Learn the planning, staging, and filming of Licence to Kill’s truck chase and how Kenworth modified three trucks for Rémy Julienne and his stunt crew to perform some of the best truck stunts in cinema. Plus, discover how director John Glen planned this action sequence, how the Bond team created some of the biggest explosions in history, and how Timothy Dalton performed many dangerous stunts himself. 

In Licence to Kill, James Bond (Timothy Dalton) goes rogue and seeks vengeance against drug lord Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) for maiming his best friend Felix Leiter and killing Leiter’s bride, Della.

The stripped-back, tightly plotted film builds to a phenomenal climax involving five 16-wheeler Kenworth gasoline tankers, a plane, a car, a pickup truck, several infernos, and a fiery end to Sanchez. Bond has infiltrated Sanchez’s drug operation, destroyed it from the inside out, and blown his drug processing plant sky-high. All that remains is Sanchez’s cocaine dissolved in petrol that he is smuggling in those five Kenworth tankers. 

The stage is set for some spectacular road rage and implausible stunts with Kenworths. The well-staged sequence is one of the best action sequences in the Bond series.

The ten-minute sequence rivals practical truck stunts from Terminator 2. Indeed, Licence to Kill’s truck chase is largely forgotten, but it nonetheless set the groundwork for more audacious vehicular stunts in cinema, including the aforementioned truck chase in Terminator 2. Like the truck sequence in T2, this truck chase involves Bond overcoming a series of obstacles in his path to close the gap between him and his target.

This involved stuntmen performing some nifty stuntwork, including:

• overtaking and ramming another Kenworth into a cliff face
• avoiding a missile by performing a side wheelie which involved driving a truck and trailer onto its side
• performing a pop-up wheelie to drive through an inferno
• ramming one of the tankers into the side of Sanchez’s last remaining truck, and
• overturning a truck and trailer as it goes over an embankment

Everything to do with the trucks was performed with practical effects and stunts. They were all full-scale trucks. No miniatures. However, miniatures were used for Pam Bouvier’s plane and a jeep in one scene, and a few other movie tricks were used to sell the idea that the actors were involved in the action. Timothy Dalton did also perform some of his own stunts when he wasn’t being doubled for more dangerous stunt work.

Licence to Kill’s truck chase would be the first of more large-scale vehicular action setpieces in the Bond series, including Goldeneye‘s tank chase, Tomorrow Never Dies’ motorcycle chase, and beyond into Daniel Craig’s tenure. 

Creating and filming these sequences is complicated, dangerous, and significant planning is made before one frame of film is shot. 

The Brainchild of John Glen

The truck chase recalls the truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the climax in Mad Max: Road Warrior. But Glen told Jason Barlow, author of Bond Cars: The Definitive History that he was inspired by the 1958 film Wages of Fear in which four mercenaries transport nitroglycerine on a long hazardous road.

Licence to Kill was Glen’s fifth consecutive Bond film as director, and before that as second unit director, he directed some of the best action sequences in the Bond series. In his book, For My Eyes Only, Bond’s longest-serving director wrote that the truck chase “was probably the most complicated and dangerous sequence I ever devised.”

Speaking with Really, 007 podcast Glen detailed how he broke the sequence down into two or three-second segments, which he did for all his action sequences. There are hundreds of cuts in Glen’s action sequences of three minutes or more, primarily for safety reasons.

“… That’s the whole art of action shooting is you do it in very easy to manage segments, otherwise it becomes very, very dangerous for the participant. It can be a very dangerous business shooting this stuff and particularly with cars, you know car chases. I mean I’m thinking Licence to Kill where we did those scenes where Timothy’s underneath the wheels of this huge truck. One slip and he’s under.”

Glen storyboarded the sequence before EON even approached Kenworth for permission to use their trucks. 

Approaching Kenworth HQ in Seattle

Legendary stuntman Rémy Julienne, who coordinated the stunts on Licence to Kill, approached Kenworth at their headquarters in Seattle.

Licence to Kill continued the Bond tradition of product placement. Kenworth actually paid to have their truck tankers modified and destroyed in the sequence and ran a series of print adverts and commercials based on scenes from the film. Apparently, the sight of wrecked and exploding Kenworths in a Bond film increases sales. 

The truck company gave the production 16 Kenworth W900B tractor trucks. Only 144 were ever produced, and in Mexico Chris Corbould had the dubious task of finding trailers and tankers to match these Kenworths from local truck drivers and truck companies. (The locals tried to hike prices when they heard the film production needed truck equipment.)

