How Thunderball Underwater Shots Were Filmed
Interview with Jordan Klein to talk about his early career and his first brush with James Bond on “Thunderball”…
“Thunderball” is noted for its large-scale underwater sequences. How were these in pioneering and how is such a big production handled underwater?
It was amazing. We had 40 divers in one scene, plus camera and safety personnel. It was the good guys (in white) and the bad guys (in red and black) and the camera crew. That was truly incredible. We had trouble finding divers that understood quarter inch wet suits and their compressibility. Most would weight themselves to sink at the surface, as they went down they became heavier and went down rapidly, some with dire results like blown eardrums. So divers would jump in the water and we’d tell them, “OK trim yourself out and go to the bottom.” We had safety divers in the water watching them. All these hot-shot divers from up and down Miami and the coast of Florida came over and jumped in the water and ended up with about six blown ear drums and all kinds of problems. The rubber in the new suits was monocellular, so the water just compressed the bubbles it didn’t squeeze the air out. When you went down you would get less and less buoyant because the bubbles were being compressed in the wetsuit. The weight you put on the surface was about four times what you needed to stay at the bottom. Once they started down the suits provided less and less buoyancy which made the diver descend more rapidly, crashing to the bottom. It became a nightmare to get enough people. It took us over a week to get enough divers for the fight scene.
What were you responsible for on the Thunderball shoot?
My job as ‘Director of Underwater Engineering’ was to provide workable underwater props. The Bomb Carrier, as well as the Sleds, had to work almost every day. This required all 28 batteries to be charged, spears reloaded into the Bomb Carrier, all air ballast tanks had to be filled and any repairs had to be made. This took four technicians all night to accomplish.
You were back with the Bond team for “Live And Let Die” where you were responsible for shark wrangling. What aspect does this add to the production?
I was involved with the shark wrangling, yes. I did filming on that. In one scene there was a good guy and a bad guy and they were fighting away and I see a shark in the background. I think, “I don’t believe this!” The shark is coming and coming and I kept the camera running. Then the fighting guys both look and see the shark and they both stop fighting, watch the shark and then the shark swims by and they continue fighting. You couldn’t have set up that scene.
What goes into guiding the sharks and keeping the actors safe?
We had a pretty good system on shark wrangling that we started, I think, it was in that picture. After that there were a lot of pictures with sharks and we figured it out pretty quick. Ricou Browning was the Underwater Director on that, and he also wrote “Flipper” – he’s a true animal lover and likes to train them.
We ended up having a pretty good system. We knew how to release them to come toward the camera, to go away from the camera, to go up or down. It was very interesting.We understood the psychology of a specific shark after working with him for just a few minutes. The psychology was different for almost every one of them. Fortunately, we could out think them.
Having worked on both “Never Say Never Again” and “Thunderball”, which share plot elements and sequences, from your perspective and role, how did they differ?
“Thunderball” would have to be my overall favourite. I did the exact same thing on both of them. I built the underwater hardware and props and some of the sets. I started out doing filming and ended up operating the Bomb Carrier. As far as the excitement of shooting those particular scenes, and being involved, there were some of the scenes of “Never Say Never Again” that I enjoyed doing a lot more than “Thunderball” and vice-versa. The funny part that I remember during the shooting of “Thunderball” was that the word got out but I don’t remember how, was that “Thunderball” was going to be the first $100 million gross production! You can do that in a weekend now. Of course, $100 million won’t buy what it did back then.
How much did you work with the actors versus stunt doubles?
We worked with the actors – with Sean Connery and a lot of the girls. They had training but not too much time to get serious training. Connery really didn’t like diving all that much, but he was there for the important shots. The best part of the day was heading back to the dock after a day working with the girls. They would change out on deck as if they were one of the guys!
On the Bond productions, who is responsible for the direction or the over-all vision of an underwater sequence?
Ricou was the director – and he is the best wet director ever to do underwater – he’s not the kind of director to sit up there in a chair in the sunshine and talk about it. He’ll be the first in the water and the last out. He knows what he wants to see and then he’ll discuss it with the camera crew as to how it can be done. I did most of the rigging with a crew, pretty much at his direction.
What are some of the technical challenges filming a portion of a picture underwater compared with regular filmmaking?
What most Producers and Directors don’t consider when working on an underwater project – they don’t put themselves in an underwater environment. That’s a deadly sin for a director. The underwater camera is omni-directional, it can move in any direction, you can go backwards, forwards, do a 360-degree roll or invert yourself or all of the above at once. In production people don’t think that way. This makes production more costly and without the action they are seeking. The underwater camera can produce shots that can only be dreamed about on land.I think the camera underwater should be moving all the time to enhance the action. You can always enhance the action by moving away or back of following or passing by. The cameraman has to understand the physics of the whole thing, what he can and can’t do and the amount of time the scene is going to take. I feel very comfortable under these circumstances.
Are you currently involved in any film or television productions and if so what are your responsibilities?
