[quote]
Originally posted by DLibrasnow
I never knew that about the historical buildings...Is there somewhere I can read about that Triton? [/quote]
There is an interview with Derek Meddings in the August 1981 issue of
American Cinematographer and I remember reading the article several years ago when I was in college from a library whose holdings have since been destroyed by fire.
Luckily, the
Mister Kiss Kiss Bang Bang site of the Ian Fleming Foundation has reprinted articles from the
For Your Eyes Only issue of
American Cinematographer.
In the article titled
For Your Eyes Only and its Special Effects, Derek Meddings describes his minature work on the film.
[quote]
QUESTION: Although you direct all of the mechanical effects on the Bond films, your specialty is miniatures. What was the major miniature sequence in this picture?
MEDDINGS: There wasn't as much miniature work as in most Bond pictures I've worked on because they don't like people to think that there are miniatures used in those films. They prefer to have the audience think that it was all done for real, but on this occasion, we had a sequence that was shot at a harbor on the island of Corfu (it's supposed to be Albania), where all the heavies have their hideout in a particular warehouse. Eventually Bond and his crew attack the warehouse. The villain of the picture had set the warehouse to explode. When Bond and all his attackers get inside, he pushes a plunger and the whole place explodes. We located a spot on Corfu that had a building on a jetty and it was near a fort - quite a historic fort. All we had to do was build a false roof and blow it off to make it look as if the whole building blew up. When the authorities on Corfu realized what we were up to - we had written them a letter telling them what we were going to do and that we wouldn't damage their historic fort, but they didn't believe us - they said we weren't allowed to blow the roof off this building. That presented us with a problem, because now we had a major sequence that had to be shot elsewhere.
QUESTION: Where did you finally shoot it?
MEDDINGS: What we did was build a large miniature on the backlot of Pinewood Studios. We built the whole area in miniature right down to the last detail, including the jetty, the wharf and two boats. One was a lighter and the other was quite a beautiful sailing ship, a three-master. We built the whole lot. The script called for the villain in a Mercedes to drive along the jetty when he pushes the plunger that blows the building up, just as Bond and his helpers come out of the warehouse. We did most of this on Corfu, but we built a larger section of the warehouse out on the backlot at Pinewood so that we could blow the doors off. It looked quite dramatic. However, the climactic moment of the sequence is when the whole of the jetty and the warehouse erupt in balls of flame, and that we did in miniature. It was about 1/12 scale. The jetty must have been about 60 feet long. The actual warehouse itself was about 2
