Evening Standard: "The Man from U.N.C.L.E - cars are the stars of this 1960s spy thriller"

- December 04, 2015

Transformed: Padfield Road became Sixties East Berlin for a dramatic car chase in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which is released on DVD next Monday

Only the most eagle-eyed will have spotted the location in the final cut, after 100 cast and crew converged on a tiny south London backstreet and transformed it into atmospheric Sixties East Berlin for a major Guy Ritchie film involving no fewer than 250 period vehicles.

By day, Padfield Road at Loughborough Junction — squeezed into a triangle locked in by two arterial roads and a network of clattering overhead railway lines — is home to motor repair businesses and a café, huddled under a row of Victorian arches.

After the set designers went to work, however, it had “moved” approximately 600 miles to the east to present a glossy, “noir” backdrop to the opening scenes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

It’s where German motor mechanic and missing nuclear scientist’s daughter Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander) meets American art thief-turned-CIA operative Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill), triggering a dramatic car chase through Cold War East Berlin in a fast-paced spy thriller that races into the colourful and more glamorous world of Sixties Italy.

It’s a highly stylised, humorous re-boot of the Sixties television series of the same name and involves plenty of sophistication, beautiful settings and wardrobes full of immaculately pressed Sixties garments.

But, for many, it’s the cars that make the movie, with a star cast of vintage Ferraris, Jaguars, Mercedes and Aston Martins among the more prosaic Wartburgs, Vespas, Trabants and the occasional Peugeot and Citroën H van. But all was not as it seemed, as I discovered when I caught up with the film’s vehicle co-ordinator, Alex King, to mark the release of the film on DVD and Blu-ray on December 7.

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