VENICE, Calif. — Bluebird Films announced the first of a series of five big-budget spy movies the company said has a price tag of $1 million to produce.
While making the series "Spy Hard: Die Hard," the company said it "trashed six cars and a helicopter" and used real guns with live ammunition in the all-action spy thriller shot on location around the world.
The series includes five volumes or "Agent Missions," the first volume, "Department S Mission 1 - City of Broken Angels" is available now.
Creator Paul Chaplin said, "If you're going to do an action movie, you have to do it big. What really bumped up the budget was when we started blowing up cars. And not just any cars. The sexy girl Agents of Department S (Sabotage, Surveillance, Seduction) needed to be driving - and dying - in style, so we bought Jaguar sports cars, BMWs and Jeeps. The Finance Department was puzzled as to why we were buying the cars: why not just hire them, they said. The looks on their faces when I explained that we had to buy them - because there wouldn't be much of them to hand back when we'd finished filming!"
The film's "evil Baron's headquarters" was shot in an exotic locale.
"We found this amazing hotel actually built into the cliffs on the sea in a small village in Albania. Nobody's ever shot adult there before, so there was a big learning curve. The talent costs were off the scale as we basically used every star girl from the U.S.A., U.K. and Europe over the 5 Volumes. And because they were using real guns, including live firing automatics, the safety costs alone would have budgeted half a dozen standard movies. Don't even get me started on the tanks and the helicopter..."
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