[Q] Are you the person who's responsible for the Bond gadgetry, really? I mean you say about the DB5, and that was the first...

Yes, well, when... when you say responsible, yes, I come up with most of the ideas, but we had the most brilliant special effects engineer, really, Johnny Stears, who worked on those films, and then unfortunately died, and later on we had Derek Meddings on the later Bond films, who was also brilliant, and also, unfortunately, died. But it would have been impossible for me to work without them, and without the team around me, you know, and whereas, from my past, having been a fighter pilot, and trying to race cars, and so on, all this appealed to me, and I could think up of, you know, things: cutting the tyres, or the wheels on the car or machine guns – which was the obvious thing – or the flamethrowers, or... but we had Johnny who made them all practical. He was a brilliant engineer. I mean he didn't make a practical machine gun, thank God, but as near as damn it, and we also had a functioning ejector seat.

Martin-Baker I think it was who did the ejector seat, which, when the car chase… and we... we filmed part of the car chase at the Pinewood studios, exterior – night shooting – and the driver of the Aston Martin was a stuntman called Bob Simmons, who was a great friend of mine and a great stuntman, and I had built a phoney wall outside, but it was just about 10ft in front of a concrete, a real concrete wall, at the back of it. So I said to Johnny, 'Listen, Johnny, you've got to start braking really early because the phoney wall has no resistance at all, but 10ft behind it, or 15ft, but... there is a real wall'. So he said, 'Don't worry'. And, of course, he didn't brake early enough and went straight into the other wall. And the damage... and we had the whole crew working through the night and the next day to get the car back into shape again. So these things happened too.