Julienne told Kenworth what stunts he wanted the trucks to do, and special modifications were made to three Kenworth tractors nicknamed Pamela 1, 2, and 3, after the film’s heroine, Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell). 

Three Trucks Modified For Stunts

Seattle-based company, Truckweld, upgraded the suspension and added heavy weights to the prime movers so they could perform wheelies with the three stunt trucks. Modifications were made to each stunt truck to perform a specific stunt: one to perform pop-up back-wheelies, one with a high supercharge engine, and one with dual-steering. 

The modified back-wheelie Kenworth W900B truck required a new front axle, steering brakes, and the application of a new suspension to the rear fault axle.

The high supercharge modified Kenworth W900B truck received new turbo charges and injectors increasing horsepower to 1000 hp, two to three times the normal capacity.

The dual-steering modified Kenworth W900B truck was the largest and most detailed modification of all the trucks.

The dual steering wheel was invented for the film and involved electronic engines and two throttle steer peddles, each independently operated. Truckweld’s retired engineer Moe Buringrud devised the system and sent an instruction manual with it to Mexico.  In the film, Carey Lowell appeared to be driving the truck, but in reality, her steering wheel was operated by a stunt driver hidden behind her. He drove the truck and the dual steering wheel also turned Lowell’s steering wheel left and right adding to the appearance that she was driving.

Filming the Truck Chase

The sequence was filmed at 7,000 feet above sea level on La Rumorosa Pass, a twisting, dangerous stretch of road that snakes down a mountainside about 50 miles west of Mexicali, a city in Mexico. The altitude of the location and the 120-degree temperatures made filming arduous and kept the on-set doctor busy attending crew suffering from altitude sickness. 

The production took place on a four or five-mile stretch of the road, closed to the public after many fatalities. Barbara Broccoli produced the truck chase–her first solo producing effort–which Glen described the truck chase as “a film-within-a-film”. 

Second Unit Director, Alec Wooster, filmed all the stunt work over seven weeks at Rumarosa, and Glen and the principal actors (Dalton, Davi, and Lowell) arrived toward the end to shoot their contribution. This arrangement between first and second units is standard on action sequences.

Remy Julienne and The Kenworth Stunts

Famed vehicle stunt driver Rémy Julienne masterminded the spectacular stunt driving. As a long-time collaborator on the Bond films, Julienne knew his craft. Julienne worked as a stunt driver and driving stunt arranger on six successive Bond films beginning with For Your Eyes Only and ending with Goldeneye. While he didn’t personally perform any stunts on Licence to Kill, the truck stunt work here is arguably his team’s best work. His stunt team did most of the driving while he coordinated the stunts.

Julienne regarded his work as “science rather than stunts” and apart from the obvious calculations that must be made in successfully performing a stunt without injury.

The above clip features no less than four crazy, yet thrilling, truck stunts in less than two and a half minutes. The most impressive stunt is when Bond drives his Kenworth and trailer onto its side to avoid a stinger missile. Bond then rights the truck again and, in the process, flattens a Jeep CJ-7 driven by Sanchez’s henchmen.

Truck Side Wheelie

Driving an 8-wheeler onto its side is a wild idea, and Julienne employed an expert stunt driver to perform it. However, Julienne had a backup plan in case it didn’t work. His team initially tested a rig mounted to the side of the truck.

The precaution wasn’t needed though as the stunt driver performed the stunt without the rig, perfectly. Nonetheless, according to Licence to Kill stunt coordinator Paul Weston, Julienne’s team spent two or three months trying to get the truck to drive on its side. After many practice runs steering the truck cab only, the stunt driver performed the stunt with the tank attached. Driving an articulated (prime mover and trailer) truck is a lot more difficult than driving a prime mover on its side.

“With an articulated truck that’s when the skill comes in,” Weston told James Bond Radio. “It takes a long time to perfect. And he had to cut of the center part of the middle of the tanker to make it slightly shorter because it was getting out of – you couldn’t control too much.”

In a Licence to Kill featurette, director John Glen expressed how impressed he was with the stunt driver.

“How that didn’t fall over I don’t know…We were able to do it without using any devices. The skill of some of these French drivers is amazing. It’s one thing doing these sorts of wheelies with a car but to do it with a 10-ton truck is something new.”

The Bond series and other action films are filled with cars performing wheelies, but nothing can top an 8-wheeler driving on its side.

Crashing A Kenworth Into A Cliff Face

The glorious result of Bond’s truck slamming another into a cliff wall was actually a mishap. Weston recalled:

“At one time—it wasn’t Timothy; it was a French stunt guy—hit the wall and just smashed up. It went through so many tankers…It really smash a few of them up.”

