Behind the Scenes: Goldfinger (Hamilton, 1964) with Sean Connery and Gert Fröbe

A few minutes ago, you were having a pretty tough time, I saw, in a dungeon. I'm glad you've fought your way out to talk to us. Do you find this side of filming particularly strenuous? Well, no more strenuous than some of the digs I was in in Manchester. Um... No, it's all pretty well worked out and, uh, it's not advisable on top of a heavy breakfast or a hangover. Otherwise, it's all right. This is your Sir James Bond picture. I'm sure that, as far as picture-goers are concerned, they could see more and more, but how do you feel about this yourself? Oh, I think it's splendid. I think it's very good entertainment. They obviously like it. One every year, 14 months. There's a sort of good, healthy issue with it. James Bond really conjures up a picture of bombs, bullets and booze. Do you find that people expect you to be like this in real life? Um... I don't meet a great deal of people, really. I've been so busy. I'm on my fourth film in one year. So the chances of meeting people are pretty remote. And, uh, other than going to the theatre or going out to a restaurant to eat or something or driving somewhere, I leave at half seven in the morning and get back at seven at night. The chances of boozing with blondes and bullets are pretty remote. Most Scottish actors start in the north and then come south. Why did you come straight down to London? Very much, if anyone in Scotland would have employed me. They employed me, certainly, for other jobs. We're not as an actor. I hadn't any real experience. And, uh, it was more a sort of giggle in, uh, in London to join South Pacific to do the audition. At the time, I was down for a long weekend to London on holiday from the evening news to Edinburgh. So when I got the audition, they said, OK, you can come back in three months. So I went back, packed my bags, left Scotland, came back and joined South Pacific. And then it was into television after that? No, I was in the... Yeah, so I would play... When South Pacific came back, I did three or four plays at Kew Theatre, which is sort of experimental theatre in London. It didn't work for about six months even. I think you've been giving perhaps the impression that you've been playing James Bond and nothing else, but a film has recently been released, hasn't it? Woman and Straw. Yes, and I just came back from Hollywood. I did Marnie for Hitchcock. And, uh, I was in Canada the year before last doing Macbeth. And, uh, I was in the West End just before that Well, I'm afraid you must go, but thank you very much for speaking to us. Bye-bye. The seventh 007 novel was published in England and America in 1959. Fleming got the idea for Goldfinger during an April 1956 stay at Anton Hall, a health spa in central England, where he met a gold broker who educated him on the trade in the world's most coveted metal. Three years after the publication of Goldfinger came the surprise success of Dr. No, and later, from Russia with Love. When we did Dr. No, I remember we all had very limited resources. The film was, I think, $800,000, $900,000. Producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman set a budget of $3 million for Goldfinger. To bring Bond No. 3 in on time, the producers selected a seasoned pro, Guy Hamilton. Guy was always going to be a director of Bond sooner or later, and then Guy came in and did that one. Some people think that's the best of all the Bonds. Hamilton had something else, a relationship with the film's star, Sean Connery. I'd known Sean long before he made Bonds. We had a little club called the Buxton that we used to meet each other. Goldfinger was a bit of a challenge because I began to sense that Bond was becoming a superman and using the things that worked so wonderfully well in the two previous films, it was then not too difficult to have a target and know what we were trying to do. Once again at the typewriter was Dr. No and From Russia With Love screenwriter Richard Maybaum, collaborating with Oscar-winning British screenwriter Paul Dane. In Goldfinger, we decided to have a little mini-adventure at the start of it, which had nothing to do then with the story that followed. It seemed to me that if we could do the pre-credit sequence, which is a wonderful piece of nonsense, I mean, where you can go swimming with a seagull on top of your head and you can unzip your suit and have a white tuxedo underneath. If that makes you laugh, let's all now, after the credit titles, go for a great big ride and have fun. The guy that was originally cast to do it in his spare time was a cat burglar, which was all right, but unfortunately he was caught in the act the day before he had to shoot the scene. I got the part merely on the fact that I had, according to the make-up guy, high cheekbones. I could be made up to look like a Mexican more than anybody else. They said, right, well, you're doing a fight. And I said, oh, what fight? As the fire hits the water, the flashbulbs go, the UV lamp comes on and the steam comes out. Well, the force of the steam, the hosepipe wrapped itself