(April 17, 1930–January 22, 2021): Top French auto-stunt coordinator whose frenetic car chases became an industry standard, thanks in large part to his work on the James Bond series. Julienne began his Bond association on For Your Eyes Only, for which he devised and coordinated the Citroën Deux Cheveux chase and the motorbike fight in Cortina d’Ampezzo. On Octopussy, his drivers took Bond (Roger Moore) on the wild chase through the German countryside to an American air force base. On A View to a Kill, Julienne took a car down concrete steps to the Seine River in Paris, then obliterated its windshield and eventually cut the car completely in half as Bond attempts to keep up with a parachuting May Day (Grace Jones). Later in the same film, his auto daredevils were put to work in downtown San Francisco during Bond’s hook-and-ladder chase. In Mexicali, Mexico, on Licence to Kill, Julienne was intimately involved in the Kenworth tractor-trailer truck stunts.
Julienne’s final Bond assignment was GoldenEye. As he recounted at the time, “I started with the James Bond series in 1980 [on] For Your Eyes Only. In GoldenEye, it’s a very subtle race between two protagonists—a Ferrari 355, which is a real animal, and an Aston Martin DB5, which is a relatively ancient vehicle, a venerable machine. We were afraid to hurt it. . . . In order to match the performance of the two cars that have nothing in common is very complicated. We’ve had to use tricks—spikes on the tires to make it slide—it’s the opposite of what we’re used to doing. And this is precisely why the job is fascinating. In this chase scene—it is not a stunt, it is a chase scene—it must be very subtle to adapt to the actors’s performances. And that’s what makes it very difficult. But on the other hand it’s also something wonderful to achieve.”
He added, “Everything is always very dangerous. It requires a lot of skill in order to be very precise in relationship to the camera. The day before yesterday, we crashed both the Aston and the Ferrari. A small thing, but huge consequences. We were able to fix it during the night. . . . What is now wonderful is that we can now use all the technical craft we have acquired on the race tracks, the Grand Prix, and use this knowledge for filmmaking, and I believe this is an outstanding accomplishment.”[1]
A native of Cepoy, Loiret (in the Loire Valley, ninety-four kilometers from Paris), Julienne made his motion picture stunt debut on director André Hunebelle’s crime comedy adventure Fantomas (1964). Three years later, he first served as a stunt coordinator on George Lautner’s Sorrel Flower. However, it was his masterful work on Peter Collinson’s The Italian Job (1969) that brought him international acclaim for his innovative car stunts.
[1] Special features, GoldenEye, James Bond Ultimate Edition (1995; MGM, 2006), DVD.
