Diamonds Are Forever

Then in 1971 you worked on the next Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever. The big controversy surrounding this film was that everybody thought it was going to be made in America, and without Sean Connery. They even cast an actor called John Gavin, who later became - I think - the American Ambassador to Mexico for Ronald Reagan.

John was very good-looking. Yes, he'd appeared in Psycho and Spartacus.

But eventually a deal was struck with Sean Connery and the movie shifted back to England. That must have been quite nerve-racking.

Yes, it was nerve-racking. It was also interesting in a way because it was my first experience of working in Hollywood, and because Harry Saltzman owned Technicolor at the time, which was part of Universal, we were VIP visitors at Universal Studios. It was still run like the old classic film studios: the art department had a pool of over a hundred assistants, like sketch artists, and the production designer wasn't allowed to do his own sketches; the illustrators did all that for him.

They had the most professional staff who were under contract to Universal and had worked there for years and years, happy to be either an illustrator or draughtsman. The chief art director - the equivalent of Cedric Gibbons - was Alex Golitzen. I found myself in a tiny office without a window so I said to Alex, `I'm sorry, but I can't work like this. I need a window.' He said they had twenty art directors working like this. But we had muscle, so Alex gave me the only office with a window. The block was called the Black Tower. In fact, it's still called that. I also got the best team from the art department to work for me. Boris Leven, who I was very friendly with, advised me who to use for the Bond movie. So it worked pretty well. Around this time Cubby, who was a friend of Howard Hughes, had the idea of doing a spoof in a way of the Howard Hughes persona.

Above: Book cover art

Book Data Stream
Paperback 320 pages
Publisher: Faber and Faber
ISBN: 0571220576

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For the moon buggy?
Yes, the moon buggy. And a very important car chase for which Harry had discovered these French stunt drivers who were able to flip a car on its side and drive like that. I learnt a lot because Ford provided all the cars and they had to be properly ballasted to do this stuff. Basically we all had a very good time, but I remember Dave Chasman, who was pretty high up in the UA hierarchy, came to Universal one morning and said, `You're crazy to do this film with John Gavin.' Dave knew we were paying Gavin nothing in comparison to the two million dollars that Sean Connery wanted, if I remember rightly, but he said we could recoup that money with EADY Money, which was a tax shelter in England.

In effect, a grant.
So, to cut a long story short, Sean got the film. We were going to shoot the scenes that we had already set up like the Las Vegas sequence, the oilrig in Santa Barbara, the car chase ...

The moon buggy in a gypsum mine close to Las Vegas ...
Yes. Shoot all that there and then film the interiors and other sets in Pinewood. This was decided late in the day. For me it was a gigantic logistical problem because I had nobody from the British Bond team with me. So I rang Peter Lamont, who was fortunately available to fly out and liaise with the American art department, and then set up an art department in Pinewood for when I got back.

There's a great shot in the film - that looks like a futuristic set but I think it's a real location - of Bond standing in an exterior glass elevator going up the side of a building. It seems almost science fiction.
It's partly on location. There was a hotel that no longer exists, The Sands maybe, and it was a bit like a tower with one of these exterior glass elevators. I wanted to show it to a, so I went to the hotel with my 16mm camera and stepped into the elevator, but a security man told me I couldn't shoot there.

I told Cubby and he made a call to Howard Hughes who was living in a penthouse. Hughes apparently said, `Don't worry about it. Get your production designer back there and he'll get the VIP treatment.' So I went back there and everybody was bowing and scraping to me. At the time, half of Las Vegas belonged to Hughes and the other half to various syndicates. Cubby even got me permission to enter Hughes's ranch in Nevada, where the security guards looked at me and said, `Are you Mr Hughes?' They had no idea what he looked like!