Quantum Mechanics

Reality can get a bit slippery on a film set. An Italian with the kind of face you'd find on a Roman bust has just emerged from a port-a-potty, adjusted his brown tailored suit, climbed into the passenger seat of a black Alfa Romeo 159 and picked up a submachine gun from the footwell. Parked in front is an Aston Martin DBS with eight bullet holes in the rear windscreen. Next to us, a bruiser in a Hi Vis jacket pours himself a coffee from a huge plastic urn and complains about the late arrival of some Bourbon biscuits. "It's a facking disgrace," he says, shaking his head and lighting a cigarette. For a backdrop, there are mountains with precipitous cliff-hugging roads, a vast iron-gray lake and dark clouds rolling by like a funeral procession.

The set is actually a real location, Lake Garda in northern Italy. The Aston Martin DBS is also real, as is the Alfa, the Italian stuntman, the port-a-potty and the coffee. If the Bourbon biscuits finally turn up, they'll be real, too. What aren't real are the bullets in the submachine gun and the bullet holes in the Aston's rear windscreen. They're both props in the opening chase sequence of the new James Bond escapade "Quantum of Solace," which kicks off with the hero cars — Bond in his DBS , gunmen in three black 159s — involved in a pursuit along narrow roads and through tunnels around the lake, dodging "ordinary" traffic as they go.

The Second Unit film crew (the 400-odd people responsible for the action sequences in the film) has nine days to get the scene in the can before falling behind schedule. The Italian authorities have been hugely accommodating, closing a two-mile stretch of the road around the lake from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Nine days might seem like plenty of time to get six minutes of screen time, but given the unpredictability of the weather (it's April) and the fact that the process of shooting fast-paced action sequences is a slow business, the heat is on.

There will be other, as yet unforeseen, problems over the next few days, like an Aston Martin, being delivered for promotional purposes, spinning out on a bend and ending up in the lake, and an Alfa 159 crashing and injuring two stuntmen, one of them seriously. These incidents, and others, will have the media talking about "the curse of Bond."

We are on set before any of these incidents took place, and comment on an ambulance parked up at the side of the road, asking if it is real or part of the shot. It's real. One of the crew members also point out a boat bobbing on the lake: "That's an ambulance, too."

"You really expect any cars to end up in the lake?" we ask. "Just look at the thickness of that stone barrier!"

Everyone has a bit of a laugh at that one...

What the accidents actually reveal is how tough a shoot this was. Bond films pride themselves on creating real stunts, not CGI, and what that translates to here are cars being driven at perilous speeds, down roads just barely wide enough to get three cars abreast, in the wet. "There really is no margin for error," says stunt driver Ben Collins. He explains how there was no practical way the stunt team could re-create the environment they're in now, so the drivers practiced beforehand on airstrips, using cones to mark out the width and shape of the roads. Get a car a tad out of shape, and cones tend to be a bit more forgiving than limestone.

Gary Powell, the film's stunt coordinator, doesn't need me to point that out. He knows that even the most meticulous planning isn't foolproof, and that a calculated risk is still a risk. But having come from a family of stuntmen, Powell was being thrown off horses and out of vans from the age of 11. For him and the stuntmen he's in charge of, working on Bond films is the high point of their careers. They're employed precisely because they're not the kind of guys to hold back, to bottle it on the big take.

"Quantum of Solace" opens right at the point where "Casino Royale" ended, making it the only one of 22 Bond films that's a genuine sequel (this is what caused the hex, no doubt). Bond, as in Daniel Craig, isn't here but back at Pinewood Studios working on another scene; the close-ups will be done at another time. At either end of the set are base camps, one where the second unit director, a huge bear of an American called Dan Bradley, will pour over the rushes, and the other, known as the Action Vehicles Base, where Graham Kelly is in charge of a team of crack commando mechanics responsible for looking after the seven Aston Martin DBSs on set.

Did we mention there were seven of them? And that's only the half of it, or just over half, because a total of 12 DBSs will be used during filming, amounting to nearly $4 million worth. What's more, the seven of them here will, as Gary Powell puts it, "get smashed to fucking pieces." That is, in fact, the point — at the end of the car chase, Bond's DBS is supposed to be a write-off, hence the scope for things getting out of control. But to film the car's gradual destruction requires more than one Aston, because even if it drives after a serious knock, it'll drive badly, so you need spares that look damaged but function perfectly underneath.

