One car, every gadget
On the Goldfinger Continuation he had to put every device in a single customer car. In the films, he said, four cars could carry four gadgets under controlled conditions.
People
Chris Corbould
Bond special-effects supervisor who developed the Goldfinger Continuation guns, smoke screen and oil slick
- Nationality
- British
The record
British special-effects supervisor who developed the working guns, smoke screen and oil slick on Aston Martin's DB5 Goldfinger Continuation.
He left school after an uncle working in special effects called him onto Tommy with The Who. He did not go back. At a Pinewood Studios effects company he spent years learning engineering as an unofficial apprentice — technical drawing, the lathe, welding — then joined the Bond unit on The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977. He later said a ski-stick prop from that film was something he made at seventeen or eighteen.
He has worked on fifteen Bond films and ran the series' special-effects team from GoldenEye in 1995 through No Time to Die in 2021. The official 007 site names the tank chase in GoldenEye and the DB5 pursuit through Matera in No Time to Die among the sequences he supervised. In 2011 he shared the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects on Inception with Paul Franklin, Andrew Lockley and Peter Bebb. The 2014 New Year Honours appointed him OBE for services to film.
His method is practical first. At the 2025 International Film Festival of India he said digital tools lose the emotional connection the moment they carry everything, and that Christopher Nolan would not accept a digital workaround for the truck flip in The Dark Knight. Variety records the same in-camera approach on the revolving corridor in Inception, and a full-size house interior he built to tilt and sink into a tank for Casino Royale.
In August 2018 Aston Martin and EON Productions announced twenty-five DB5 Goldfinger Continuation cars at Newport Pagnell, with gadgets to be co-developed with him. He told Aston Martin that film crews can split gadgets across several cars; a customer car cannot. His own work was chiefly the front guns, smoke screen and oil slick. The guns could not use the film-world gas-and-ignition flame, so a new system was devised for untrained hands.
Practical effects first
He has said digital tools lose the emotional connection once they carry everything. Variety records the same in-camera preference on Nolan's truck flip and revolving corridor.
Consumer-safe gun effect
The Goldfinger light-cluster guns could not use a flammable gas mixture. He devised a new system to give a realistic effect in untrained hands.
The stations
- 1977–1989EON ProductionsSpecial-effects technician on James Bond films
- 1995–2021EON ProductionsSpecial-effects supervisor, James Bond films
- 2018–2020Aston Martin Works and EON ProductionsGadget development, DB5 Goldfinger Continuation
The house
Credited through EON Productions.
In the register
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In their words
“We have licence in the film world to 'cheat' different aspects under controlled conditions. For instance, we might have four different cars to accommodate four different gadgets. We obviously don't have that luxury on these DB5's as all the gadgets have to work in the same car all the time.”
Chris Corbould · Aston Martin newsroom, 2019