has been a
realism. Even the kinds of
realistic
a mili¬
Russian general, a KGB double

return to

villains
tant

are more

-

agent, and an American arms deal¬
er - all in keeping with the effort to
go
Richardson and son,

Marcus, with radiocontrolled

Ladyhawke"
represent second
and third

generation
of special effects
family.

villain. This is the fourth time Lamont has designed a lab for Q. This
one is supposedly at the home office
rather than on foreign assignment
and Lamont went for a high-tech
look. "Philips Electronics has sup¬

with thousands of pounds
extremely high-tech com¬
puters for their business systems.
The type of thing they use in inter¬
national banking. In the early days
we were lucky to get one or two
computers, now we have two or
three dozen of the most sophisti¬
cated computers ever made. Every¬
thing is set up and operating...."
"The most amazing piece
of high-tech equipment we have is a
huge video wall. It is made up of 12
plied

us

worth of

individual screens and we have the
choice of one huge moving picture
or a combination of pictures. This is
the first time it has ever been seen on
film."
For The Living Daylights,
the exterior of Whitaker's (Joe Don

Baker) villa is represented by the
Forbes Museum in Tangier. The
contains

museum

the

world's

largest private collection of minia¬
ture soldiers and military memo¬
rabilia covering centuries of land
warfare. A fitting home for a vil¬
lainous arms dealer. The interior
was constructed at Pinewood and,

they inevitably

are, destroyed by
007 when the villain gets his come¬
as

uppance.

The interior was based on
museum. In fact,

the interior of the

only after the location
museum

fanatic

did

on

Pinewood

62

American

our

crew saw

the

villain become

a

military strategy. The
set

included nine life¬

Cinematographer

back

to

the books.

For Lamont, as
there is a certain thrill at

for Glen,

being able
imagine." He

"do what you can
would do another Bond film with¬
to

out

hesitation, but, he

warns,

doors chopping an agent in half, a
mid-air battle between Bond and
the evil Necros hanging on a net

suspended underneath the Hercules
and that's just the beginning. The

-

Aston-Martin

largest roles
off a chase
grows

skis

must never forget - all these
Bond pictures are a huge team
effort. We are only as good as one
another. It's all a big tea. We rather
like to leave people thinking 'How
the hell did they do it!' "

in

one

of its

it cuts the chassis
with its built-in laser,

ever:

car

so

it

can maneuver on a

lake of ice, fires two rockets and
blows up a road block, and takes on
a little extra
speed with a special jet

engine.
But Richardson's purview
doesn't end there. There are myriad
little things: for instance, the ghetto
blaster that will literally knock your
head off, the sofa that swallows

people, the toxic and explosive key
ring - all of it comes under the title
of special effects.
Richardson is

"Peo¬

ple

returns

a

man

that

John Glen describes as a "bit dour,
but he comes up with some lovely
ideas." It's not just the ideas but the
execution of those ideas that make

Special Effects
John Richardson's special
effects is one of the ways they do it.

Richardson's place in the world of
special effects. In the rough cut re¬
cently viewed at Pinewood, there
were maybe four or five shots mark¬
ed for opticals. Everything else was
done, as the British say, real-for-

Richardson, like

real.

family,

most

with

of the Bond

history. His
father Cliff Richardson practically
invented special effects in England
in the early '20s at Ealing Studios.
John's first film was Exodus. He left
comes

school for

a

while

at

about 15

to

help his father in Israel. His credit
appears on such familiar films as A
Bridge Too Far, Superman, ffolkes,
and Raise The Titanic, and he re¬
cently shared an Academy award
for his work

Probably Richardson's best

a

Aliens. Richard¬
son's association with Bond began
with Moonraker and he hasn't
missed one since.
If the locations in a Bond
film are like a minor character, then
the special effects are eligible for
best supporting role. Audience ex¬
on

are always high - what
they possibly do that they

in-camera stunt involved a bridge
over a ravine in Morocco. The Free¬
dom Fighters are being chased
across

it

by Russians in various

ve¬

hicles. The audience sees a bridge
over a hundred-foot ravine. There

explosions going off on the
bridge while horses and vehicles
crowd over it. Eventually Bond
are

blows it up.
In

reality the ravine was
deep. "We laid a fore¬
ground miniature of the ravine and
we used the bridge so that you
could see vehicles driving along it,"
explained Richardson. "We used
about 25 feet

from the hand rail down to the road
level of the existing bridge. Every¬

pectations

thing beneath that was miniature. It

can

was

haven't done before? Consider this
list from The Living Daylights: In
the major effects category, there is
almost a mid-air collision between
a

Hercules and

a

passenger

plane,

a

jeep ejected from the belly of the
Hercules with our heroes in it, glass

July 1987

23 feet from the camera lens to
the miniature. It was something like
a thousand feet from the camera
lens to the real bridge, so that the
two

do

a

married in. We could
nodal pan on

"All of the

actually

on

actually

it.

blowing up was
another bridge which
American Cinematographer - July 1987

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