Maybe don’t knock on wood: Pinewood Studios’ unfortunate habit of bursting into flames
What do the following movies have in common: Dr No, Superman, Aliens, Batman, and Mamma Mia? As any Anglophile movie obsessive will know, the answer is that they were all shot at the iconic Pinewood Studios in the quaint parish of Iver, England, approximately 18 miles away from the bustling of central London.
Britain’s most famous film and television studio has been in operation since 1936, and its cavernous confines have been home to the James Bond franchise from the very beginning. Since 1977, a specific ‘Bond stage’, appropriately named the ‘007 Stage’, has been used for the movies, featuring one of the largest water tanks in Europe. Aside from the Bond stage, which is the largest in the complex at a mind-boggling 59,202 square feet, Pinewood’s 15 other stages can cater to productions of all shapes and sizes.
While the place has held a special place in the hearts of industry workers and cinephiles for the better part of nine decades and is still England’s premier studio, the complex has one nasty habit that never seems to fully go away. Over the years, the place has seen more than a few instances of devastating fires, with the first major one in 1984 razing the ‘007 Stage’ to the ground.
In June 1984, fresh off the high of some critically acclaimed hit features, Ridley Scott was in the process of shooting the fantasy epic Legend on that stage, and while everyone was on a lunch break, a blaze broke out. Unfortunately, it quickly caused some gas cylinders to blow up, and soon the entire building was on fire. A property stage hand and a carpenter suffered second-degree burns, but thankfully, no one else was maimed or killed. It was a close escape, too; if the fire hadn’t broken out at lunchtime, there would have been 150 to 200 potential victims milling around the enormous stage.
Pinewood Studios’ history of devastating fires
Fast-forward to 1997, and the next inferno at Pinewood occurred when a controlled explosion on the set of The Avengers—the Sean Connery one, not the Marvel one—got wildly out of hand. The fire occurred at 17:00, having started when sparks from the explosion shot 30 feet in the air and ignited insulation and roofing panels. 60 firefighters were called to tackle the blaze, and a spokesperson for the Buckinghamshire Fire Brigade grumbled, “We are also looking into why the studio failed to tell us that they were having a controlled explosion today.”
All in all, this wasn’t Pinewood’s finest hour, but as The Avengers producer Jerry Weintraub said, “It’s a serious blow, but as long as nobody dies or gets severely injured, then we’ll get over it”.
To the chagrin of Bond producers, the ‘007 Stage’ was again the site of Pinewood’s next fire. After going up in smoke in ’84 and being rebuilt, the stage once again burned in 2006 during the shooting of Casino Royale. Amazingly, the same thing happened again when the fire broke out, as it caused two gas cylinders to blow, and before the fire brigade could get it under control, the roof of the corrugated steel building had warped and partially caved in. To add insult to injury, the signage on the structure had also been damaged, leading it to simply say, ’07 Stage’.
Naturally, Pinewood rebuilt the stage, good as new, within six months, and the studio went without a major blaze for the next 15 years. However, in 2021, a workshop fire engulfed a one-story building and required 11 fire crews to contain it, and in 2022, another fire occurred that entailed 12 crews to put it out.
An unnamed source claimed, “A set made up of a lot of wood and trees was currently being built in the Richard Attenborough Stage. Rumour is, a piece of the set has caught alight and spread across the rest of the set. Some crew in the studio were shaken but evacuated without injury, apparently”.
The passion for filmmaking at Pinewood seems to burn a little too literally.
