‘Roger did not get the joke': Why A View to a Kill is Bond at his ridiculous best

There's a rule about the Roger Moore Bond films: the more ridiculous and less believable it is that Rodge himself is performing the stunts – whether he's skiing off a 7,000ft mountain in The Spy Who Loved Me or clambering across a train in Octopussy – the more entertaining he is. That's never truer than in A View to a Kill, Moore's final outing as 007, which premiered 40 years ago.
Rodge – a less-than-spritely 57 by this point – escapes KGB agents by snowboarding through the mountains of Siberia (cut to a cover of The Beach Boys ' California Girls) and dangles from the swinging ladder of a high-speed fire engine. In the end, he fights Christopher Walken at 750 ft on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Moore's age is a common criticism of A View to a Kill, which – it's fair to say – is not the most critically adored Bond film. Moore himself named A View to a Kill as his least favourite due to violence. And when I ask director John Glen where A View to a Kill sits within his five films as director, he responds, 'Roger was knocking on a bit. We all knew, including Roger, that it was his last Bond.'
But A View to a Kill is a perfect swansong for the japery of the Roger Moore era. All the distinct pleasures of Moore's tenure are present and correct and magnified by the fact that Bond is – in Moore's own words – 'a bit long in the tooth'.
There's thrilling stunt work by stunt men who are definitely not Roger Moore; knowing gags that raise an eyebrow to the audience; the queasy canoodling of any young woman within his vicinity; and the relentless innuendo ('I'll fill you in later, Moneypenny… I'm an early riser myself…I got off eventually', etc).
It's all right there in the pre-title sequence. After the Beach Boys snowboard escape – a brilliantly inventive chase – Bond sneaks into an iceberg-shaped submarine, immediately patronises the delectable helmswoman ('Be a good girl would you and put her in automatic') then bumps the controls so she falls onto his bed.
But 57 or not, Bond is still Bond, and when the titles kick in – a day-glo sequence set to the walloping synths of the Duran Duran theme – it's absolutely electric, charged by an excitement that's unique to Bond films.
A View to a Kill also has two of the great Eighties Bond baddies: Walken's Max Zorin, a maniac industrialist who was born of a Nazi genetics experiment (naturally); and Grace Jones as Bond girl-cum-henchwoman, May Day. In the film, May Day parachutes off the Eiffel Tower – the film's signature stunt, performed by BJ Worth – while behind the scenes Grace Jones got on Rodge's wick.
'I've always said if you've nothing nice to say about someone, then you should say nothing,' wrote Moore in reference to Jones. 'So I'll say nothing.'
Roger Moore had hinted that every Bond film would be his last for several years before A View to a Kill. It was all a bit of a game to increase his pay cheque next time around – to add a few more double-Os, perhaps. But writing in his memoir, Moore reflected that he really was taking stock of his career and thinking about winding down when producer Albert 'Cubby' Broccoli asked him to play Bond again. Moore was game. 'I was pretty fit and still able to remember lines,' he wrote.
The script – by Richard Maibaum and co-producer Michael G Wilson – had little to do with the Ian Fleming short story, From a View to a Kill, other than the title and Paris setting. In the film, Zorin plans to kickstart an earthquake that will wipe out Silicon Valley, allowing him to take control of the booming microchip business.
Yes, Moore's flared tuxedo may have been a touch behind the times, but Zorin was of the technological moment. Forty years on, Zorin now looks like the original tech bro, prefiguring all those jokes about how tech billionaires such as Elon Musk are almost real-life Bond villains, with their plans to travel to space and conquer Mars. 'Maybe he saw my films!' says John Glen, laughing.
Zorin's plans were foiled before production began, though. The famed 007 stage at Pinewood Studios, which was set to hold Zorin's network on mines, burned down in June 1984, while being used for Ridley Scott's Legend, and had to be rebuilt.
As for Zorin himself, David Bowie was offered the role but declined – 'I didn't want to spend five months watching my double fall off mountains,' Bowie said – and Sting had meetings. Christopher Walken, however, was a different class. He was already an Oscar winner by this time, having won a Best Supporting Actor statue in 1979 for The Deer Hunter. 'They sent me a script, it seemed like a good job,' Walken later recalled. 'I knew there were lots of reasons to do it. How many times does an actor get to be in a Bond film? That would just be fun to do that.'