I wrote a script while working on another picture in 1993. The name of it is “Whiskers” – which is a working title. It’s about a Sea Lion that is a “Fugitive”. None of the three S’s is involved – no sex, shooting, swearing – so it probably can’t be successful with what is going on in today’s market, but we’ll give it a hard try. I have interested parties saying that they’ve got the money and we can go to production very soon. That should be an interesting show and it’s ideal for a TV series.
NYPD Divers Describe Dramatic Rescue
That’s how two New York Police Department divers depict their rescue Thursday of a passenger from US Airways Flight 1549 after the jetliner made an emergency landing in the icy waters of the Hudson River.
Detectives Michael Delaney and Robert Rodriguez are partners on the NYPD Harbor Scuba Team.
“As we got to the scene (in their chopper),” Rodriguez told Early Show co-anchor Julie Chen, ” … we saw that there was an airliner in the water. And at that point, we started to communicate to each other (using) hand signals and shouting in the helicopter to figure out what we were gonna do.”
“We usually try to come up with some sort of a game plan while we’re on the way to the scene,” Delaney explained. “When we looked out of the helicopter, we saw how big the scene was. At that point, when the helicopter started lowering down into a hover, there were a lot of other boats, ferryboats in the area, and the aviation pilots did a great job of putting us in an area where we were out of their way.
“Yet, we saw one victim … in the water that we wanted to get to right away.”
Delaney, Rodriguez noted, is the pair’s “lead diver, so he’s out first. Then I follow his lead. He had an eyeball on the victim, and he went straight for the victim. And then I exited the aircraft after that and followed him.”
The passenger, Delaney said, “was holding onto the front of a ferryboat. At that point, we saw she was in immediate distress. … We were still in the helicopter. We jumped — we deployed from the helicopter, swam to her. And she was — she was in a panic. She was glad to see us.
“I told her, ‘You’re gonna have to let go of the boat. You’re gonna have to grab on to me.’ She didn’t want to let go. She actually thought we were going to get run over by one of the ferryboats. I just told her to calm down. I asked her her name. She let go. She grabbed onto me, and I swam her over to one of the other ferryboats that had a ladder down to the water. And both me and Detective Rodriguez helped her up onto the ferryboat along with the assistance of the crew of the ferryboat.
“She was on the verge of hypothermia. She was pretty much just limp in the water holding on to me. She was of little use, being that her lower extremities were in such cold water for such is a long time. When we pulled her up, thank God there were people there from the ferryboat to help pull up. As we were pushing her up onto the boat, they were pulling her up from the deck.”
Rodriguez told Chen he and Delaney have been involved in “quite a number of rescues … but this is at a magnitude a lot larger than anything we’ve been involved with.”
How did they stay calm?
“It’s not really about being calm,” Rodriguez said. “It’s just about getting the job done. We’re so focused on the job and what we need to do that it’s not really an issue. It’s something we do.”
Both said they don’t feel like heroes.
“It’s just another jump out of the helicopter for us!” Rodriguez said.
Record-breaking whale stranded on Irish beach dies
Motionless in the shallows off the coast he lay, as his life ebbed away. It was a sorry end for the young fin whale, found trapped on a sand bank yesterday morning.
Although his carcass was left by the shore, apparently mourned by just a single surfer, this whale did not die without a fight. His final hours were testament to the bond between one of Earth’s largest animals and humankind – as up to 5,000 flocked to the beach to try to help him back to sea. The 65ft whale, whose species is endangered, had been spotted by lifeboatmen at their station at 8am. Then he was alive and spouting water from his blow-hole. Michael Hurley, of the Courtmacsherry Lifeboat Station in Ireland, said: ‘His tail was in the air waving about. I could see the spume of water being blown up.’
An endangered species, the fin whale can grow to 88 feet in length, can dive to 820 feet deep and can hold its breath for 10 to 15 minutes. But, he added: ‘As time moved on, it became obvious he was getting more and more tired as his activity began to slow down. He may have been injured at sea. ‘There is a score mark along one of his sides as if he was in collision with a ship.’ As soon as the alarm was raised, rangers from the National Parks and Wildlife Service began to co-ordinate a rescue operation with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group.
It was possible that the whale had come in on the tide the previous night and been in harbour all night. They hoped to launch a lifeboat and refloat the 15-ton whale by coaxing him out of the bay at high tide. As news spread, locals arrived to see if they could help. But by 11.30am, when the tide had dropped low enough for rangers to reach him, it was already too late.
The whale had weakened and died. Simon Berrow, from the IWDG, said: ‘Our options were limited. The whale was looking thin and bones were showing. It must have been pretty sick to die in such a short time.’ Experts believe the male may have been beached off County Cork all night, after seeking shelter. He was among the biggest of 65 sighted in the area. Cranes and slings will be needed to move the carcass.
The fin whale, second in size only to the blue whale, can grow to 88ft, dive to 820ft and stay underwater for 15 minutes.
A Quick Rescue Kept Death Toll at Zero
The police divers found two women, going limp, with minutes to live in the frigid waters between New York and New Jersey.
“They were lethargic,” said one of the divers, Detective Michael Delaney. “They were no help whatsoever. Their extremities were frozen cold.”