around my leg, gave me a sort of a tickly burn. Everybody thought it was down to my acting. It wasn't, it was down to sheer pain, actually. Other actors had their own challenges to face. At the rehearsals, I was working at a desk and Bon comes in and I got up to greet him. And Guy said, no, no, no, you don't take any notice of this man, you don't like him. And I thought, well, but this is Bon, this is James Bond, and I'm just an ordinary civil servant. I must admire him like everybody else does. He says, no, no, no, no, of course you don't. He doesn't treat your gadgets with any respect at all. But there is one gadget the whole world comes to respect. I was a sports car freak in those days, so I got rid of a lot of my inhibitions when it came to redesigning the Aston Martin. I thought it was an elegant-looking car, and I remember in Switzerland driving it up and down there, it impressed a lot of people. But I think that its setting in the story and in the film gave it a more unique quality than the car actually possessed. The management of Aston Martins were very, very sceptical about us. They said, well, what do you want to do with the car? I told them briefly, you won't do it, you won't get any more equipment in this car, it's absolutely loaded as it is. So I said, just give me a break, let me do it, I haven't proved you I can do it. Aston Martin executives loaned the Goldfinger team the development prototype, DP216-1, destined to become a legend. The first thing we're going to do, we're going to make a hole in the roof for the ejector seat. Then I said, I will make the first hole, and I can remember it now, putting a hole through this lovely Aston Martin, my pride and joy. Back in those days, we didn't have the electronic devices that we have nowadays, where we could have done things, made things work electronically now. In the old days, we had to do it by pneumatics, didn't we? Obviously, you couldn't go around with the real machine guns in the car, but for distant shots, we had the gas guns operating. The rear lights that dropped down, and the oil slick that came out of it, we've done four reels, funnily enough, with a big container in the back of the car. To get the tank in there, the bulletproof shield had to be taken out, and then, of course, put back after that shot for the bullet effects. So there was never sort of a dull moment. I was having a lot of trouble with parking tickets in London around that time, so my ambition was to have a revolving number plate. So that was my contribution to the supercar. The actual tire slashing apparatus, we didn't do on the car as such. All that touching was done actually in the studios. I built a rig on rails, built the sides of the car in fiberglass, both the Aston Martin and the Mustang. And what about the DB5's pièce de résistance? I went home, and I got a telephone call saying, would I go back to the studios next day? And I thought, oh, good. I got an extra bit in the film. And when I got there, they gave me this bit about the ejector seat. The chassis would have taken a proper ejector seat, and the guy next to the driver would have got burned anyhow, so I used compressed air on that in a lightweight dummy. The whole thing works. I mean, it's just, it's a dream. It's your dream. Wouldn't it be fun to have a car like that? All this gadgetry was created and installed in just six weeks. Other equipment was built into the car, but never used in the finished film, like front and rear overriders, good for ramming enemy vehicles. Bond's secret arsenal also included a weapons tray located underneath the driver's seat, a nail chamber that could spit out nasty triple-spike clusters, and a radio telephone hidden inside the driver's door paneling. What's really amusing, actually, is that there must be 50 around the world claiming to be the one, and people keep paying to see it. Even Bond's Aston Martin proved no match for the movie's sublimely evil villain, Auric Goldfinger. Oh, you're looking, Mr. Bond, at an industrial laser beam which emits a new extraordinary light not to be found in nature. Natural light, you see, being multicolored, widens and weakens as it travels from the source. Laser light, being of one color, never widens, never weakens. Gert Frobe, I'd seen him, or Cubby had seen him and showed him to me in a German film where he was playing a sort of child molester, and he was absolutely wonderful. Yes, he's the perfect Goldfinger. Does he speak English? Yeah, I've spoken to his agent. He speaks English. Gert Frobe arrived day one on the set. How do you do? I'm very happy to meet you. That was all right. Then I talked to him, and I realized he didn't speak a word of English. The very first scene I shot on the balcony with Gert, and Gert had to start the scene, and he said... I thought, oh, my God! What was that? But his mouth stopped, so I thought, well, OK, I'll say my line. I always remember Gert Frobe, who was a dear, sweet man. You know nothing, Mr. Bond, you know nothing. Cubby and Harry, when they saw the first rushes, went bananas. They said, you can't... I mean, you can't understand the