Gary Powell was the stunt co-ordinator who staged the crash in which 007's Aston Martin is blasted by a nitrogen cannon in the new film Casino Royale. KEVIN BARNES reports.

The most visually arresting sequence in the new James Bond movie Casino Royale is not the sight of Daniel Craig, heavily muscled and brooding, emerging from the blue waters of the Caribbean.

It is to be found neither in the gravity-defying chases through low-rent landscapes nor in the climactic sinking of a Venetian hotel in the Grand Canal.

No, the scene that most assaults the eyeballs, that elevates celluloid action to barely guessed-at heights, is rather the work of a 43-year-old from Tadworth.

Gary Powell was the stunt co-ordinator on Casino Royale and his defining achievement was to stage the crash in which 007's Aston Martin DBS is blasted by a nitrogen cannon.

That description probably does him - and the stunt driver - a disservice. The car is not merely flipped through the air. It is rolled through seven-and-three-quarter-turns, enough turns to have set a Guinness world record.

To the uninitiated this may say more about the whimsicality of official world records than the limits of human endurance.

The most cannon rolls in a single take, you fear, is destined to rest beside longest chain of lingerie, or most rattlesnakes held in a human mouth, in the pantheon of unexampled human endurance.

But to listen to Gary talk about the stunt is to learn how it demanded the same mental toughness required of those who set landmarks by scaling cloud-piercing summits.

He says: "Adam Kirley was the stunt driver of the Aston Martin. He had an extremely difficult job. His judgement at hitting the button to release the cannon had to be perfect - this while driving at about 80mph.

"If he had hit the button incorrectly he could have ended up on either side of the road, among the trees.

"Releasing the cannon had to be done at the precise moment, otherwise the stunt would not have worked."

Despite - or perhaps because of - this dicing with death, being a stunt performer on the set of a Bond movie, with runways full of buildings to crash through, has occupied generations of schoolboys' dreams.

Gary is not about to dispel any illusions and he describes the role as the pinnacle of his career.

His path had always seemed set: Gary's father, Nosher, his brother, Greg, and his uncle Dinny were stuntmen and, between them, the Powell clan can claim to have worked on all 21 films in the Bond series.

It is somewhat surprising, then, that family gatherings are rarely conducted in casualty wards.

"I've had a couple of accidents but fortunately not suffered any serious injury, bearing in mind some of the stunts I've done," Gary says, recalling his work on Harry Potter, Mission Impossible, Saving Private Ryan and Titanic.

"The worst injury was a broken wrist. Besides that, just the usual cuts and bruises which is part of the job. The most serious accident I've had was the boat barrel roll on The World is Not Enough. The boat didn't go fully over - only half way - and landed on top of me. Fortunately the boat came off worse than I did."