Derek Meddings was the real Q for James Bond

A new book hailing the talent of Derek Meddings is out - reports The Times. Lucy Davies pays tribute to the special effects mastermind who became the James Bond films’ very own Q.

Raise an eyebrow and picture the scene: 007 wrestles the controls from a wayward helicopter pilot looping over Big Ben, only to find the aircraft is wired.

An unnamed voice crackles over the radio: “You are now flying remote control airways. I trust you have a pleasant … fright.” The helicopter plunges downwards, skimming between the floors and through the windows of an abandoned industrial gasworks. Spearing his enemy with the copter’s landing skid, Bond ploughs him into the air, dangles him over 200ft of chimney stack, and unceremoniously dumps him with the toe-curling send-off “Oh, you want to get off?”

It’s remarkable to think that this hair-raising sequence from For Your Eyes Only owes nothing to a computer in Soho and everything to David Meddings, the special effects mastermind who joined the Bond franchise to become producer Albert Broccoli’s very own Q, and a close friend of Roger Moore: “Goodness, we had fun on set,” recalls Moore today. “We were always fooling around. But Derek was a consummate professional who immersed himself 100 percent in what he was doing.

“He always hoped nobody would recognise his model work on screen because then he’d have failed, you see. I think it’s true to say that looking at the films today, it’s impossible to spot what is in fact model and what is life-size.”

A nod to Meddings’s achievement comes in the form of a collection of behind-the-scenes photographs published in collaboration with his sons.

He cut his teeth on Thunderbirds, Joe 90, Captain Scarlet and Stingray, prior to a crack at crumbling limbs for the House of Hammer alongside the legendary Canadian special effects artist, Les Bowie, who had worked on David Lean’s 1946 film, Great Expectations. “Bowie was tight with his budgets,” he recalls. “And I still think in his way. If I can do something with string and bits of wires, then I will.”

The interest in films was innate. Meddings’s mother was secretary to the Hungarian director and producer Alexander Korda and stand-in actress for Merle Oberon. Both his father and stepfather were employed as craftsmen at the then thriving Denham Studios in Buckinghamshire. His 007 reign began with Live and Let Die, the eighth Bond film and the first to feature Moore.

The plot follows 007 on a manhunt from Harlem to the Caribbean to defeat the evil Dr Kananga, whose infamous demise — when he inflates, he rises to the ceiling and explodes — was orchestrated by Meddings’s team. They created a replica inflatable character, attached it to a wire that elevated it to the rafters of the cave, and then detonated a charge attached to the back of the body and out of camera view.

“There were always so many gadgets and models on the films that I didn’t actually see many of them until the premieres,” says Moore. “The Lotus car, though, was without doubt the most famous, but a car that converted to an underwater submarine — please! It worked, though, and it looked like the real thing.”

Only two cars of its type were available at the time, so the production crew had to persuade the head of Lotus, Colin Chapman, to lend them his own for the shoot. Meddings led his team to the summer heat of the Bahamas to shoot the sub aqua scenes.

“You couldn’t actually drive it underwater,” Moore recollects, “unless you were in a wet suit with breathing apparatus — the shots of me driving were completed in the studio.”

Different Lotus models were used to imply the underwater transformation: the car that entered water was purely a shell propelled off the jetty by compressed air canons. Further full-sized models were already underwater and merged seamlessly as the vehicles fired depth gauges and smoke screens. Sales of Lotus Esprits rocketed after the film.

“Much of the success of Moonraker can be attributed to Derek’s genius,” avows Moore.

Indeed, the outstanding effects earned him an Academy Award nomination. Based at Pinewood whilst the rest of the cast were filming in Paris, he used only miniatures and puppets to create the scenes in space. Budgets did not allow for varying scales. This meant the model of villain Drax’s estate had to be built in eye-watering detail to allow the camera to move in close for the shuttle-docking scene.

The budget also prohibited any optical effects, so everything had to be filmed.

“He’d film one individual model sequence,” says Moore, “then rewind the film in the camera and shoot another individual sequence, and another and so on, to complete a composite shot of everything seemingly happening all together. I think he passed the film through over 100 times, knowing that one slip would render everything he’d shot to date useless.”

Meddings’s final Bond outing was with Golden Eye in 1995. He died that year during post-production. It had been 14 years since he’d worked on the franchise, adding Superman I and II, Krull and Batman to his credits in the interim.

By now, of course, computer-generated special effects had made much of Meddings’s painstaking camera toil needless but nevertheless, the effects he produced earned him a posthumous BAFTA nomination.

“No one who knew him had a bad word to say about him,” Moore attests. “Meddings was a master of the industry. I hope this book goes some way in conveying to readers just what a special man he was.”

# Special Effects Superman is available from www.meddingsbook.com

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