Licence to kill cars: we speak to the stunt team behind No Time to Die

A Land Rover Defender 110 sits stationary in the pouring rain.

While appearing stock from the outside, the interior has been stripped bare, a new fuel cell installed, along with the kind of roll cage that’d make a WRC car blush. Sat strapped into the fixed bucket seat via a racing harness is Jessica Hawkins. You probably don’t recognise the name, but you should.

Stretching in front of Hawkins is what appears to be an empty field. But right at the vanishing point, where mud and grass meets bleak sky, sits a ramp. From certain perspectives the metal construction is competely hidden. That’s no mistake. And now, with no practice run, Hawkins must hit the ramp at near enough 100km/h, launching her Defender into the air.

Not many would be willing to take her place. This is the work of a stunt driver - doing what others can’t, or won’t.

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You and millions of others will be able to watch the end result of Hawkins’ leap of faith, as it is part of a chase sequence in the latest James Bond film, No Time To Die. It’s no spoiler alert to say that the flight path is impressive both on film and in reality, with the 110 and Hawkins completing a 30-metre jump worthy of an automotive Olympics gold, in a lumpy 4x4 weight division at the least.

In the scheme of the movie, and to a larger extent the Bond story, Hawkins and her Defender are a temporary blip of action. But those few seconds of movie magic, where a Land Rover is launched skywards, isn’t the work of a moment, it is culmination of months of hard work from a frankly giant team of professionals. MOTOR sat down with three of them to find out how visually death defying stunts are made safe and repeatable.

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At the coalface is Hawkins, one of the many stunt drivers that performed the action you see on-screen in No Time To Die. Above her in the ranks is Lee Morrison (pictured above), a veteran of the industry who has been there, jumped that, crashed those, and now heads up elite level stunt crews while working as a full-time stunt coordinator. Finally, there is Chris Corbould (pictured below), the action vehicle supervisor that leads a team of people between 100-120 strong depending on the project.

Think of Chris as the ideas man. He is responsible for working with the director to turn an ethereal idea or concept into a performable and engaging reality – often going to extremes to do so.

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When it comes to Her Majesty’s Stunt Service, Chris Corbould is quite literally The Man. The 63-year-old was the special effect supervisor in the eight Bond films preceding No Time To Die, having worked on a total of 15 films that focus on the world’s most famous spy.

His other special effect credits include Inception, Star Wars The Force Awakens, and The Dark Knight Rises. Such is Corbould’s talent that the Queen named him an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2014 New Years Honours List. Bond would be proud.

This is to say that when Corbould attempts something, he doesn’t do it by halves. He has a firm rule for the Bond Films that he oversees that if a stunt is to be included, it needs to happen for real – CGI be damned.

Remember the sequence in Skyfall, where an entire train falls through the roof? Corbould was so determined to make it happen that he had a series of ‘lightweight’ train carriages built (weighing five to six tonnes each), and then crashed them on set.

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“I was finishing off Dark Knight Rises in Los Angeles, and I had a call from [Skyfall director] Sam Mendes about the underground sequences. And he said to me, ‘I’ve got this great sequence, on foot, running through the underworld of London.’ He said, ‘I just need one great big jaw-dropping moment.’ And that night I just dreamt of this tube train coming through the ceiling, and that’s how it was in the film. And everybody instantly loved it. And we built the rig and did it,” Corbould explains to MOTOR.

When he isn’t crashing life-sized trains through brick walls like a boy living out playtime on a 1:1 scale, Corbould is transforming often inappropriate road cars into purpose-built vehicles that can complete his demanding tasks.

“The chase on the ice in Die Another Day was an interesting one because we initially thought that we should have the four-wheel drive versions of both the Aston Martin Vanquish and the Jaguar XKR,” Corbould explains.

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Thing is, neither Jag or Aston built all-wheel drive versions of the vehicles in question. But you didn’t really expect the man that built and then smashed a literal train through a film set to settle for whatever an automotive product planner bowls up, did you?

“So, we set about in our workshops making four-wheel drive versions and we totally changed the front ends of both vehicles, or four of each one of those vehicles, to be able to do that chase on the ice. And the other thing that we had to be mindful of, alongside all the usual safety requirements, is we built into them automatically opening inflation bags so that if, for whatever reason, one of them went through the ice, it wouldn’t just plummet to the bottom of the lake. It would automatically inflate and keep the guys on the surface.”

