‘Italian Job’ car chase stunt driver, dies

In the annals of best movie car chase, perennial favorites include “Bullitt” (1968) with Steve McQueen achieving liftoff in his Mustang along the terraced streets of San Francisco; “The French Connection” (1971), with Gene Hackman terrorizing blocks of Brooklyn pedestrian traffic in a LeMans; and “Ronin” (1998), with Robert De Niro behind the screeching wheels of a Peugeot on the streets of Paris.

But many moviegoers and stunt lovers might opt for the stunt sequences in the more-lighthearted British-American comic caper, “The Italian Job” (1969), in which three British Mini Cooper cars — one red, one white and one blue to match the U.K. flag — outwitted Italian law enforcement through the streets, shopping arcades and sewers of the Italian city of Turin after a gold heist.

French stunt driver Rémy Julienne orchestrated and drove in some of the chase scenes, an unforgettable car ballet in which Julienne’s team raced around a sloping roof before driving at 75 mph up ramps onto a getaway truck traveling at 50 mph on a motorway outside Turin.

In another scene, he drove the red Mini at 70 mph over a 60-foot gap between two factory rooftops 50 feet above the ground. After half a century of risking his life on wheels for movie audiences, he died at 90 on Jan. 21 of the coronavirus at a hospital in Montargis, France, according to his wife, Justine.

“We were very, very lucky to get Rémy Julienne [and his] stunt driving team,” Michael Caine, star of “The Italian Job,” was once quoted as saying. “Because they [the Minis] were really the stars of the film in a way.”

In fact, sales of the little Mini Cooper and more powerful Cooper S models took off around Europe after the film hit the screens. The movie not only epitomized Britain’s “Swinging Sixties” but also precursored, by almost 50 years, the widespread British sentiment that their little island could outsmart Continental Europeans.

Julienne, a former French national motocross champion, also did the stunt-driving on six James Bond movies, body-doubling for several Bond actors in car sequences.

In the 1995 Bond movie “Golden Eye,” Julienne choreographed the car chase in which Bond (Pierce Brosnan) races his Aston Martin down a mountain against the villain Xenia (played by Famke Janssen) in a Ferrari. Julienne’s son Dominique body-doubled for Brosnan in the chase, while his other son Michel, in a wig, drove the Ferrari in place of Janssen.

Guided by their father, the two sons also took turns doubling as Bond for Moore in “For Your Eyes Only” (1981), in which the superspy has a five-minute car chase driving a flimsy yellow Citroën to escape the baddies.

In all, Julienne was a stunt driver and/or coordinator on no fewer than 1,400 films and TV commercials starting in his native France in the 1960s. He was known in his business almost as a scientist; he was one of the first stunt people to use a computer to calculate ratios involving weight, height, speed, wind velocity and whatever else he thought would protect the lives of himself and his team.

Until the end of his career in 2010, Julienne insisted on getting involved only in “real” stunts rather than those using computer-generated imagery.