This leads to some surreal moments. During one take in which the cars drive off into a tunnel, we hear the sound of gunfire, tire squeals, a loud, ominous thud and then silence. A few moments later, the two-way radio crackles into life telling someone to call the recovery vehicle. Eyes roll. Air is sucked through teeth. The DBS has taken a knock on the front wing and this has put the steering and suspension out, meaning it has to go back to the mechanics. But Dan Bradley is happy with the damage — beaming about it, in fact. So before a new Aston can be brought in, a photo of the prang is sent to the mechanics at the Action Vehicles Base, who take hammers and angle-grinders to the front wing of a pristine DBS, all in the name of continuity.

As his CV reveals, Bradley's no stranger to smashing things up, what with "The Bourne Supremacy," "The Bourne Ultimatum," two Spiderman films and the latest Indiana Jones among the choreographed chaos credited to him. But for car chases, his blueprint is one of the classics.

"I always return to 'The French Connection.' It's a simple sequence, a few trash cans and so on. But it's Popeye Doyle's behavior that gives us the emotional connection to the character. And it's the characters as well as the action that give the chase its tension."

Character is something Bond was missing in the twilight of the Brosnan tenure, action and plot having reached a level so farcical it would have ruptured the eyebrows of a safari-suited Roger Moore. Such was the mishmash of gadgets, explosions and chases, you could have watched a film like "Die Another Day" backward and it would have had the same emotional impact.

So it was back to basics, then, back to the story — the first Bond story Fleming ever wrote in "Casino Royale." And there was a new Bond in Daniel Craig. The tabloids went to town, naturally. He was deemed too RADA (given his Royal Academy of Dramatic Art roots), too intellectual, too blond and therefore too much of a poof to be a proper Bond, somehow missing the irony that Fleming's creation had started out life as a public schoolboy in the 1920s, meaning he'd had his fair share of fagging.

Craig ended up being nominated for a BAFTA, and critics and moviegoers agreed the franchise had found its mojo again. It is now the biggest-grossing Bond film of all time.

The influence of Jason Bourne on this success is difficult to avoid. It's a name you're jokingly told to whisper around here, but Dan Bradley is just one of many on the crew to have worked on the Bourne films and brought with them some of the gritty, taut atmosphere of the blockbuster trilogy. Bradley points out the differences, though.

"We're not going handheld, like with the Bourne films. We want a different effect with Bond. But we want to be close, see the tension in the eyes." So more polished, then, but not the high gloss of a film like "GoldenEye." Some Bond fans remain uncomfortable with this, believing that being unflappable is part of 007's job description, and that the martini should be the only thing shaken after another brush with death. Yet Craig captures the more morally complex qualities in Bond's character. He comes closest to fitting Fleming's description of the man as someone who is vulnerable yet has "something cold and ruthless in the eyes."

But enough of that. Time to talk about a bit of kit that makes all the difference when filming car chases: the Ultimate Arm. It's a carbon-fiber crane from which hangs a gyro-stabilizing camera, all of which is attached to the roof of a Mercedes ML55, painted matte black to minimize reflection. It looks stealthy, like a bit of military hardware, which is an apt coincidence, given the crane's inventor is Lev Yevstratov, a man who honed his engineering expertise making nuclear guidance systems for the Soviet Union.

Incidentally, chatting with the crew at the bar that evening, we discover that quite a few are from ex-military backgrounds. One of them even argues that film companies could save a lot of time and money if the crew were organized like a military unit and subject to operational discipline. Given that he's quite drunk and in the process of ordering a round of sambucas, we doubt his level of commitment and suspect his opinion would mellow if faced with a drill sergeant screaming in his ear at 5:00 the next morning.

If nothing else, renting an Ultimate Arm of your own demands a military-size budget. But then this is a highly technical bit of kit, able to keep the camera stable at speeds of over 100 mph while coping with wind resistance and uneven surfaces. Watching a monitor inside the car, the operator uses a joystick to guide the camera and crane, able to send it through a 360-degree rotation in six seconds, while the Arm's stunt driver weaves in and out of the traffic being filmed. For evidence of its effect, watch the sequence in "Batman Begins" where the Batmobile is pursued by the police through Gotham City. No doubt the final cut from "Quantum of Solace" will be just as heart-thumping, if a bit more real-world.

Ah, we're back with that slippery idea of the "real" on a film set, and specifically how realistic a Bond film needs to be. Getting the balance right has seen the pendulum swing back and forth more than once during its 22 incarnations.

That this is the second-biggest-grossing film franchise of all time speaks volumes for how frequently they've got it right in a history that now spans nearly 50 years.