How Roger Moore’s most ridiculed gadget vehicle was built, filmed across one of the world’s most logistically hostile locations, and nearly sank its star — and why the slapstick it unleashed haunted the Bond franchise for the better part of a decade.
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) had posed a creative problem that no amount of script meetings could easily solve. The Lotus Esprit submarine car — a sleek, gadget-laden sports car that drove off a pier, sprouted fins and torpedoes, and glided through the Bahamas as a fully functional submersible — had set a benchmark for the Bond gadget vehicle that was almost impossible to follow.
How do you top a car that becomes a submarine?
The answer, in Moonraker (1979), was to stop trying to top it and instead invert it entirely. Where the Lotus Esprit had entered the water and transformed, a gondola (nicknamed the Bondola), equipped by Q Branch with a speed boat outboard motor and the ability to become a hovercraft would transform and exit the water. Where the Lotus was sleek and plausible, the Bondola would be preposterous and played entirely for laughs. It was the moment slapstick fully took the wheel of the Roger Moore era — and it left a long shadow over the films that followed.
Pre-Production: From Motorbike to Gondola
Moonraker presented the production with a location challenge unlike anything the franchise had previously attempted. Venice — built across 118 islands and connected by 400 bridges — is one of the most logistically hostile film locations on earth. There are no roads. Every piece of equipment had to be transported by barge. Associate Producer William Cartlidge, a nautical scholar, used his knowledge of the Dover Tide Tables to calculate the Venetian tides, later recalling that clearance
under the city’s bridges was sometimes less than a foot: “It was necessary because going under these bridges with our barges the clearance under them would sometimes be less than a foot. So if you tried to move the unit at the wrong time of the day you are in trouble.” The Venice location budget ran to $2 million — an entry listed in the production accounts as “special location facilities.” Cartlidge was rather more candid about what it actually covered: “Fuck it — it’s for bribes!”
The sequence itself began with a very different idea. Screenwriter Christopher Wood, finding that a gondola chase in Venice would be “too predictable,” originally conceived something far more kinetic. As Wood recalled in the EON Productions documentary Inside Moonraker: “I thought Bond getting on a motorbike and screaming around there because he could have used the waters as well: humped-back bridges, motorbike sprinting off and landing on gondolas and then off onto the other
side.”
It was producer Cubby Broccoli who vetoed the motorbike — not on creative grounds but on grounds of image. Motorcycles, Broccoli felt, were too low-end a vehicle for James Bond. The gondola idea emerged as the replacement, and with it came the creative problem of how to make a boat chase in one of the world’s most photographed waterways feel anything other than routine. Wood’s early drafts took the sequence in a markedly different direction from the finished film. A March 1978 draft, analysed in Clément Fuetry’s Scripting 007, shows Bond’s gondolier being killed not by a machine gun rather thana throwing knife. More strikingly, the sequence’s climax involved Bond escaping first on motorbike through Venice and then on a jetpack — launched from a boathouse, pursued by a helicopter, crashing through the glass roof of a luxury restaurant and landing between two tables. Bond’s line upon landing: “I’m afraid I haven’t made a reservation.” Broccoli, according to Wood, was obsessed with jetpacks. Nonetheless, the idea was scrapped. The hovercraft gondola — a direct creative inversion of the Lotus Esprit’s underwater transformation — replaced it.
The shift from the early script to the finished film also shaped the sequence’s opening — and the tone is set immediately. A man rises like Dracula from a coffin strapped to the roof of a passing funeral barge and kills Bond’s gondolier Franco with a throwing knife. Bond grabs the dead man’s knife and returns it. The coffin lid closes. The funeral boat glides on. It is slapstick from its first moment and abates as a lovers boat is sawn in half while they kiss, an old man throws away his cigarette — presumably giving up smoking — after seeing the coffin floating in the canal, till the moment the gondola turns into a hovercraft and travels past a double-taking pigeon in St Marks Square.
Moonraker leans into the comedy genre more than other Bond film — and for many it works, never taking itself seriously. At the time, Moonraker earned the highest box office for a Bond film, just two films after it had reached its low-point with Moore’s second outing as 007 in The Man With The Golden Gun. These various comedy moments — such as the Bondola sequence — helps prepare the audience for the film’s outrageous climax in outer space.
Engineering the Bondola: The Ford Granada on the Grand Canal
The central engineering challenge of the gondola sequence was one the production discovered the hard way. As documented in Inside Moonraker, the crew’s first instinct was to take a real gondola and fit it with a motor. The result was immediate and definitive: gondolas are not designed for speed. Once the vessel exceeded 15 mph, it sank.
The production was forced to start again. Cartlidge recalled the solution: “The gondola, which was a splendid idea and sort of rang a change on the normal boat chase thing. What we did in the first instance was get a gondola and we had to get a clapped out one and virtually rebuild it because nobody would sell us their prize gondola.” Ultimately four gondolas were purpose-built and
customised for the sequence, capable of travelling at 60 mph through the narrow Venetian canals — four times the speed at which the original had sunk.
The hovercraft transformation added a further layer of mechanical complexity. Former car designer Peter Bohanna — drafted into the Bond productions to conceptualise and build prop vehicles — was responsible for the Bondola’s construction. As documented in Bond Cars: The Definitive History, the gondola-hovercraft concealed a Ford Granada powertrain beneath its traditional wooden hull. The transformation mechanism worked by inflating a rubber skirt (the inflatable membrane around the base of a hovercraft holding a cushion of air) around the hull’s base, lifting the vessel clear of the water and allowing it to be driven on land. In principle, it was a clean and logical piece of engineering. In practice, as Roger Moore would discover, it was anything but.
