Narrator: This is the climax
of the opening car chase in "No Time To Die."
To pull this off with hardly any CGI,
the Bond crew had to figure out
how to imitate bullet impacts
and then line each one up with the car's prop machine guns.
Chris Corbould: I think the beauty of this sequence is
it is probably 95% for real.
Narrator: And that's just one element
of an opening sequence that involved
10 versions of the Aston Martin,
hundreds of fake bullets,
and 8,400 gallons of soda.
Here's how they did it.
As soon as director Cary Fukunaga found Matera, Italy,
he knew the claustrophobic paths and steep slopes
were the perfect place to put 007 in peril.
We went out to Matera probably 13, 14 times,
finding locations, dreaming up ideas.
Narrator: That's Chris Corbould,
special effects and car supervisor for "No Time To Die."
While Corbould has overseen tank chases
and record-shattering explosions for the Bond franchise,
this shoot presented a surprising challenge:
cobblestone streets.
Matera's ancient streets weren't suitable
for vehicles going 80 miles per hour.
While beautiful, the roads were also slippery,
with less traction compared to modern asphalt roads.
So stunt coordinator Lee Morrison
came up with an unusual solution.
Soda.
He sprayed 8,400 gallons of sugary soda on the cobblestone.
Once dried, the sugar made the surface extremely sticky,
giving the tires much better grip.
The drivers could then make sharp turns, drift,
and go up narrow corridors.
I was skeptical at first myself about it,
but when I saw it,
it absolutely paid dividends.
Narrator: Once the roads were suitable for driving,
Bond could ride on a motorcycle
and execute a daring jump to reach the town square.
The memorable moment was done without a green screen.
Craig's stunt double had to jump a 25-foot ramp
going exactly 60 miles per hour
and then drop down 12 feet onto the road above.
To hide the ramp, filmmakers added this arch
as a clever VFX cover.
After four takes, they had the shot they needed.
The next part of the chase
sees Bond hop in his Aston Martin,
but the crew couldn't use just one car for this.
They alternated between 10 versions depending on the shot.
Two of them were the real version, used for beauty shots.
The rest were replicas.
Two had driving pods on the roof,
so a stunt driver could drive at high speeds
while the cameras captured Daniel Craig pretending to steer;
four were driven by stunt drivers inside the car
for exterior shots;
and two had all the gadgets built into them.
One such gadget was the mine dispenser,
which Bond activates here,
causing this black car to flip.
In reality, those mines were made with rubber,
and these simulated explosions
were electrical charges set to go off
as the car drove over them.
The flip provided another issue.
Because the car was going so fast,
it couldn't be attached to a fixed point,
so cables, which were usually effective, weren't an option.
So the crew needed a different approach
to flip the car without losing speed.
They placed a nitrogen cannon
facing down under the driver's side.
When activated with the push of a button,
it lifted the car into the air.
The stunt coordinator wanted to keep it
a bit more realistic
and have it look like it was just lifting up onto its side.
Narrator: But a dangerous stunt like this
meant they had to protect not only the stunt driver,
but also the city's old buildings.
Corbould: Some of those buildings are over 1,000 years old.
And Bond has a history and prides themselves
on not damaging anywhere they go.
Narrator: So they padded the buildings
with protective concrete barriers,
dressed up by the art department
to look just like the existing architecture.
This layer of protection was especially crucial
for one of the sequence's biggest moments,
where Bond does a full doughnut in the DB5
while firing the car's headlight machine guns.
The mechanics of the revolving ones
gave us a huge amount of firepower for the bullet impacts.
Narrator: Each bullet impact had to be synchronized
with the exact spot the guns were pointing.
The effects team couldn't be off by even a second,
or they'd risk ruining the illusion.
First, they used a line lock on the car's brakes,
which helped keep the doughnuts consistent for each take.
The stunt car's hydraulic hand brake
locked off the car's left front wheel.
Once the driver released the brake,
the car could spin on its own.
It's almost like a pivot.
So when you press the throttle to the floor,
you're actually pivoting around
that wheel that's locked off.
Narrator: The car also had to move
in sync with the gunfire.
Corbould: We had a line where we knew
the guns were lined up,
and we knew that it took one and a half seconds
to get from there to the next segment.
Narrator: So Corbould planted squibs
simulating bullet impacts all around the square.
Each of these was attached to a firing box.
Because they were set to an automated timer,
the devices would fire only when perfectly lined up
where the guns pointed.
Meanwhile, the stunts and effects team
had to ensure the safety of the actors and stunt drivers.
Right before going into doughnut mode,
Craig and Léa Seydoux had to be seen
from the inside of the car as the DB5 got shot up.
So Corbould fired about 200 pellets at the windows.
Each fake bullet created
a bullet-hole-like shape before shattering,
and the car's windows were layered
with a strong plastic called polycarbonate.
It would break the glass,
but there was certainly no way
that it would get through the plastic.
Narrator: While that was happening,
a crew member vibrated the car in sync with each impact.
Finally, there was the Connery-era smoke screen,
which Bond employs to make a getaway.
The screen needed to let off way more smoke
than an actual car exhaust.
So Corbould took off the car's exhaust
and replaced it with injectors
used to make smoke effects in movies.
We're using the heat coming out of the engine
to make the smoke in the exhaust.
Narrator: Funnily enough, these final shots
of Bond and Madeleine speeding away
were filmed before any of the preceding action was shot.
The last thing that we wanted to do
was lose one of our cars in the first part of the sequence,
because you never know how many you're going to use up.
Narrator: So they ended up faking the damage.
First, the crew put vinyl wraps on the car
and scratched them up.
Then a mixture of glue, glitter, and glass shards
created the illusion of bullet holes.
Corbould: If you got really up close to them,
you could probably see that they weren't real.
But, you know, the speed they were going at,
they held up perfectly.
Narrator: All of this work was done
for just the beginning of the movie,
showing just a sliver of how much thought
goes into a James Bond stunt --
and how much soda, too.