Goldeneye’s Tank Chase: The Definitive Behind-the-Scenes Look At The Design, Planning, And Filming of The Action Setpiece
The biggest action set piece in Goldeneye is an incredible tank chase. After the astounding truck chase in Licence to Kill set a new standard in vehicle stunts for the Bond series, Goldeneye had much to prove and EON Productions aimed to develop a unique and memorable central setpiece for the film. A tough call for a then-23-year-old film franchise known for original stuntwork.
Goldeneye’s tank chase featured complex practical stunts and practical effects with heavy vehicles carefully interacting with the environment. EON made careful preparations not to damage St Petersburg, with more dangerous and explosive stunts performed on recreated streets back in England.
Goldeneye’s tank chase is all practical stunts and effects except when James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) derails Alec Trevelyan’s (Sean Bean) train in the final scene. That final moment was created in miniature, and even though almost thirty years old, the miniature work is indistinguishable from the real tank.
This tank chase remains cinema’s most practical tank sequence, using real, modified tanks and no CGI, whatsoever. This is how they did it.
Concept and Planning
Bond special effects veteran, Chris Corbould, conceived the sequence.
Corbould, who was promoted to Special Effects Supervisor on Goldeneye, had worked on the Bond films since 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me, mastering his trade in everything from miniatures to physical effects to civil engineering effects.
Corbould, with his well-earned credentials in creating action sequences, was asked to join a meeting with Goldeneye’s director Martin Campbell, and producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli.
Originally a motorcycle chase was planned, and the producers wanted Corbould to develop ideas to make it more exciting.
“I got called in to see Martin Campbell and Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson,” Corbould told the Cracking the Code of Spy Movies Podcast. “They said to me, ‘Chris, we’re really worried about this motorcycle chase, you know. How can we make it better?’ [I said] ‘Well, get rid of it. There’s been three or four great motorcycle chases in the last two years.’ And they said, ‘What can we do different?’ I said, ‘Well James Bond starts that whole sequence in a military car park. Why doesn’t he just steal a tank?’ And they looked at me and said, ‘Yeah. Great idea!’”
Devising a great, original idea is one thing; making the sequence work in reality is quite another. The sequence involves Bond in pursuit of rogue Russian General Ourumov (Gottfried John) who has kidnapped love interest Natalya Simenova (Izabella Scorupco). It’s tank versus Ouromov’s GAZ 31029 Volga saloon, with many other Volga saloons and Ladas destroyed along the way.
Corbould’s main problem was determining why the car couldn’t outrun a slower tank. He explained the logic of the chase to
“The tank could go through buildings, whereas the car had to go around them. And that was the logic we used throughout that chase. He could always take shortcuts.”
From there, director Martin Campbell meticulously storyboarded the sequence and Corbould and his team created paper models to help visualize the sequence in 3D. Preplanning continued with stunt coordinator Simon Crane, the film’s cinematographer Phil Meheux, and second unit cinematographer Harvey Harrison.
Modifying And Testing 3 Old Russian Tanks
Corbould’s Special Effects team purchased three tanks: two 1950s Russian T-54s and T-55, costing £9,000 to £11,000 each for the sequence.
All were modified and painted to look like T-70s.
The tanks were tested for a few weeks. Corbould’s team drives them through masonry, walls, and over cars. “You’d think they’d just barge them out of the way, but with those tracks underneath, when you drive over a car it sort of feeds it through and out the back.”
Employing a trick used on Licence to Kill’s truck chase, the tank driver was hidden behind Brosnan, who looked like he was the one behind the controls. He was, in fact, pulling the levers to a dummy turret.
A tank was transported to St Petersburg from England on low-loader trailers.
One night, Corbould got a call from the shipping agent who said that one of the tanks was “still active and could still fire a shell. We needed to deactivate it, by welding a great big billet of steel into the barrel.”
They had to wait for an official from the Birmingham Proof House, who licenses all the guns, to give the tank a certificate of deactivation.
Shooting the Tank Chase: On Location and at Leavesden Studios
Image: MovieStillsDB.com
Shooting the sequence began on January 16th 1995 in St Petersburg under the direction of second unit director Ian Sharp and photographed by cinematographer Harvey Harrison. The first unit shot inserts of Brosnan in the driver’s seat after the second unit finished filming the sequence.
“It was five weeks’ work and ultimately will last five minutes in the final cut,” Harrison told American Cinematographer Magazine in 1995. “We nicknamed the tank ‘Metal Mickey’ — at 42 tons, it didn’t stop for anybody. We had ten days in St Petersburg and then shot for the balance at our stages in Leavesden.”
Harrison shot scenes at Leavesden in sunny and dull weather to match the footage from St Petersburg. Taking note of atmospherics and the sun’s position also helped with the seamless intercutting of both footage.
All 3 tanks had been transported from England to St Petersburg via low loader truck trailers.
The crew undertook a detailed engineering analysis to confirm how the sequence could be filmed carefully without damaging old roads and historic buildings of St Petersburg.
Surprisingly, St Petersburg’s authorities gave the Bond team the greenlight to film carefully staged stunts and explosions in the city.
