WORKING TALL

The “Quantum of Solace” foot chase scene took about four or five weeks to choreograph. I told director Marc Forster to look at the initial choreography, but I felt it just wasn’t right. It wasn’t exciting enough. So we did the whole thing again. The stunt people have to do quite a bit of training to be hanging on those wires for such a long time. The whole fight takes place with them actually hanging on these cables, and when you’re doing that stuff for a couple of weeks . . . the first couple of days, it’s great and it’s exciting . . . and then the harness starts to dig in and the aches and pains become unbearable.

That was also quite a complicated scene because the set was very small. The original idea was to use a building in Siena, Italy, which was like 80-foot-high, so we would have had a lot of depth there to play with. But in the end, it was better for us to do it on the stage. Shooting there meant that we had only a 45-foot-high ceiling.

We had to make sure we could put the camera in places where, you know, if you’re looking up, you can see the ceiling from there; if you’re looking down, the floor is far enough away to make it look dangerous. We had some help with visual effects; they’ve done some things to make it look higher and those sorts of things. To keep the audience at the edge of their seat, you have to have the danger element. If there’s no danger, there’s no excitement.

-- Gary Powell, stunt coordinator