Filming the Sequence
The main unit departed for Venice in late September 1978. Lewis Gilbert directed the Venice sequences, including the St Marks Square crossing made by the Bondola, with second unit work (i.e. the action work in the canals) overseen by John Glen — who had been brought in after original second unit director Ernest Day was forced to step down when his wife fell ill. Glen had previously done the Venice reconnaissance with Gilbert, so he was already familiar with the location when he
took over.
The sequence also pauses filming entirely at one point. The death of Pope John Paul I on September 28, 1978 — just days into the Venice shoot — brought the city’s bells into continuous tribute. The sound made location recording impossible, and the production suspended work until the tolling ceased.
What the finished sequence presents as a continuous chase through the Venetian canal system is, in reality, a geographical fiction. The production filmed across multiple disconnected neighbourhoods — primarily Dorsoduro in the south of the city and Cannaregio in the north — and stitched them together in the edit to suggest a single unbroken pursuit. Anyone who knows Venice well will recognise that Bond moves from one side of the city to the other between cuts, covering distances that would take considerably longer than the sequence implies. It is a classic piece of location filmmaking — the city as a collection of visual assets rather than a coherent geography.
The Canal Chase — A mishmash of unrelated locations stitched into one continuous chase
The chase proper was filmed primarily in Dorsoduro, with the Fondamenta Briati, Rio del Carmini and Rio de S. Margherita used repeatedly for trick shots as the four customised gondolas — capable of 60 mph — threaded through the narrow waterways. For context, the official speed restriction in Venice’s canals is 5 knots — approximately 6 mph. The production was moving at ten times the legal limit. As Moore described in Bond on Bond, the conditions were in one sense straightforward: the canals were so narrow and the action so fast that crowds had nowhere to watch from except a few bridges, and by the time anyone realised what was passing, it was already gone.
Behind the wheel of the Bondola throughout the canal chase was Irish stuntman Martin Grace — Roger Moore’s principal stunt double across six Bond films — with Claude Carliez, the French stunt arranger on the production, playing the gondolier Franco on screen. Carliez had the distinction of being both the man responsible for coordinating the French stunt performers and the man killed in the sequence’s opening shot. The pursuing speedboat — registration V99060 — was piloted by stuntman Claude Pillas while Michel Berreur fires a machine gun.
The chase also passes the Squero di San Trovaso — one of Venice’s last working gondola shipyards, also in Dorsoduro — giving the sequence an inadvertent irony: Bond’s motorised impostor of a gondola roaring past the very yard where real ones are built and repaired.
The Gondola Split — A Practical Trick Using Weights
Here the sequence makes its most audacious geographical leap. The edit cuts from Dorsoduro in the south to Cannaregio in the north — opposite sides of the city — convincing the audience that it’s an adjacent location. The gondola carrying the kissing couple emerges from Rio di Santa Caterina as Bond and the pursuing speedboat come in from the north on the canal. The production installed temporary traffic lights on the canal wall specifically for this shot, controlling boat movement through the junction during filming. As the speedboat passes over the kissing couple’s gondola and shears it in two, the front half drifts away across the canal towards Rio della Sensa, the couple still blissfully unaware. Their gondolier, rather less fortunately, goes down with the other half. The gag nods directly to the river chase in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), in which a boat is similarly sheared in half.
The stunt was performed by Daniel Breton as the male half of the kissing couple and Dorothy Ford as the female half — Ford also serving as stunt double for Lois Chiles elsewhere in the film. To ensure the floating half of the gondola didn’t simply sink the moment it was sheared, the production weighted it to keep it stable on the water — allowing the couple to continue their oblivious embrace, while their gondolier went down with the other half of the boat.
The Hovercraft Transformation — Canal Grande, St Mark’s Basin
The chase climaxes at the Canal Grande quays leading to St Mark’s Basin, with the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute visible in the background. Here the gondola was required to exit the canal, rise out of the water as a hovercraft, and mount the waterfront steps onto the Piazzetta. There were 40,000 tourists watching.
Two gondolas were used for the sequence: the first for the transformation shot itself, the second — built on the Ford Granada chassis — for the land-based driving across the square. The transformation was filmed in five attempts. The problem was that the hovercraft’s inflation mechanism activated unevenly — one side inflating faster than the other, tipping the vessel sideways and depositing Moore into the Grand Canal.
As Moore described it in Inside Moonraker: “I’m sitting there in a nice grey silk suit, push the button, and the thing starts to rise up out of the water, and WHOOP! — it throws me into the lagoon. There are 40,000 tourists watching. They think that’s rather fun. I don’t think it’s very much fun at all.”
The tourists, armed with Nikon cameras, documented each failure with enthusiasm. Each take required Moore to be dried off, re-suited, re-made-up and returned to the gondola. He had arrived for the day with five silk suits. After four failures, everything depended on the fifth take — and the fifth suit. It worked. “Luckily I had five suits,” Moore recalled — though characteristically muddling the count in the telling. “One more take and we wouldn’t have been able to do it.”
St Mark’s Square — Piazza San Marco, alongside the Doge’s Palace
Once on land, the sequence abandons any remaining pretence of action filmmaking and becomes pure comedy. Bond drives the Bondola up from the canal onto the Piazzetta and across the vast open square — all at the wheel of what is, however you dress it up, a motorised gondola on wheels,
threading through tens of thousands of bewildered tourists.