Project Petrolhead

“Afterwards, I said to Rémy, ‘Bloody hell, my heart was in my mouth.’ He said, ‘Michael, it’s mathematics.’” – Michael Caine

You may not know the name, but you have almost certainly seen his work. If you’ve ever sat down to watch a movie and seen a car do something extraordinary, then the chances are that Rémy Julienne was involved in the making of that sequence.

Performing his first stunt (jumping a bicycle over a canal) as a child in nazi-occupied France, Julienne went on to become French Motorcross champion in 1957, transitioning shortly afterwards to stunt-riding for movies in the mid-60s. after a few years of cultivating his reputation in the French film industry, his big break came in 1969 with The Italian Job where he coordinated the Mini chase through Turin, including the death-defying jump from the Fiat factory roof.

After this triumph, work came thick and fast for Julienne, with perhaps his most famous work being six consecutive Bond films (from For Your Eyes Only to Goldeneye) which featured, among other things; the mountainside chase in which Roger Moore’s Bond drives a Citroën 2CV, a chase in which Grace Jones is pursued through Paris by Bond in the front-half of a Renault 11, Dalton’s frozen getaway in his Aston Martin V8 Vantage and Brosnan racing a Ferrari F355 in his Aston Martin DB5.

The best Bond stunt coordinated by Julienne, however, takes place in the finale of Licence to Kill in which Bond (played by the underrated Timothy Dalton) is hot on the heels of Robert Davi’s cocaine-smuggling Franz Sanchez in a Kenworth W-900. As part of the chase, the team wanted the truck to go up on… well… the car equivalent would be two wheels, but this is an eighteen-wheel lorry so… nine wheels? To do this, Kenworth themselves had built a rig that would allow the lorry to do the seemingly impossible stunt. That was until Rémy Julienne got hold of a standard lorry and said “nah, I reckon I can just DO that” (paraphrasing, obviously) and then… Just DID it. Completely unaided.

Rémy Julienne passed away from COVID-19 in 2021, but his legacy will endure for many years to come. He was a man who could make ordinary, everyday cars (Minis, 2CVs, Lorries, you name it) do spectacular things, and he is responsible for putting together some of the most creative and memorable car chases in film history. With 313 stunt credits listed on IMDb, ranging from 1964 to 2017, it’s almost guaranteed that you will have seen at least one film or TV episode that he has worked on at some point in your life and if you haven’t, then you owe it to yourself to check them out.