Special Effects Is the Family Business for Oscar-Shortlisted Corbould Brothers

In a rare stroke involving this year’s visual effects Oscar contest, three brothers are all shortlisted for different movies. This trio of British special effects vets are Chris Corbould, special effects supervisor on MGM/United Artists’ No Time to Die; Neil Corbould, special effects supervisor on Disney/Marvel’s Eternals; and Paul Corbould, SFX supervisor on Disney/Marvel’s Black Widow. A fourth brother, Ian Corbould, also works in the business (and worked on Black Widow with Paul). Their sister, Gail, runs Neil’s SFX company, Neil Corbould Special Effects Ltd.

The VFX mastery that runs in the family started with a single relation. Their uncle, Colin Chilvers, worked in special effects and received an Academy Award for his work on Richard Donner’s 1978 classic Superman, starring Christopher Reeve. “One by one, we all got into the business,” relates Neil.

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For Chris Corbould (who won an Oscar for Inception), No Time to Die was his 15th 007 film. “Barbara Broccoli and I were talking about it the other day. We both started on The Spy Who Loved Me, which was 44 years ago,” he recalls.

The DB5 chase in Matera, Italy, was one of Chris Corbould’s more challenging sequences in Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond. “My job was to talk to Aston Martin about how many cars we needed, what we needed to do to them. We then designed all the gadgets to go in the cars, and then myself and Lee Morrison, the stunt coordinator, went out 12 or 13 times to dream up the sequence and find the locations. [Then] we’d get into the filming of it. So that was quite complicated.”

He also highlights the scene during which Bond and Felix (Jeffrey Wright) are trapped inside a sinking trawler that has exploded, which he described as a “great combination of work with special effects and visual effects.” It started with creating an explosion on a real boat. And as part of the underwater portion of the sequence, the SFX team built a mechanical rig on the underwater stage at Pinewood Studios. “We mounted the whole interior of the trawler on it, so we could rotate it 360 and then sink it into 20 feet of water,” he remembers.

Neil Corbould, who has won Oscars for Gladiator and Gravity, describes the work involved in an expansive action sequence that occurs when a group of Eternals go to find Druig (Barry Keoghan) in a wooded village that comes under attack. The scenes involved “a lot of interaction work, hand in hand with visual effects,” such as collapsing buildings. “We would have to prep the buildings, some with flattening, some with taking walls out as though one of the Eternals had been thrown through the side of a hut,” he explains. “There’s a scene where Sersi (Gemma Chan) dives into a pool with a villain and she turns the being into a tree, and there’s a massive explosion that came out of the water, which we basically rigged up with lots of air canons to create that effect.”

He adds, “That carried on throughout the movie, what sort of destruction would happen with these beings walking around the planet.”

Paul Corbould, who is shortlisted for another Marvel movie, the Scarlett Johansson-starring Black Widow, is a two-time Oscar nominee for Marvel’s Doctor Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy. “It’s great that practical effects are still playing a major role in moviemaking, working in conjunction with visual effects,” Neil says. “There was a point, quite a few years ago, when they thought that special effects would die out because of digital effects. It’s nice to see that it’s still going.”

This year isn’t the first time more than one brother is in the awards race. Neil remembers a past season when all three were nominated for BAFTAs for different films. “It was quite funny in some respects, it was probably the best outcome of the evening, where we all lost,” he says with a laugh. “We all had a drink together and a good laugh about it.”

He adds, “You know, it’s fantastic. We’re all very dedicated to our craft and love what we do. I’ve been in this for 40 years and I love getting up in the morning and seeing what the next thing we can achieve is.”

This story first appeared in a January stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.