The Lost Bond Film – Part 1: Escape from Piz Gloria

In 2005, while researching the book James Bond and Switzerland (Peter Waelty, Michael Marti, Echtzeit 2008), we met the son of Alfred Zurschmiede. His father, now deceased, was the ski stunt coordinator on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1968.

Rolf Zurschmiede invited us to his home in Lauterbrunnen and showed us what his father had kept from the shoot: Swiss assault rifles made of papier-mâché, ski goggles, prop pistols, skis, and costumes. The garden fence was made from the filter panels that had once been mounted in front of the restaurant windows on set to reduce incoming light.

Then, almost casually, he mentioned that there was also a film his father had made. Minutes later, an old 8 mm projector and a screen were set up in the living room. The film was threaded. What we saw was astonishing. Between 1968 and 1969, Alfred Zurschmiede had shot and edited a roughly thirty-minute documentary. No one outside the family had ever seen it. No one.

Rolf Zurschmiede made the material available to us. We digitized the film. Presented here for the first time, as a world premiere, are individual, uncut excerpts from that footage. The strongest scenes form the basis of our new advertising campaign.