He and the other diver, Detective Robert Rodriguez, shoved one of the women aboard a boat with the help of workers on board. Detective Delaney soon helped the other woman aboard as well.
That was the scene in the minutes after US Airways Flight 1549 slid into the Hudson River on Thursday afternoon after the crew reported that the plane had struck a flock of birds shortly after leaving La Guardia Airport.
For a moment after the water landing, it was a picture of eerie calm, the airplane floating on its belly in the center of the river near West 48th Street under a bright sky. A witness in a penthouse apartment called it a perfect landing, as if on cement.
But very soon the water was churned by an ad hoc flotilla of boats and ferries flying the flags of almost every city, state and federal agency that works the waters around New York City. They sped toward the slowly sinking jet, a rescue operation complicated by river currents that kept dragging the plane south, as its passengers climbed aboard the wings to await help.
The rescue began in the airplane itself, among the passengers. One passenger, Jeff Kolodjay, 31, said he and others helped the women and children off the plane and onto ferries. “There was a lady that was trying to crawl over,” he said. “She had a baby on her shoulder.”
The plane’s pilot walked the aisles of the cabin twice to ensure no one was left behind before he exited, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said at a news conference.
Vessels from the New York Police and Fire Departments and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey worked with New York Waterway ferries, which sent 14 boats, and the Coast Guard in the rescue. “We sent as many boats as we had,” said Alan Warren of New York Waterway.
The operation was not without improvisation: Four New York police officers commandeered a Circle Line boat picking up tourists and commuters at 42nd Street and hurried to the jet. Two officers stayed on the ferry and tied themselves to two detectives, John McKenna and James Coll, who stepped onto the wing and helped people onto rescue boats, the police said.
The divers were at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn when the call came over the radio of an airplane down.
A pilot at the field, Sgt. Michael Hendrix, 42, said that he imagined it was a small airplane, a routine job.
The pilot and the divers scrambled aboard a helicopter. Air traffic controllers gave them a special route to the Hudson River.
Sergeant Hendrix took the helicopter on a path that passed the Empire State Building and as he passed the skyscraper, he dipped the helicopter down. He saw the jetliner in the water — its tube floating and US Airways spelled out on its side. “I never, in a million years, expected to see US Airways in the Hudson River,” he said.
There was debris in the water and a film of jet fuel coating the surface. Some of the plane’s passengers were on the wings.
The helicopter hovered, making sure not to get too close out of concern that the winds from the rotor would push passengers into the water, Sergeant Hendrix said. The divers jumped from the helicopter not far from the water. About five to seven minutes had passed since the 911 call, Sergeant Hendrix said.
The divers saw the women fighting for their lives in the water.
The women were clinging to a ferry but were unable to get aboard as the water quickly numbed them. Detective Delaney entered the water without an air tank, but only his diving suit, mask and snorkel and approached a woman floating in a life vest, he said.
“She was very frantic,” he said. “I just told her to relax and tell me what her name was.” She feared the ferry she was holding onto would run her over, he said.
The second woman had panicked and fallen off a ferry, the divers said. “I swam over to her and helped her in,” Detective Delaney said.
John Peruggia, 45, the chief of Emergency Medical Service for the New York Fire Department, was in a car in Queens, when he got the call of an plane crash.
The chief ordered 35 ambulances to a staging area in Manhattan, 25 of them for basic life support and 10 with advanced medical services.
By the time Chief Peruggia arrived to the staging area, passengers were streaming in — people dressed in suits and clothes for a flight to a warmer climate.
“All in all, on the New York side, we saw 88 victims of the plane crash,” he said.
A majority of the patients were in stable condition. “Mild signs of hypothermia,” he said.
Of the 88 who came ashore in Manhattan, 20 were taken to hospitals, Chief Peruggia said.
He said he saw no one bleeding and was stunned that some of those passengers did not appear to have been through an ordeal at all.
“A couple people I talked to, who were in business suits, I said, ‘Were you guys on the plane?’ because you would not know they were just in a plane that crashed on the Hudson River. They said, ‘Yeah, we were on it.’ ”
Chief Peruggia added: “One guy said, ‘I stepped out of the plane, onto the wing and then onto a boat that brought me to this building and then two of your paramedics took great care of me.” The chief said he asked the man to go repeat that story for the mayor, who was standing nearby.
The rescue was described as remarkably smooth. Another witness, Fulmer Duckworth, saw the crash from his office at the Bank of America. He looked through binoculars and saw 70 or 80 people on a wing. “Actually, it looked like everybody was really calm, like on the subway platform when it’s really, really crowded and everyone’s standing shoulder to shoulder. Everyone was standing right up against each other on the wings.”
Honorio Hector Rabanes, a deckhand on the Thomas Keane, a New York Waterway ferry, summed up the just-doing-our-jobs underplaying of the rescue typical of many who spoke of it Thursday night.
“Basically, let me tell you, we were in the right place at the right time,” he said.
But he went on to describe the panic of the passengers: “When we got near them, we heard a lot of yelling. Once they saw us, they were still panicking. We saw two babies on the lifeboat and we tried to get them to pass them to us, but they couldn’t listen. They were just holding on to them tight.”