Plane Stunts and Miniatures

Bouvier’s Piper PA-18-150 Super Cub crop duster is a combination of stunt work, models, and miniatures. Corkey Fornof, who piloted the Acrostar mini-jet in Octopussy’s pre-title sequence, piloted the crop duster in the truck chase. A makeshift runway had to be bulldozed in Rumarosa mountains first so Fornof could land and take off.

Fornof flew above the tanker so Dalton could drop on top. He had to steady the plane as a prop missile shot through the plane’s tail, and he dropped a load of fertilizer on Sanchez’s henchmen.

The idea of flying a plane underneath a burning jeep plummeting off a cliff worried Fornof. So Richardson’s team built a remote control replica of the plane and a three-quarter scale model jeep for the scene.

“A very tricky model shot because we had to find a cliff we could access near a road straight enough that Nigel Brackley could take off and land the model from,” Richardson said in his book, Making Movie Magic: A Lifetime of Creating Special Effects for James Bond, Harry Potter, Superman, and More. “After a long search we found one and just managed to get the shot but timing it was very difficult, especially with the camera turning at 120 frames a second to slow it down.”

The life-size plane was suspended from a crane with Lowell in the cockpit for mid-shots and close-ups. All were intercut together, along with aerial footage to suggest that Lowell was behind the controls and performing the stunts. It all works rather well.

Pyrotechnics

“The major effects challenge on Licence to Kill was the work with the tanker chase, where we had all these petrol tankers and they had to crash and blow up with missiles being fired at them… [W]e were doing all the fiery bits in between [the truck wheelies and plane stunts]. It’s not often that you get the opportunity to do explosions that often and that big. I think we had something like five tankers we had to blow up. That took up a vast portion of the work on the film for us,” special effects coordinator John Richardson said in the book, James Bond Legacy. 

Each explosion was carefully planned and timed. Crew often had to hide behind rocks to avoid shrapnel and also the intense heat. 

Timothy Dalton Performs His Own Stunts

Dalton wanted to do as many stunts as possible, but many were just too dangerous for the actor to perform. 

The truck driving was performed by Julienne’s team, with close-ups of Dalton in a cab. But many of the other stunts involving Bond on the outside of the trucks is Dalton. As already mentioned, Dalton dropped from the Piper PA-18-150 Super Cub crop duster onto the back of a moving tanker.

And he does, on occasion, go underneath the moving tankers to dodge machine gun fire. (Note the deliberate sound of ricocheting bullets performing the Bond theme).

He was also required to kick out a cab window, climb onto the hood and then grab hold of the ladder on the rear of Sanchez’s tanker. 

“For the finale, I had to jump from one moving tanker to another,” Dalton told Empire Magazine (June, 2012). I leap across, climb the ladder while all these bullets are going off – bam! bam! bam! – and the klaxon that means ‘cut’ goes off. I’m thrilled. I know I’ve done a good job. But when I look around, everyone’s pissing themselves. I look down and I’m in my underpants. My trousers are hanging down off my ankles.”

Image: Danjaq

Despite Dalton’s courage, stuntman and Licence to Kill‘s stunt coordinator, Paul Weston, had to step in and double for the actor for more hair-raising dives on the back of the moving trailer. 

A Haunted Location?

La Rumorosa Road appeared to be disused for a reason — a supernatural reason. Years earlier, a van carrying nuns went over the edge and burst into flames.

Strange events plagued the area ever since, including the production of Licence to Kill.

Vehicles suddenly caught fire in the middle of the night, a security guard was confronted by an apparition that disappeared like smoke, one vehicle suddenly drove by itself, but the spookiest occurrence was caught on camera. 

“If there was any doubt left in my mind [that the place was haunted], it was dispelled by a bizarre photograph taken by one of the special effects boys,” Glen recalled in his book. “One of the trucks explodes in a huge fireball and the still showing the explosion shows something that isn’t at all visible in the movie — the flames seem to form the face of a dog, and a column of fire extending from the explosion appears to make the shape of a forearm and five fingers, reaching out from the fire.”

While many of the crew dismissed the events, others bought into local folklore that the road was haunted.

Other mishaps included a prop missile hitting a linesman up a telegraph pole two miles away and a near head-on collision between an ambulance and one of the Kenworths carrying Dalton. The near miss could have cost Dalton his life.

Nonetheless, despite these setbacks, the crew filmed the sequence on time, creating one of the most spectacular Bond film finales.