With his off-world stare and trademark lilt ('You am- USE me, Mr Bond'), Walken is an elite level Bond villain. A by-product of being genetically engineered by Nazis, we are told, is also being psychotic. He drops uncooperative business associates out of his airship and laughs to himself as he machine-guns an army of his own workers.
Moore later pointed to that moment as the reason A View to a Kill was his least favourite Bond. 'Too violent,' Roger said in 1996. 'There was no slow-motion, blood-spewing Sam Peckinpah action, but with the machine-guns and thousands of people getting blown away, the violence was too gratuitous.'
Walken certainly seems to relish in the violence of the massacre. 'I just let him go,' says Glen about Walken's machine-gun performance.
Elsewhere, Zorin kills Patrick Macnee's MI6 agent Sir Godfrey Tibbett, putting an end to what was essentially a dream team pairing of James Bond and John Steed (whom Macnee played in ITV's The Avengers) and forcing Moore's most serious moment in the film.
The story begins with 007 attending a horse auction at Zorin's estate. Zorin is both a racehorse breeder and cheat – the horses are doped by his Nazi scientist creator. Bond wanders around spying on Zorin with massive polarising sunglasses – the most glaringly conspicuous bit of gadgetry in Q's arsenal – and chats up much younger women. 'I was hoping we'd spend the evening together,' he tells sexy geologist Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts) 60 seconds after meeting her.
Bond meets his match in the bedroom, however, when he slips between the sheets with Grace Jones's May Day, who looks like she could ravage Moore to a pulp.
During filming. Jones surprised him in bed with a menacingly large dildo. Moore did not appreciate it. 'We played a few tricks, as we always did on the Bond films,' says John Glen. 'She was in on it... It's the first time I'd ever known him not to take the joke. He got a bit upset about it, I must say. Normally it was him playing a joke on everyone else.'
Though Grace Jones wrote glowingly about Moore in her autobiography, calling him a 'softie', Moore was less complimentary. He described in his memoir how she played loud heavy metal in her dressing room, which ruled out an afternoon nap.
'I did ask Grace to turn it down several times, to no avail,' Moore wrote. 'One day I snapped. I marched into her room, pulled the plug out and then went back to my room, picked up a chair and flung it at the wall. The dent is still there.'
The scenes at Zorin's estate were filmed at Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. Glen recalls that Walken had a tendency to get bored between set-ups and wander off. 'There was a lot of waiting around,' he says. 'Christopher would go off for a walk in the hundreds of acres of woods and we'd have to send search parties. In the end I delegated one assistant director to watch him all the time so we could keep tabs by radio. It became a game. Christopher would watch this assistant and the moment the assistant took his eyes off him, he was gone!'
Production also visited Paris to shoot major action sequences, including May Day's BASE jump from the Eiffel Tower. Parachuting off the Eiffel Tower was suggested by stuntman BJ Worth during Moonraker, and had appeared in a draft of the Moonraker script. With the stunt greenlit for A View to a Kill, Worth and skydiving pal Don Caltvedt performed 22 jumps from a hot air balloon. They had to get the precise timing to safely open the parachute from 900 ft and clear the outward slope of the tower. They worked out that they needed to pull their chutes after three seconds, which they timed with the changing pitch of the wind in their ears.
But getting permissions in Paris was complicated. As well as the Eiffel Tower BASE jump, they needed approval for veteran stunt driver Rémy Julienne to drive a cut-in-half Renault 11 around a one-way system (going the wrong way, of course) along the Seine. The filmmakers had to schmooze numerous local authorities for the necessary permissions. But plans were almost compromised when in April 1984, ahead of filming, a London couple sneaked past security measures at the tower and jumped with parachutes hidden in backpacks. Paris authorities were concerned that the couple got the idea after hearing about the upcoming 007 stunt, and almost withdrew the film's permissions.