thing. I said, don't worry, because we're now going to dub him later. Hamilton instructed Frobe to speak quickly, which aided actor Michael Collins, who provided the voice for Orick Goldfinger. The guy knew exactly what he wanted and how he wanted it. He's one of those kind of people. Very, very contained director. Very, very cool. He's very much get in there and do it or else. Hamilton definitely wanted Honor Blackman for the female lead, Pussy Galore. There was hardly anybody else about that was as right for it as me, because I, at that point, I was having a huge success in The Avengers, and I was coming to the end of my two-year stint. So, since the character demanded a knowledge of judo, and I was a hot property at that point, it seemed dead right that I should play it. And there was no question of chemistry between Goldfinger's two stars. I mean, he is, I think, without doubt, the sexiest man I've ever met. He has a natural authority, charisma. He's very virile. It was very funny when we did the fight in it, so-called fight, because I had been used to doing judo in the studio on the cement, so they had banks and banks of straw and all sorts of things, and they said, will that be all right? Can you land on, will you be safe and all? I mean, it was luxury for me, because I'd had such a terrible time in the studio with the cement floor, you know. So, we had quite a lot of fun in the hay, because we had to lie about for quite a long time. Casting Oddjob proved to be no challenge at all. I was watching one Saturday afternoon, they used to be wrestling, and there was Oddjob on television. Harold Zucata came on, and everybody booed, and there was Oddjob, and Harold Zucata had been a serious athlete, had been the first Hawaiian to get a silver medal at the Olympics. Harold was a monumentally strong, but very genuine and gentle guy, and he gave me that chop behind the neck at the fridge. He put me on the floor. He wasn't quite used to the cinema technique of taking it to the wire and then stopping, you know. And some days I think I still have it from then. And he was a joy to work with, and a very brave man, because in Fort Knox, when those fireworks go off at the end, he got badly burned, and he was hanging on there. And I didn't say cut, because all the sparks were flying everywhere, and it looked good to me. It's all finally a Harold thing, and then he'd really burnt his hands, but Guy, you didn't say cut, so I just hung on him there. Rounding out Goldfinger's villains was Kish, the man with the nuclear key. I was going to be in a stage play in London, and my agent suddenly said to me, by the way, I got you out of that play. I said, what do you mean you got me out? I had a lot of trouble getting in. He said, I got you a part in the next James Bond film, Goldfinger, instead. I said, well, that's fair enough. I was thrown over the railings, and there were some cargo boxes and mattresses and things that I landed on on the other side, but the actual fall, about a 40-foot fall, I think, that was done by Bob Simmons. Mellinger was also armed with a camera which attracted Harry Saltzman's attention. I was filming, which I shouldn't have done, I suppose, and I said to him, to make a joke of it, I said, I'm going to release mine before yours, and he wasn't very amused. Although in Goldfinger for less than five minutes, Shirley Eaton made an unforgettable impression with audiences around the world. It was a nice sensation, being painted all over with this fine brush. On Pinewood's D Stage, make-up artists gilded Shirley Eaton. I was nervous and happy at the same time, and every now and again somebody would come in and pop their head round the door and say, how's she getting on? To avoid problems of skin suffocation, there was a doctor on the set throughout this sequence. Guy Hamilton was extremely kind, and we got the shots done during one morning, which was really quite fast. Mr Big, somebody who wants all the gold in the world and is prepared to get some gangsters and gas everybody, I mean, if you believe that, monkeys can fly. So you've got to take it with a wonderful pinch of salt. The star of Goldfinger in terms of settings was supposed to be Fort Knox. We had a friend of Cubby Broccoli, who was called Colonel Ruchon, who had great influence with the American authorities. So I was whisked off to Kentucky and was allowed to fly over Fort Knox and to look at it from the outside, but I wasn't allowed to go anywhere really near it because it was so protected, and there were sort of loudspeakers all over the place saying, you are now trespassing, don't approach any... And there were all sorts of people with machine guns. At that time, it was discussed that perhaps Fort Knox would be in Portugal, but we eventually put it on the back lot at Pyewood. Suddenly bulldozers started to appear, they started bulldozing roads, laying concrete, and I thought, oh, my God. Originally, the final battle was to take place at the gates of the gold depository, but Cubby Broccoli insisted that the villain enter the world's most secure building. Richard Maybaum and Ken Adam