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The job to get the Defenders ready for filming was far less involved. The vehicles you see on screen are mechanically identical (other than the added safety equipment and hydraulic handbrake) to a 110 P400 you can buy from Land Rover right now.

Despite the team preparing for catastrophic component failures, the 110s did their job on stock suspension without issue.

While Chris’ team was responsible for preparing the Defender that Hawkins used for her jump – and its nine identical siblings – it was Morrison that ensured the driver returned to terra firma safely on all eight takes. Oh, yeah, the Defender completed the task at hand repeatedly, jumping higher and farther each time.

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Morris is an exacting individual who doesn’t suffer fools. The risks of the job demand that he be this way.

“I’m a hard guy to work for and please, I expect the best from everybody,” Morrison admits to MOTOR.

Before she found herself strapped into the Defender, Hawkins had to pass a simple test Morrison uses to assess all potential stunt drivers – hold a drift around four cones and then stop on a mark. Morrison will tell the driver what he wants them to do, perform the task himself once, and then the interviewee has one attempt to do the same.

“If they do that on their first turn, they got a job. If they don’t, and many haven’t, they haven’t,” he says.

The test isn’t so much to discover what drivers can hold a drift – plenty of people can do that – but it allows Morrison to find those that can hear instructions once and replicate them perfectly, while understanding that they are working to achieve a look, not a laptime.

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“There’s a wealth of talent out there and there are some amazing drivers. The film industry is an animal in its own right really, because you can get someone who’s an extremely talented race driver, and yet they don’t understand the camera angles, they don’t understand where they’ve got to be at the right time,” he adds.

“It is all about timing. A lot of people in the film industry say, ‘It’s all about timing.’ Well, it is. So you could be driving 120mph and overshoot a corner and it looks great coming out the apex a bit, but the entry where I’m shooting, it looks like a complete mess. So, it’s really being able to turn it on.”

Hawkins passed the first test, clearly. “I can drive,” she laughs when chatting with MOTOR. “It’s about the only thing I can do.”

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Its Hawkins’ job to do as Morrison asks. When he says hit a ramp, she asks how fast. Though Morrison has an extensive and proven track record, that doesn’t stop the stunts he asks his team to perform being nerve wracking.

“When Lee first explained what we were going to be doing, you kind of took it all in your stride because that’s what we do, and we do big stunts along with the other drivers and stunt people,” she explains.

“But it wasn’t actually until I was heading towards the ramp the first time where it kind of suddenly dawned on me what I was doing, and by that time, it was too late to back out. I first hit the ramp, all I could see was a very, very grey sky. I couldn’t see any floor. I couldn’t see anything but a grey, rainy, horrible sky. And I was heavily anticipating an extremely painful landing, but testament to the car and the planning of people around me like Lee and stuff, not one of the landings hurt.”

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But unbeknownst to Hawkins at the time, she wasn’t the first person to complete the stunt. Morrison was.

“I took one of the cars up on my own earlier that morning with one of my safety team to, see if I needed to make any wedges for the ramps,” he reveals.

“And I hit it around 60mph and the flight I got was perfect. But I knew what I was going to get from the guys, so when I set them up for their first jump, I’d already done one.”

So how does a 26-year old from East Hampshire find herself in the role of an unseen Bond baddie with a need to launch their Land Rover Defender into low earth orbit?

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“I started racing cars when I was eight years old,” Hawkins explains.

“It was never supposed to be a career path. It was just something that I stumbled across with my dad one day and I begged him to let me have a go. And then 18 years later, I’m still here and I’ve made a career out of it which is great.”

According to Hawkins, it is the same set of tools that make a world-class racing driver that are deployed by stunt drivers, just repurposed to achieve an inverse goal.

“When racing I’m always trying to correct the car if it’s going sideways, whereas stunt driving, they often want a bit of flair to it or it’s a drift scene or something. My whole life I spent trying to correct cars and now I have to teach myself it’s okay if it’s going sideways,” she says.

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Unfortunately, like many aspiring drivers, Hawkins’ career hit the skids due to a lack of financial backing.

“Basically, I wasn’t able to find the budget to continue to go racing, and that kind of led me into the stunt-driving world,” she adds.

“I took an opportunity and that led me onto doing a show called Fast and Furious Live.”

As part of preparations for the show, she underwent three months of intensive training, through which she was connected with Morrison. The rest is history writ large on the silver screen.

So when you find yourself watching Daniel Craig’s 007 run from a fleet of Land Rover Defenders, remember that there is a dedicated team that did it all for real.

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