Fortunately, BJ Worth was allowed to make the jump, which he did from a driving board-like platform. (Glen recalls his reaction to first seeing the platform during practices: 'I said, 'You can't use that! This is a world-renowned landmark! You can't change the silhouette of it!') Incredibly, Worth fell asleep on the scaffolding at the top of the tower while he waited 15 minutes for a camera reload. His adrenaline had been pumping so hard in the build-up that he shut down as soon as there was a delay.
The jump was a success and Cubby Broccoli declined to risk filming a second attempt. However, backup jumper Don Caltvedt was miffed that he didn't get his turn, so crept up the tower early in the morning with a friend and craftily jumped without anyone knowing – or so he thought. The crew was already setting up for the next day's shooting and Caltvedt plummeted past Glen and his team. Worth fired him on the spot, and the Paris authorities almost pulled permissions once again
'I was very upset about that,' remembers Glen. 'It was incredibly irresponsible to jeopardise our shoot in Paris. To do jumps on the Eiffel Tower we had to get top permissions and had to assure them that we wouldn't do anything to embarrass them.'
There were no such problems with permissions when the production moved to San Francisco for the second half of the film. The San Francisco mayor, Dianne Feinstein, was happy to host Bond and was especially enamoured by Roger Moore.
'It was lucky and fortunate enough that she was one of the rare people that preferred me as Bond instead of Sean [Connery],' Moore later said on a making of documentary. 'And so, we got all sorts of permits.'
'Her first question was, 'How much are you going to spend in the city?'' says Glen. 'We said, 'About four million'. She said, 'Do anything you like!' When we told her we wanted to burn down City Hall she said, 'If it's OK by the fire chief, it's OK by me.''
Rather than actually burning down San Francisco City Hall, Glen and his crew lined the roof with gas burners. (Torching the building is one of several Zorin plans to bump off Bond rather than just shooting him on the spot. See also: challenging 007 to a horse race rigged with traps, and locking him in a car and pushing it into a lake). In the following action sequence, Bond and Stacey Sutton steal a fire engine and race through San Francisco. Stacey steers as Bond clings to the ladder. It took almost three weeks to complete, with shots of a stuntman hanging off the ladder and dodging oncoming traffic, spliced with close-ups of Moore.
Critics and fans have poked fun at A View to a Kill for several shots of stunt doubles who are quite obviously not Roger Moore – but that's all part of the fun of it. Glen laughs about the fact he switched Moore for stunt double Martin Grace at every opportunity. 'Roger wasn't particularly athletic,' says Glen. 'He couldn't really run very well. We'd always stick Martin Grace in where we could to double for him!'
It certainly wasn't Moore at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge for the climactic punch-up between Bond and Zorin, after Zorin's airship gets stuck on the north tower. Though Moore did climb up one of the replica bridge sections built at Pinewood. 'I wasn't paid enough to climb the real one,' he later said.
Much of the fight is taken from shooting on the Pinewood replicas, but the shots that are taken from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge are stomach-lurchingly impressive – Martin Grace doubles for Moore on the massive sloping cables.
'We were limited with what we could do because we were right above all the traffic,' says Glen. 'But we did a bit of stuntmen fighting with safety wires on them.'
Zorin, unhinged until the end, laughs as he falls to his death from the bridge. Walken was laughing for real. 'I was hanging there and I was about to fall off the bridge on to some mattresses,' he said. 'It struck me as funny, that's all.'
A View to a Kill premiered in San Francisco on May 22, 1985, the last of Roger Moore's seven films as 007. Though not Moore's finest outing, A View to a Kill still demonstrates the magic of his tenure – his screen persona. That's why even at 57, he gets away with it. You don't need to believe that Roger Moore can kill a man with his bare hands or snowboard away from the KGB.
The film would also facilitate a necessary change for the Bond series. After A View to a Kill, the Bond team set out to find a more serious actor and ultimately cast Timothy Dalton for 1987's more Fleming-esque The Living Daylights, which Glen also directed.
'We had to make a radical change,' says Glen. 'Roger's Bonds were light-hearted. Timothy Dalton's Bond was more akin to Sean Connery. We were going back to the darker, laconic type of Bond. We had to go back to the original Fleming concept… We'd had our fun with Roger.'

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