Bond 22 unit manager talks about upcoming location work in Panama

Mally Chung is not speaking loudly but the words he uses have sufficient force to send them hurtling across the café and straight into the ears of nearby diners - reports News & Star.

Conversation elsewhere dries up as people pause to listen. The eavesdroppers’ hushed interest coincides with Mally saying something they apparently did not expect to hear on a cold morning in Carlisle:

“When I start working on the next James Bond film”.

Forty-six years on from Dr No, these are still magic words.

Earlier this week Mally travelled 5,000 miles from his Carlisle home to the Central American country of Panama. He will spend the next three months there; a crucial cog in cinema’s biggest machine as the 22nd James Bond film takes shape.

The sequel to Casino Royale, again starring Daniel Craig, is currently known only as Bond 22 and is due to be released in November. The first 21 Bond films have grossed more than four billion dollars.

Mally is one of two unit managers on the Panama shoot with responsibility for the smooth running of the working lives of the 400-strong crew, and ultimately the continuing good health of a cultural icon.

“It’s the day to day stuff, making sure everything’s all right, setting up all the logistics to make sure it works,” he told the News & Star shortly before his departure. “We’re like a travelling army.”

So how does a Carlisle lad – a Trinity School-educated, Carlisle United-supporting Carlisle lad – find himself at the heart of cinema’s most spectacular circus?

Forget any kind of X-Factor talent contest. There have been no short cuts for Mally. He has spent the past 10 years edging up the ladder, one step at a time.

It began in 1998, here in Cumbria. Mally, who was then 25, left his course at Cumbria College of Art and Design (now the University of Cumbria) to work as a location assistant on a film being made by a fellow student.

The production crew of BBC1 drama The Lakes were staying in the hotel where this film was being made. Mally asked the location manager for a job. “I was in the right place at the right time,” he says. “I’ve never looked back. The Lakes was a big learning experience. I quickly became aware that most of this job is common sense. The solution is thinking on your feet.”

He believes that one of the most important attributes for someone in his line of work is simply good manners. “We roll into town, cause mayhem, and roll out again. How you communicate with people is 99 per cent of it. A lot of the crew, especially the younger ones, will run out and stop people if they’re not standing where we want them to. I always think ‘How would I feel if someone was doing that to me?’”

As unit manager Mally is the first to arrive and the last to leave. Ninety-hour weeks are common. He is the first point of contact for local councils, emergency services and the general public. “If there’s a problem people come to me,” is how he sums up the job.

Mally is justifiably proud of the fact that he has never felt the need to change his mobile phone number. That number has been distributed to thousands of people all over the UK whose lives have been disrupted by the TV or film travelling circus: from Clocking Off in Manchester to Dalziel & Pascoe in Birmingham; from The Queen in Scotland to Atonement in Cleveland.

There have been anguished phone calls in the middle of the night, but they have come from his own team with dramas about broken down lorries and temperamental generators rather than from disgruntled strangers.

Mally has also been location manager on many productions, spending hours scouting the most striking places for the camera to aim its eye, working from dawn to dusk in pursuit of perfection.

“If you haven’t found what you’re looking for you keep looking. Even when you’ve found somewhere you’re always worried that someone will say ‘I know somewhere, and it’s just up the road!’”

After seven years working on some of the UK’s top-rated drama series Mally’s break into films came in 2005 with Stormbreaker, a spy movie with a £25m budget starring Mickey Rourke and Ewan McGregor. Mally was second unit location manager in charge of stunts.

“I did a lot of the opening sequence, which involved a car chase with Ewan McGregor. We closed Port Erin beach on the Isle of Man for two days. We had cars, helicopters, motorbikes, speedboats, and mortars exploding on the sand.

“I had 19 security guards and two police officers keeping the public back and I’m standing in the middle of it all. Once or twice you catch yourself sitting back and thinking ‘Wow!’

“I went to see Stormbreaker at the Village cinema on Botchergate with 10 or 12 of my family. We were the last people still in when the credits rolled. When my name came up – “Second Unit Location Manager: Mally Chung” – they all cheered! It was great.”

Having impressed the film world as well as his family, the big screen offers have hardly stopped. For the past two-and-a-half years most of Mally’s work has been in films. He says: “It’s every bit as hard as TV, although you have a bit more time and money to do things. But the pressure is on because you’re expected to perform.”

After Stormbreaker Mally’s next job was The Queen, which won its star Helen Mirren an Oscar. Mally spent two months as assistant location manager in northern Scotland.

He was assistant location / unit manager on the critically acclaimed adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, starring James McAvoy and Keira Knightley.

“Atonement was fantastic to work on. I was in Redcar for three-and-a-half months preparing for what would be a five-day shoot. Redcar doubled for Dunkirk. It was a huge undertaking and we had horrendous weather. We closed the road for a couple of weeks. There was major construction. Everything you see, we built. You’d never say that was the north east coast.”

Mally is understandably coy about dishing any dirt on the stars he has worked with. “The bigger the star the easier they are to work with,” he says. “Keira Knightley is very down to earth.”

In 2006 Mally worked with two more of the most sought-after actresses in the world, Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, on The Other Boleyn Girl, a film due for release in March. “Even at six o’clock in the morning with no make-up, they’re stunning.”

He takes a swig of tea. “I wish I could say the same about myself.”

So stunning are Portman and Johansson that Mally found himself scouring the undergrowth for photographers – and one morning he found one. “We were filming near Bath and we decided to do a spot check for paparazzi. Lo and behold, we found this guy encamped in a hedgerow with full camouflage gear on, even face paint.”

While Mally’s film career has taken off, the same cannot yet be said for his home county. Cumbria’s biggest recent film role was in the Beatrix Potter biopic Miss Potter, but this was a rare example of the county’s stunning scenery reaching the cinema screen.

Mally turned down the chance to work on the film; a decision utterly consistent with his pride in his home county. “The location manager rang up and told me what money he was going to pay me, which was a lot less than the going rate. He said he didn’t want to pay ‘a London rate’. I said ‘Why? Am I doing a different job to somebody in London?’ It was a fortunate decision because I ended up doing Atonement.

“People probably still look at my CV and don’t ring me because they see where I live. It’s taken me longer living here – maybe 10 years instead of five – but this is home for me. It’s where my friends and family are. It’s good to be able to tell people you don’t have to be from London and you don’t have to live in London.

“It’s not unachievable. I left school with no qualifications. If someone wants to get into the industry, it’s not really a closed door. But you have got to really push yourself to get in.”

And you have to make sacrifices. Taking the James Bond job means Mally will miss his daughter Leila’s sixth birthday. “That’s one of the biggest decisions I’ve had to make about doing Bond. But my wife Rachael said, if there’s one film worth being away for, it’s this.”

When he returns to Carlisle, what then? It’s a question Mally has already asked himself. “Where do you go from here? The logical next step would be production manager. But if you’re doing films of the calibre of Bond it’s quite hard to take a step back from that.

“When it comes out it will be the biggest film in the world. It might be horrible to work on. I might hate every minute of it. But in years to come I can turn to my grandkids and say ‘I did James Bond’.”

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