Ten silver Aston Martin DB5s were used for the thrilling opening action scene in No Time To Die filmed in the southern Italian city of Matera. Two of the cars had all the spiffy gadgets built in such as mine dispensers, smoke machines and headlight machine guns.
But the cars were just one element of what went into the scene for the latest Bond movie as explained in the above Insider video by special effects supervisor Chris Corbould who said that 95 percent of what is featured in the sequence is real.
Watch the above six and bit minute-long video on how they created the stunts by clicking on the play icon on the left in the feature image.
The city of Matera is a Unesco heritage site, and the crew went to great lengths to protect its architecture while also coming up with ingenious ways to ensure that the vehicles didn’t slip on the town’s ancient cobblestone streets — hint it included gallons of soda pop.
Other productions have shot picturesque city include Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, released in 2004.
No Time To Die’s director Cary Joji Fukunaga said the film’s production designer Mark Tildesley pitched him the idea of filming in Matera, a city of some 60,000 people.
“The monochrome nature of Matera already makes it feel like a large necropolis. There’s a lot of metaphors there in terms of what Bond was leaving behind for the next chapter,” Fukunaga told EW.
“So that’s kind of how we got there,” he said.
“We also combined two different cities in the sequence. The bridge that we say connects Matera to the necropolis is actually in a neighboring town around 30, 40 minutes away called Gravina in Puglia. We made it seem like it’s all part of the same journey, but it’s actually not part of the same town.”
Fukunaga said the locals of Matera showed up en masse to try to get a glimpse of the film’s star Daniel Craig who was onboard for his fifth and last outing as 007.
No Time To Die is officially the 25th Bond movie produced, not counting the 1967 version of Casino Royale or 1983’s unofficial Never Say Never Again.
