“You’re going to have to rethink this.” An undercover source at Bond production company Eon cited “the opportunity to re-energise the franchise and take it to even greater heights.” “Look, this game’s changing fast,” Lee Tamahori, Die Another Day’s director, told the Bond producers after a screening of The Bourne Identity with its raw stunts. Until, that is, a creative handbrake turn jettisoned the near-50-year-old like an unsuspecting DB5 passenger. (For the pre-credits beach landing, he was body-doubled by surfer Laird Hamilton.) Nevertheless, Brosnan, a commercially successful and much-liked Bond, understandably expected to return for 2006’s Casino Royale, which would’ve been bang on the mid-Naughties trend for middle-aged action heroes: Rocky, Rambo, Indiana Jones, John McClane. But the highest-grossing Bond film to date was widely ridiculed for such cartoonishness as the Aston Martin “Vanish” and the undignified spectacle of a badly superimposed Brosnan surfing an ice tsunami. By contrast, Roger Moore’s tenure had, a longstanding Bond crew member told Brosnan, been “a good old laugh”.ĭie Another Day was deluged with CGI in an attempt to keep up with other blockbusters, and that paid off at the box office. Making Bond films was “great fun”, Brosnan later said, but also “bloody hard work”, lamenting that an action scene could take weeks to film without him uttering a line of dialogue. Producers Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli likened the incident to “a super-athlete getting hurt”, while Brosnan’s recovery was “almost bionic”.
Filming was delayed - another franchise first - for seven days, while he flew to the US for surgery. On 2002’s Die Another Day, while sprinting between explosions during the filming of the pre-credits hovercraft chase, his knee blew up. On Tomorrow Never Dies, Brosnan’s face required eight stitches after being cut by a stuntman’s helmet the crew shot his good side.
Stop him getting ill or injured.ĭislocating his collar bone after falling from a hot air balloon, Bond does get injured in the pre-credits sequence of The World is Not Enough - a franchise first for the hitherto remarkably unscathed character, but not the leading man. Warm him up before strenuous scenes and cool him down after. Be a training partner for Brosnan to lift weights and cycle with. But mostly the order of the day was “generic fitness”, says Waterson. And there was “no really big aesthetic brief” for new recruit Waterson, now a veteran of seven Bond films and over 20 years on the franchise: “We weren’t in an era of Marvel superhero physiques.”īrosnan’s third Bond film, 1999’s The World is Not Enough, presented some particular demands: lunges and other ski-type movements for the mountain sequences agility, hand-eye speed, coordination and ducking under pipes for the fight with Robert Carlyle’s terrorist Renard aboard a sinking submarine. This Bond was the rather more lithe Pierce Brosnan, then filming Tomorrow Never Dies, his second outing in the tux (by Brioni).
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And this was a different Bond: not Daniel Craig, arguably the most A-list of the V-shaped clients whose bodies Waterson would go on to transform: Chris Evans for 2011’s Captain America, Chris Pratt for 2014’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, all the Chrises, plus a Tom (Hiddleston), Jake (Gyllenhaal) and Benedict (Cumberbatch). These days, the idea that a rookie PT might receive an out-of-the-blue phone call to go to Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, 20 miles west of London, and audition for a supporting role with the world’s least secret agent is as far-fetched as an invisible Aston Martin.īut this was a different time: 1997. Finding himself opposite a fully naval-uniformed Commander James Bond was particularly surreal for Simon Waterson, who’d only just left his post as a physical training instructor in 845 Naval Air Commando Squadron.
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