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The stunts begin early in “No Time to Die,” the latest chapter of the Bond franchise, and the last with Daniel Craig as its star.
This scene comes after Bond has woken up from an explosion meant to kill him. He knows immediately that his partner, Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), is in danger. He tries to race back to her on foot, but gets cornered on a bridge by the same men responsible for the explosion. Deciding the best direction for his escape is down, he leaps from the bridge using power cables that are strung along it.
Narrating the scene, the director Cary Joji Fukunaga said the locations that he, his production designer, Mark Tildesley, and his cinematographer, Linus Sandgren, found during scouting helped to drive the narrative direction. They used a bridge in the Italian town of Gravina in Puglia.
The sequence was shot with Imax cameras, which presented a challenge because they’re so bulky. It limited how many the crew could use to cover the action. Scenes with this kind of stunt complexity are usually filmed with as many as five cameras, but often they only had two Imax ones to work with at a time. Fukunaga said they had to be very “surgical” about shooting to make sure they captured all they needed within their time constraints.
Later in the sequence, Bond is cut off by Primo (Dali Benssalah), who tracks him down by motorcycle. Bond leaps on Primo and knocks him off his ride. To make that moment happen, Fukunaga said he relied on the “Texas Switch”: the camera is first on Craig, but when it pans away from him, a double enters the shot to perform the stunt.
Read the “No Time to Die” review.
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