CARS IN FILMS

Film makers have always had a close relationship with the motor industry. Jean-Luc Godard is said to have once claimed that to make a successful film all you need is a girl and a gun but he should also have added a car.

Perhaps the most famous film car marque of all time is Aston Martin. Their association of course is with the famous Bond films, something that goes back to 1964 for Sean Connery's DB5 as used in Goldfinger. More recently, the marque provided a V12 Vanquish for Pierce Brosnan in Die Another Day, this a 460bhp beast fitted with grille-mounted machine guns and heat-seeking missiles and a DBS for Daniel Craig in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. In Skyfall they reverted back to the original DB5.

Aston's return to the 007 spotlight came after the Bond film makers had for several years defected to BMW. The Munich company supplied their then brand new Z3 for Brosnan's first Bond outing, the 1995 film Goldeneye. He was subsequently upgraded to Z8 for The World Is Not Enough (1999).



It's all great product placement of course - as long as you ignore the fact that in the original Ian Fleming books, Bond actually drove a Bentley. Of course, things aren't always what they seem. Apparently, the car that Brosnan was seen driving in Die Another Day wasn't technically a V12 Vanquish at all: owing to reported clutch problems with the new model, the one on screen contained a modified gearbox and the V12 engine was replaced with a Mustang V8 to allow room for the gadgets.



Of course, the Bond/Aston deal is just one of many that have lined the film-makers pockets over the years. Remember the Volvo C70 Turbo Coupe owned by Val Kilmer's Simon Templar in The Saint (1996)? Or the slinky TVR Tuscan used by John Travolta's cyber-terrorist in Swordfish (2001). Then of course there's Gone In 60 Seconds (2000) where Nicolas Cage has a huge range of mouth-wat...