Having met and worked with some Bond technicians myself, they always comment on the working family atmosphere. Everybody felt a part of the team. Did Cliff feel the same warmth?

“Yes indeed. Very much like working for Disney.” Cliff worked on quite a few Disney films and had a very close working relationship with Walt Disney himself.

“Someone once said to me when I was working on my first Disney film, ‘As long as you don’t burn the stage down, you’ll be on the next one.’ And that was true of the Bonds. For me personally, I think it possibly worked that I was very friendly with Johnny Stears who was the resident special effects man for quite a while. So John would pass all the opticals and mattes on to me to do.”

Unfortunately for Cliff, when Johnny ‘stepped down’ there was a big change round and people like Derek Meddings and John Richardson took over the reigns of special effects and the mattes went elsewhere. Cliff remembers this time was around the end of The Man With The Golden Gun.

Although he did create some bits and pieces on further Bonds, including the graphic display of the Ranger’s and Potemkin’s ill-fated Armageddon missile trajectories in The Spy Who Loved Me. The recollection prompts another memory.

“I only slipped up on one shot in a Bond that I couldn’t do and that was one with Roger Moore. It was the one where the opening took place at Northolt airport that was supposed to be in South America and Bond is flying a red, white and blue plane?”

It was obvious that Cliff was talking about Octopussy and the Acrostar mini-jet - but what was the shot that never was?

“The director, John Glen, wanted the plane when it did a victory roll to trail red and blue smoke. They hadn’t shot it on the day so he gave me the footage and told me to see what I could do. We tried everything. We tried shooting two red and blue smoke pots flying up into the air. We tried animating it. We tried it every which way we could. In the end John Glen told us to forget it. So they cut the shot out. We tried, but this one was just a little too difficult.” Cliff sounded disappointed at this excusable failure. Passing swiftly over that slight hiccup in an otherwise blemish-free career, I asked Cliff if he had any idea how many mattes and opticals he did on all the Bond films he was involved with, and I wasn’t really that surprised with his reply.

“Absolutely no idea! In fact I was only talking about this the other day. When I retired I sold around about 80 of my paintings to a company based at Elstree Studios.” These weren’t just Bond mattes, but mattes from films including Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Last Days of Pompeii, most of the Norman Wisdom films, Hellraiser II, Clash of the Titans, Spymaker – The Secret Life of Ian Fleming - and many, many more. Only 80 paintings seemed quite a small number over a career of 52 and a half years, and I ask out of curiosity what happened to the others?

“When I was working full-time for Rank, once a picture had been released and I was at a loose end, my boss at the time, the late Bill Warrington (The first British effects man to receive an Oscar for his work on The Guns of Navarone.) would tell me to scrape the painting off. So I’d do as I was told and clean the glass up and get it ready for the next picture.”

It seems such a tragic waste, but hey that’s showbiz. I asked Cliff if he kept any of his mattes back from the 80 he sold.

“I’ve kept four, three Bonds that now hang in EON’s head office and one from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

Cliff has already mentioned how much fun the early days of Bond were to work on, but towards the end of his involvement he found it had all got terribly serious.

“Nobody had time anymore. It was all go, go, go. In the early days you went on location to do glass shots, but not anymore, the opticals and mattes were becoming studio based.”

I suppose some would say it was progress, but at least Cliff has the consolation of working on the Bonds in their halcyon days. This became a lateral thought as I asked Cliff if he had seen any of the latest Bond films? What did he think of them? Were they a patch on the films he worked on?

“Yes I’ve seen them, but it’s so difficult to say isn’t it? I mean, times have moved on, they’re so different aren’t they? In the early days, Bond was the big hero and all the other parts were played down to some extent, I think. I thought that Sean was so good in the part that I’m apt to look a bit sideways at the others. Yet I liked Timothy Dalton. He had that ruthlessness about him whereas Roger Moore played it for laughs. Quite sensibly really, because he knew he couldn’t match Sean. So he thought there was no point in trying to do that. Pierce Brosnan seems to have made the role his own and overall I think they are just as popular.”

Popular, I pointed out in the ever-increasing stiff competition of action and effect-laden pictures that I suppose could be said that the Bonds first pioneered. This prompted the question, have digital effects killed-off matte painting? Cliff sighs before answering, and I sense that he realises he couldn’t have retired at a better time.

“It has for the moment, no question about it. I think it’s a shame. Digital effects are absolutely brilliant at some of the things they can do, but typical of our industry, as soon as they get something new they over use it. I refuse to believe that anybody can do an electronic matte painting as quickly as I could an original matte painting. I believe that a matte painting should be done first, then given to the digital people and then get them to put in people walking about or fires burning and flags flying. By all means do that, but I really do think they’re overdoing it. They’re doing things in digital where it’s not needed.”

But Cliff’s been here before, pointing out that when front projection first came in, everything was front projection. It lasted a few years before it virtually disappeared.

“When I came into the business in 1949, special effects were there to save the production money. If you couldn’t afford to blow up a whole block of houses, you did a model. But it seems today that they’ve lost their way a bit, in that some digital effects are costing more than doing it for real.” Cliff cited the colossal amount of money spent on the digital effects in Titanic.

“They seem to think that these days, that if you have all these wonderful effects you don’t need a story and you don’t need good performances from any actors.”

I agree with Cliff and both of us cite Godzilla, a film where size didn’t matter. Unfortunately we don’t have all the time in the world and I had to bring this enjoyable interview to a close. I asked Cliff if he was enjoying his retirement. “Not half! I don’t know where I found the time to work.”

But work he did, producing some of the most impressive and virtually ignored elements that gave those early Bonds the edge over other pictures. Someone once remarked what a wonderful artist Cliff was, which he typically underplayed by replying that he wouldn’t exactly call himself an artist, but an excellent copier, and thinks he would have made a great forger. But then again that’s the sort of modesty one expects from this man. Cliff is a great artist. He is also a highly professional and respected technician, and speaking personally, one of the best bosses I’ve had the pleasure to work for. Before I left I asked Cliff how he would sum up his time on the Bond films.

“Working on the Bonds was great. Getting sent for and told we want this, we want that, it was a nice feeling. Let’s face it, they were the big films of their time and I was working on them. But the best thing for me was when some would see the film and not notice any mattes or opticals.”

So next time you're watching a ‘classic’ Bond film and you don't see any of Cliff Culley’s work, just remember - that’s just the way he likes it.