agreed. Others argued that no-one knew what the inside of Fort Knox looked like. I suppose that it's the underground vaults and it's just bars of gold that go on trolleys, or rather like the Bank of England. Peter Lamont's realistic blueprints were not enough for Broccoli. He declared, I want to see a cathedral of gold. And from there, Ken, you know, designed his huge set with the elevator that covered A stage, and we made these huge heaps of gold. And interestingly enough, we did get a letter from the controller or whatever she was, the lady who ran Fort Knox, and complimenting our art director on his imagination, because very few people have ever seen the interior of Fort Knox. Ken Adams' vision didn't stop at recreating Fort Knox. Another rich cinematic highlight is Goldfinger's Rumpus Room, where he entertains business associates. The Laser Room, the site of the most famous neocastration in screen history. Built on Pinewood's E stage, Sean Connery spent a very uncomfortable 3 days here in March 1964. Well, it didn't surprise me, because he took quite a pleasure in finding ways to make it difficult for me. They brought a real laser in, which looked great, a very pencil-thin line. As soon as you turned all the studio lights on, it disappeared. So suddenly we're faced with John Steers made up this fake one, and we optically put the stuff on afterwards. We had to pre-cut the area which was going to melt, then very carefully fill the whole lot in with solder, and then, of course, make the top finish again to look like gold. I was underneath that thing, that table, the gun, which was an acetylene that was cutting the channel. Somebody had to go be under there, of course, in case the compounded thing went wrong at the last minute. It didn't stop when it should. Goldfinger's shoot called for locations in 3 countries. The first scenes actually shot were in Miami at the Fontainebleau Hotel on January 20-24, 1964. A pared-down crew shot actor C. Slinder poolside at the hotel. To shoot coverage of Goldfinger's card scam, Hamilton used Michael Boussaint, doubling for Gert Frobe, and Ignacio Almagro doubling for Connery. The Miami shoot also included the car-crushing sequence. When we destroyed a brand-new Lincoln Continental being crushed, the whole unit was speechless, all of us, because it was like part of ourselves being destroyed. I never forget it. In April, filmmakers recreated the Fontainebleau pool area on Pinewood's D Stage to complete the scene. Ian Fleming visited the set during filming of this sequence. Little more than a month before Goldfinger was released and Bond mania kicked into high gear, Bond's creator passed away August 12, 1964. Filmmakers shot Bond trailing Goldfinger in Switzerland's Pfuecker Pass, but used Black Park, a British recreation area just outside Pinewood for the night chase scenes. For nine days in May, the Goldfinger unit took over the world-class Stoke Poges golf course, a normally tranquil set of links located just minutes from Pinewood Studios. Here, Connery's three-decade love affair with the game of golf began. In August, the filmmakers raced to complete a key sequence, the aerial assault on Fort Knox. The Bonds annually seem to open in September the 15th or something, and whether we were finished or not was immaterial. Time is running very, very short, and three of us went over to Kentucky, Cubby Broccoli, Ted Moore, the cameraman, myself. Right next door to Fort Knox, there is an army base, and Ted and I flew around, zooming on whatever these people were doing. We didn't tell them we were coming, we just did it. We got a squad, a sergeant, and we ran these soldiers around and set them up in all the places I could remember. And I said, now what you do is, when I blow the whistle once, you all look up there, when I blow the whistle twice, you all fall down dead. And they thought this was the silliest thing that they had ever been asked to do in their born days. But we said, you know, you're all going to get ten bucks and a beer, for ten bucks and a beer. But by now, we're opening in three weeks' time, practically. Extra people were engaged for the dubbing, for the music-laying, the tracks and everything. John Barry scored scenes fresh from the cutting room, producing incredible work in record time. In fact, there was only one last-minute change. Harry Saltzman decided the bomb countdown needed to end not with three seconds remaining as scripted, but at 007. The change gave the film one of its biggest laughs. Guy Hamilton's tongue-in-cheek, high-thrills directorial style helped make Goldfinger a spectacular success, changing all action-adventure films that followed. His approach was simple. We're going to take you to wonderful places. We're going to show you beautiful girls. We're going to have some suspense. We're going to have some laughs. But let's enjoy. The huge international success of Goldfinger was due to innovative filmmakers and hundreds of tremendously talented technicians who pooled their skills, knowledge and sense of adventure to create a film which continues to thrill and entertain generations of filmgoers.