You may not know the name, but you definitely know the work. Over seven decades, Oscar-winning special effects supervisor John Richardson has helped create some of the most memorable action scenes in the most enduring movies in cinema. Aliens’ epic power loader? That was him, and he has the Academy Award on his living room shelf to prove it. He climbed up the Golden Gate Bridge to prep for A View to a Kill’s high-altitude climax, shared a field with The Beatles on Help! and has worked on every Harry Potter film, quite literally making magic happen.
Effects runs in his blood: his dad, Cliff Richardson, was special effects pioneer who worked for Ealing Studios and with John Huston and David Lean.
Richardson Jr has combed through six old shoeboxes of photographs for a new book, ‘Making Movie Magic’. It offers an access-all-areas tour of everything from Harry Potter to Deep Blue Sea, and a glimpse at the secrets that went into making those famous sequences happen. He talked us through a few of those snaps.
Help! (1965)
Still a wet-behind-the-ears young special effects assistant, one of Richardson’s earliest gigs saw him rubbing shoulders with the Fab Four at the height of Beatlemania. ‘We ended up around Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain with the British Army,’ he remembers, ‘we had tanks firing guns and we did all these explosions.’ Did he have a favourite Beatle? ‘Ringo was a lot of fun. I always thought John was a little aloof compared to the others, but they were all great guys. I didn't really appreciate the experience at the time, because it was just the next movie for me.’
Aliens (1986)
Richardson’s work on Aliens at Pinewood Studios won him an Oscar, but it didn’t come easily. ‘It was a challenging picture,’ he says. ‘Artistically, James Cameron is the most talented director I've ever worked with. He knew exactly what he wanted – sometimes to a finer point than I'd wish to argue with.’ Working to the tightest of deadlines, he had to build a functioning power loader to Cameron’s meticulous specs. ‘Jim would start quibbling about the screws in the bottom of the foot. I had to ask the producer to get him off my back. That Friday afternoon a runner came down with two bottles of champagne with a note that read: "Building power loaders is thirsty work. Have one on me. Jim."’
Octopussy (1983)
For Octopussy’s opening, which has Roger Moore’s 007 flying a tiny jet through a packed aircraft hangar, Richardson borrowed an old Jaguar. ‘We cut the roof off and welded a pole arm onto the bottom. Then we mounted a full-size Bede jet onto it and I drove it through the hangar at 75mph and out through the closing doors. The gap was about four inches wider than the car. Did it feel dangerous? No, I had my eyes closed!’
A View to a Kill (1985)
Richardson got to blow up Bond villain Max Zorin’s airship in A View to a Kill – albeit at Pinewood rather than sunny San Francisco. ‘We had four different scales of airship for different shots,’ he explains, ‘and the biggest was third-scale. We filled it with hydrogen instead of helium and detonated various charges inside it. The weather was the big challenge. I remember having an argument with the producer, who insisted on getting it airborne when it was windy. We ended up having to repair it.’
License to Kill (1989)
Richardson remembers working with Timothy Dalton on his second and final outing with fondness. 'This was him in a harness being lowered from a real US Coast Guard helicopter,’ he says. ‘There aren't many lead actors who would do that, but Tim was up for most things. I never worked with Daniel Craig but Tim was the most game of the Bonds I did work with. To be fair to Roger Moore and Sean Connery, they probably weren't as athletic back in the later Bonds.'
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
In the Pierce Brosnan Bond film, evil media baron Elliot Carver sinks a Royal Navy vessel to spark a war between China and the UK. 'We shot the sinking in the water tank in Rosarito, Mexico, which was originally built for Titanic,’ says Richardson. ‘We mounted the frigate on a ramp with a track on it and used winches to pull it down. Half the crew had a tear in their eye watching it sink. It was a beautiful model.’
Deep Blue Sea (1999)
The super-shark sci-fi had Richardson donning his wetsuit again. '[Animatronics expert] Walt Conti built the shark and it was one of the best animatronic creatures I'd ever seen,’ the SFX man recalls. ‘Especially as we were filming in salt water, which makes engineering ten times more difficult.’ But as Richardson remembers, it didn’t always stay in the water. ‘There was a computer glitch and the shark, which weighed about a tonne and a half, suddenly shot out of the water and crashed back down again. That made us all very wary of getting too close to it.’
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
The special effects wizard spent ten years making objects fly in the Harry Potter movies. This paper bird charm, used by Draco Malfoy in Severus Snape's Defence Against the Dark Arts class, required a spot of fishing. '(Directors Chris Columbus and Alfonso Cuarón wanted to do as much in-camera as possible,’ says Richardson, ‘so we built it with a little motor inside and hung it on very fine tungsten wires on the end of a fishing rod. That way, we could land it on Tom Felton's hand or take off and fly around him.’
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001)
'That's me doing the very first test on Hagrid's motorbike,’ says Richardson, who worked on all eight Harry Potter movies. It's always difficult to tell an actor or stuntman to use a rig if you haven't experienced it yourself, so I'll get on there to test it and make sure it doesn't want to throw you off.’
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
Richardson describes creating the triple decker Knight Bus as ‘challenging’. Sawing the tops from two buses and bolting the top of one to the bottom of the other was followed by the logistical headache of getting the magical Routemaster into London for filming. ‘We'd have to lift the top off with a crane, put the top and the bottom on two low-loaders, drive to the next location and put it back together again,’ he recalls. ‘Sometimes twice or three times in a night.’
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001)
Not everything the special effects wizard conjured up made it to the screen. For the Hogwarts Great Hall scenes, Richardson and his team hung 450 candles, each with a fuel reservoir and a wick, from tungsten wire attached to rigging in the roof. ‘What we hadn't counted on was that Leavesden was an old aircraft hangar and there were a lot of draughts. The wind would blow the candle flames onto the wires and they'd drop. So we had to revert to CGI.’
Making Movie Magic: The Photographs is out now from The History Press.