Speak Izy : Cars,Tech & Lifestyle
Cinema Vehicles isn’t just the world’s greatest car rental service, but
a one-stop shop for automotive actors. Equipped with a full custom
fabrication shop, industrial paint facilities, graphic design and vinyl
print department, bespoke glass manufacturing, interior retrim
services and enough random spares to outfit anything you can
imagine, this place is a giant toybox and fancy dress store for the
automotive industry. A full-service replication station.
It’s not just the actual cars that the company works on, either. One
part of the facility is dedicated to essentially stunt-prep – roll cage
fabrication, custom metalwork to hold pyrotechnics, the design and
build process associated with making cars do things they shouldn’t,
like jump and crash in very specific ways
But despite the big names and even bigger budgets, it’s the detail
that really makes all this stuff so impressive. Unsurprisingly, a lot of
movies require more than one feature car to fit with tight filming
schedules, and equally unremarkably they need them to look
exactly the same. Thus, Cinema Vehicles has the canny knack of
replication, right down to the tiniest detail.
One corner is dedicated to the building of remote-drive pods, a kind
of tiny rollcage that sits on top of the feature car and contains the
actual controls for the vehicle. Thus, while the actors are inside
concentrating on actually emoting, the car can be driven from the
roof by a pro. There’s also a department capable of recreating
expensive machinery from much more mundane underpinnings – a
prime example being a replica of Nicolas Cage’s 1935 Rolls-Royce
Phantom Coupe used in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice that looks
completely real – until you look inside and realise it’s based on a
mid-Nineties Chevy Silverado truck. This is extraordinarily creative,
clever stuff.
Nothing says cool more than James Bond, so it’s only natural that he drives a
comparable car. In the movie Goldfinger, which was one of the first James Bond
movies in the franchise, Sean Connery drives this beauty, complete with machine
guns, in an attempt to defeat the villain. At last auction, this DB-5 sold for a whopping $4.6 million, which just goes to show you that may need a bigger bank
account before you try to buy this one off the owner.
Although The Godfather Part III didn’t achieve the same success as the first two
titles in the franchise, it was still a movie full of intrigue. However, the Maserati
Quattroporte wasn’t so much important because of who drove it in the movie, but
instead because it unveiled the car to a wide audience. Since this movie, any time
there’s a Maserati in a movie, it’s more than likely a Quattroporte.
The Ghostbusters Ecto-1 is one of the most iconic movie cars ever,
right up there with the DeLorean DMC-12 time machine from Back
to the Future. The Ecto-1 is a 1959 cadillac ambulance, built by the
Miller-Meteor company.
The car is giant, coming in at nearly 21 feet long, 8 feet high, 7 feet
wide and weighing close to three and a half tons. Plus, it has a 6.3-
liter V8, an air suspension system, and 320 horsepower. There is
plenty of room in the Ecto-1 to fit the Ghostbusting squad.
The stock constantly changes, with staff dedicated to buying and
selling items depending on what they think might be rentable, or
what projects production companies have coming up. And the car
that does the most work? The one that rents out the most? It’s not a
Ferrari, or a souped-up sports car. It’s a moth-eaten, slightly beaten-
up blue pickup truck. Old and busted enough to have character, not
specific enough to be recognisable. And that’s the thing about
Cinema Vehicles – they’re the unsung heroes of the movie world.
After all, if they’ve done their job properly, you don’t even notice they’ve done anything at all.
