The 007 Diaries: Filming Live and Let Die

After jetting the bayous in boats, whizzing around in a wingless plane, courting bites by crocodiles, and crashing cars, I will always wryly recall my last line in Live and Let Die. Delivered to the driver on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive expressway, it was: ‘Easy, Charlie, let’s get there in one piece.’ Give or take a tooth, I did.

Later, Joan Collins and Ron Kass are bringing our children to join us at Leslie and Evie Bricusse’s house in Acapulco, where I will recuperate from the rigours of Bond.

Luisa and I are leaving for California; the Broccolis have kindly loaned us their house in Beverley Hills, Hollywood, where I have been asked to present the Oscar for ‘Best Actor’. Without wishing to sound too partisan, I hope I hand it to my mate, Michael Caine, who is nominated for his performance in Sleuth.

At seven o’clock this evening, the phone rang. It was ‘Crackers’, saying with qualifying caution learned from years in the picture business: ‘All being equal, that is, if the rushes are okayed tomorrow afternoon from London, you are finished on the picture.’

B-Day Eighty-three: a day of depression. I arrived at Kennedy Airport, where we were to film Bond’s arrival at the Pan Am Terminal, to be greeted by long faces from Guy and Cubby. They had good reason for despair. Film of three days’ work, including shooting in Harlem and Saturday’s expensive stunts, was at that moment being tested in a London labo

shots, and after a miserably anxious day the good news came. The film had been successfully screened in London.

When the call came for me to get to work this morning, it was to Second Avenue at 94th Street, but to the confusion of New Yorkers, our Art Department had altered the street sign to read 124th Street, which is deep in Harlem. The corner had been spotted on a location recce and deemed perfect for the exterior of the Fillet of Soul restaurant, which

pimpmobiles by dazzled New Yorkers because some of the proud owners have made their pile in prostitution, protection and drug peddling in Harlem. Long, low caricatures of cars, their fronts are all grill and glitter, and seem a sort of cross between a colossal chromium coffee machine and a cartoonist’s Rolls-Royce. I would love to drive one down th

Driving uptown to Harlem was an eerie experience. There is no welcome for whitey there; suspicion stalks the streets, and, contrary to our usual experience, no crowd collects to stand and stare at the film crew at work. The streets look empty and forlorn, given over to grinding poverty, soaring crime, and the deathly delusion of drugs.