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It's five years since 'Skyfall' was released, so we asked the film's stunt coordinator Gary Powell about whizzing down the escalators for the tube chase scene.
How did that scene on the London Underground come about?
‘I was told there was going to be a chase scene and I’d always wanted to slide down the [tube] escalators. It was hard to get permission because London Underground didn’t want us starting something that other people would try and copy. After a long process we got permission to do it, but we had to take out all the bumps and things that they put in there for health and safety.’
Did you actually film it on the tube?
‘There’s a section at the bottom of King’s Cross that they don’t use any more and everything’s still there, it all works, so we were allowed to use that. When we first got on it, we thought we’d go flying down it, but we didn’t go that far because it was so dirty and grimy. We had to give it a scrub so we could get down it at a decent speed.’
Was it a difficult scene to pull together?
‘We had to figure out how we would go down – stunt guys will freefall down there, but when we’ve got actors, we have to make sure they’re safe, so they were on cables with a break system so we could speed them up or slow them down. We also had a roller system with a camera on. Firing them down there was one thing but filming it was another. It was tricky because of timings, but it was a childhood dream.’
Want more iconic London films? Check out our top 30 list.