Interview with British stuntman Nick Wilkinson about his work on Bond

By: Jon Auty

Published:
2004-09-06

Interview with British stuntman and stunt coordinator Nick Wilkinson conducted by From Sweden with Love contributor Jon Auty.

This interview is part of a much longer interview featured in issue 1 of STUNTS magazine.

What was your involvement on The Living Daylights (1987)?

I was involved from day one, with Greg Powell as Assistant Horse Master, this entailed training all the horses for about three weeks to prepare them and then finding horses that could be used as doubles.

What the public may not realise is that you have to find a quiet horse for the leading lady to ride, and then you have to find a stunt horse to take a fall or a horse that is used to loud noises, like gun fire, then you have another horse that will rear up and throw the rider off. The finished sequence may only take seconds to watch and yet in that sequence we will have used 4 or more horses to get the desired effect. And that is just one character; you then do the same for Bond or the villain. It’s a big job!

You were also acting as a Russian Guard on the Hercules plane just before Timothy Dalton throws you down the steps onto Koskov and Necros. How was it filmed?

We filmed it in two parts. Paul Weston, who was coordinating the fight, gave myself and Tim (Dalton) marks on the floor so that we knew where we had to be and where not to go, because it was quite a confined space. Then when he hits me with the rifle I spun around and fell off the steps. Then I was filmed jumping off a much smaller set of steps onto Jerome Krabbe and the other fella.

What other Bond films have you worked on and in what capacity?

For Your Eyes Only (Stuntman), Octopussy (Stuntman), Never Say Never Again (Stuntman), A View to a Kill (Assistant Horse Master) and Licence to Kill (Utility Stunts and Paul Weston’s Assistant).

Our thanks to Jon Auty for letting us reproduce this interview on From Sweden With Love.

For more information about Nick Wilkinson, check out his IMDB profile.

Tags:

#interviews

#james_bond_stunt

#jon_auty

All information, text and graphics (unless otherwise stated) on this website are protected by copyright law. Please contact us to use anything.

This website is not in any way endorsed by EON Productions Ltd, Danjaq, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sony Pictures, United Artists, Ian Fleming Publications, or any other James Bond copyright holders. It is an independently run non-profit website from a personal basis in spare time.

Founder & Managing Editor: Anders Frejdh

Tag Cloud

Interview with British stuntman Nick Wilkinson about his work on Bond

Tag Cloud