Kill, you could psyche yourself up for what could
well be the last stunt you ever do. And maybe,
just maybe, the lastthingyou ever do.
•••
THE SCRIPT CALLED for Bond to clamber onto
the wheels of the crop duster and, as Bouvier
manoeuvres the plane into position, leap out
onto the top of the tanker below. But scripts call
for so many things. Jumping from a plane onto
a moving truck is a cinch on the page. The reality
is much harder. So Crane and the second-unit
team threw themselves into rehearsals, where
two things happened. During one rehearsal,
the engine packed up on the plane, forcing stunt
pilot ‘Corkey’ Fornof to make an emergency
landing. “Bear in mind, Corkey was doubling
a girl, and he was wearing a dress, and I was
doubling Bond, so wearing a suit,” laughs Crane.
“We land in the middle of the mountains in
Mexicali and, suddenly out of nowhere, all these
Mexican DEA agents came running at us with
guns. They thought we were dropping drugs.
So there was a bit of explanation needed.”
Once underpants had been changed, and
the prospect of appearing in a prequel toSicario
had diminished, the second thing that happened
is that they realised the stunt was hard. Very
hard. Harder than they’d anticipated.
“The plane’s doing 70 miles an hour, and the
truck’s doing 70 miles an hour,” explains Crane.
“And it was extremely hot there. So, because
of the thermals, the plane actually didn’t get
anywhere near the petrol tanker in most of the
rehearsals.” Oh, and Crane wasn’t tethered to
the plane. He was free-jumping a fairly short
distance, but still one that could end with him
being squished, or bouncing off the tanker
and over the edge of the mountainside. Still,
stuntmen aren’t like the rest of us. They are not
like other mortals. Crane wasn’t allowed to eat
anything for breakfast, in case he had an accident
and then had another accident. But if he had
been, he would have chomped down on a bowl of
pressure, with some pressure on toast. Because,
during that long drive up to the location on the
day of the actual stunt, when he and Corbould
and the rest of the crew had to get up at 3.30am
because they had to shoot the stunt before it
got too hot, he didn’t spend it thinking about
anything and everything that could go wrong.
“I fell asleep,” he admits. “You just get pissed off ,
and you just want it done. And then, when it is
done, there’s the big sense of relief.”
And, also, a sense of slight discontentment.
For, after all that hard work, after pulling off a stunt
so dangerous it should be in the Bond Stunts Hall
Of Fame, you can barely see it in the fi nished fi lm.There’s a brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of
Crane-as-Bond hitting the top of the tanker, but
that’s it. Crane is still not happy about it, more
than 30 years on. “It should be the big show-
stopping moment, really,” he muses of the stunt.
“But it’s so quick... We could have just hung
a crane over the plane, wiggled it about a bit,
and I could have jumped safely onto the truck
from there.” It’s hard to argue. Still, it had one
unexpected benefi t: Crane’s disappointment over
the stunt pushed him to become a second-unit
director in his own right, working on the likes
of Hobbs & Shaw, Rogue One and Edge Of
Tomorrow. “You’re more in charge of the action,”
he says. “And hopefully I’m fi lming it in a unique
way. Never do the same thing twice.”•••
CRANE’S BIG MOMENT in the tanker chase
may have been botched, but nobody can say that
about Licence To Kill’s real show-stopping stunt:
when Bond, now at the wheel of the tanker, is
shot at with a surface-to-air missile. His only
recourse is to bump the truck onto a handily
placed mound of mud, and tilt it up onto its side,
deftly avoiding the missile, which fl ies semi-
harmlessly into another truck behind, sending
a very Bondian comedy extra running for his life.
Again, that’s the sort of thing that’s easy for © 1989 Danjaq, LLC & Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All rights reserved