Most of the on-location shots of the tank’s tracks were shots of an armored car fitted with dummy tank tracks. The tanks were 42 tons apiece, and the armored car weighed only about six tons. This helped prevent any damage done to St Petersburg’s streets.
Shots of the tank going alongside the canal and Ouromov’s car going across a bridge with pedestrians getting out of the way by jumping into the water were shot in St Petersburg.
Image: MovieStillsDB.com
Rebuilding St Petersburg
For more destructive stunt work, Corbould and his team turned to Goldeneye’s production designer, Peter Lamont, who recreated a two-block stretch of an old St Petersburg street on an old airfield at Leavesdon, England.
Lamont, another long-time Bond contributor, and his team of 175 workmen created the set in under seven weeks. The set spanned two acres and the building facades were supported by 62 miles of scaffolding. The attention to detail of the set was extraordinary with its authentic Russian-style telephone kiosks, street signs, and statues. The footage from the Leavesden set and St Petersburg were intercut together, and it’s impossible to tell the difference.
“We got the money shots in St Petersburg and intercut them with the tank doing real damage when it careens down an alleyway. That way we could actually crash buildings.”
Stunts
Stunt man Gary Powell drove the tank up to 35 mph.
Each shot was captured by no less than four cameras, sometimes six because many stunts, especially those in St Petersburg, could not be shot more than once. The main cameras used were a Panaflex Gold, two Arri IIIs, and one Arri IIIC. The tank was shot at different frame rates to give the illusion of acceleration and maneuverability.
Many shots from St Petersburg and Leavesden were combined to make one scene, such as the moment Ouromov’s car stops in gridlock traffic. The shots of the car turning into the street with the tank following close behind were shot in St Petersburg, while the actual traffic jam was staged at Leavesden.
Crashing Through A Wall
Image: MovieStillsDB.com
The tank chase begins with a bang, or should we say, crash.
Bond plows the tank out of the military car park through a wall. The wall was constructed in Leavesden, part of which was constructed with brick-size thermalite blocks.
The team timed the tank to crash through the wall moments after Ouromov’s car turned onto the road directly in front of the wall.
“The difficult part was getting the timing right because obviously the tank driver couldn’t see the car behind the brick wall skidding around the corner. So the stunt team had to do lots and lots of timings where the tank would get up to a terminal speed hit a mark, and then it would be all down to a stopwatch when they cued the car to come around the corner.
If they cued the car too early, it would have been squashed by the tank. If they cued it too late, it would be too great a distance and not in a great shot.”
Crashing Through A Lorry and Carrying a Statue
Image: MovieStillsDB.com
The most complicated stunt involved crashing through a truck carrying Perrier cans and then into the base of a statue of Tsar Nicholas on a horse which ended up on the tank’s roof.
It might be a great shot for product placement, but two crew members drew short straws and had to empty 90,000 cans of Perrier to prevent the cans from exploding fizzing liquid everywhere when the tank collides with the truck’s trailer.
Corbould and his team thought up many complicated rigs and mechanical rigs.
“In the end, all we did was put a great big loop off the horse bit on the top and drove the barrel [of the canon] at it and the loop looped over the barrel and hooked it. It was really simple but caused us a lot of headaches at the time.”
This scene was shot entirely on the St Petersburg set at Leavesden.
Miniature Tank Vs. Miniature Train
The final scene sees Bond come out of a train tunnel and park his tank on the truck. Dead ahead is Trevelyan in his armored train. Trevelyan tells the driver to accelerate and ram Bond’s tank. Bond fires a shell that explodes on the nose of the train. After he jumps to safety, the train crashes through the tank blowing it apart and derailing itself in the process.
The tank that comes out of the tunnel is life-size, as is the train that whizzes past Bond as he hides on the side of the track. But the collision and explosion of the tank are done in miniatures. And it really is hard to tell the difference.
The miniatures were conceived by legendary miniature effects supervisor, Derek Meddings, who unfortunately passed away shortly after the film was finished.
The First Time the Bond Theme is Heard in Goldeneye
The music by Eric Serra is the low point of the film. His tinny-sounding synthesizer version of the Bond theme is the most disappointing version of the theme across all Bond films. In post production, Serra’s Bond theme sounded even worse when matched to the tank chase footage. So director Martin Campbell decided to return to a similar version of the theme, similar to the original arrangement by composer John Barry.
“Let’s be honest,” Campbell said. “I was not very happy with the music in the film. When I was dubbing the tank chase, the music that came in for that was exactly the same register as the tanks, right? So, in other words, it disappeared. I said, ‘What we need is the Bond theme and you always use brass and percussion to crash through all the effects.”
Campbell tried to get Serra to do it, but his response was to “lower the effects.”
So he turned to composer John Altman to score the tank sequence.
“It was a Thursday, so you’ve got the weekend,” Campbell continued. “You take the sequence home. I want the Bond theme. Use brass and percussion. And by Tuesday I have to record this thing. So, I said, that’s what you’re doing this weekend. You are going to compose this. And he did.”
The film was released that Friday, so Altman came through for both Campbell and the film.
The tank chase was the first big moment for Corbould, who had been promoted to Special Effects Supervisor on the film. He has served as the SFX Supervisor on every Bond film since.
