Special Effects Supervisor Chris Corbould Details The Massive Undertaking For The No Time To Die's Ending - Exclusive
Looper recently interviewed Chris Corbould, the special effects supervisor for "No Time To Die." Corbould has been working on Bond films since the 1970s, starting as an uncredited special effects assistant on Roger Moore's "The Spy Who Loved Me." He kept up this unacknowledged effects work with "Moonraker," "For Your Eyes Only," and "A View To A Kill," before finally getting his first credit working special effects for Timothy Dalton's "The Living Daylights." He was promoted for the next movies, acting as the second unit special effects supervisor for "License to Kill." The Pierce Brosnan era kicked off with Corbould as special effects supervisor, a role he's held for every Bond film since.
Given his longevity, we asked him about any difference between Brosnan's more outlandish movies and Daniel Craig's more grounded works. "There's not a lot of difference between Pierce Brosnan ... films, and the Daniel Craig films," he replied. "It's more about what's in the script. In Pierce Brosnan, in 'The World is Not Enough' we had the caviar house being cut up by helicopter. You know, in Daniel's films, we had the sinking of the house in Venice, and then the tube train coming in through the roof. It's more about what's in the storyline than who the actor is."
That said, there was one big effect in "No Time To Die" about which we had to ask.
An explosive farewell
The most spectacular effect is, of course, saved until the end –- the big explosion that does what decades of weird villains never could and kills James Bond (At least, it killed Daniel Craig's iteration of Bond. We also can't totally rule out a "No Way Home" scenario where multiple Bonds traverse time and space to team up). Naturally, we had to ask Corbould about the most consequential explosion in Bond history.
"The explosion at the end was a combination of special effects and visual effects," he said. "We went to Salisbury Plain, and we rigged up three massive explosions that ... had the same parameters as the bunkers in the film. So we did the three explosions, and shot them, and then the visual effects put them in, adapted them, and put them in, and married them up with Daniel and the scene."
"No Time To Die" is now available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD.