John Grover, Film Editor on Six James Bond Movies, Dies at 87

John Grover, the British film editor who helped assemble a half-dozen James Bond movies and spent six long months breathing heavily at the behest of Stanley Kubrick for 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died. He was 87.

Grover died Monday, the British Film Editors organization announced. He was a longtime vice chairman of the guild and received its Lifetime Achievement Award in April.

Grover served as the film editor on the 007 films For Your Eyes Only (1981), The Living Daylights (1987) and Licence to Kill (1989) and also helped put together The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979) and Octopussy (1983).

In all, he did six films starring Bond star Roger Moore, including The Wild Geese (1978) and The Sea Wolves (1980), and also cut The Final Option (1982), Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce (1985), the 1984 NBC miniseries The First Olympics and what he said was his favorite film, Jim Henson’s classic Labyrinth (1986).

Early in his career, Grover worked as an uncredited assistant editor for Robert Wise on The Haunting (1963), for David Lean on Doctor Zhivago (1965), for John Frankenheimer on Grand Prix (1966), for Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and for Herbert Ross on Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969).

During a 2016 editing conference, Grover talked about his awful experience dealing with Kubrick, the manically perfectionist director of 2001.

“I spent six months of my life with that idiot,” Grover said. “Although he was a supposedly good filmmaker, he was mad. He’d kill the artist by [saying] keep going again and again and again.”

“I think [2001 is] a load of rubbish, it’s the most boring, long, stretched out [film]. I mean, OK, it was very clever [with its] use of original music, which we had to get back from Germany, ‘The Blue Danube’ and all that. It’s very ahead of its time; what actually we were doing in imagination actually happened, and the space stations are now up there.”

In his 2018 book Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece, Michael Benson wrote that Grover accompanied editorial assistant David de Wilde to record Kubrick — battling a head cold — breathing heavily. The audio was then used to accentuate tense scenes featuring astronauts Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood).

“With Grover’s help, they ran a microphone from the soundboard in the theater and positioned it next to Kubrick’s face, after which he lowered the helmet onto his shoulders,” Benson explained.

But Grover claimed that it was he, not the director, who did the laborious inhaling and exhaling that’s heard in the movie.

“All I did was breathing for six months,” he said. “[Kubrick] wanted it done with the helmet … He’d sit right at the front … with a notebook, and you’d run the sequence and he’d be writing and he’d come back and say, ‘OK, John, very good, do it again.’ You had to watch [the film] pretending you were doing exercises and straining and moving things.”

A spokesperson for the British editors guild said “both Stanley K. and John Grover were recorded for the ‘heavy breathing’ — and it is thought that the recording of John was the one used for the film.”

What is known for certain is that the breaths were recorded simultaneously on two rolls of 35mm film, in 10-minute takes, so that Grover could more easily cut between them when removing ambient noise.

A decade later, Grover was assembly editor on another space-set adventure, Lewis Gilbert’s Moonraker. Working alongside editor John Glen, they cobbled together the final cut of that Bond movie from 800,000 feet of film. It took 10 months — until the day before the premiere — to be completed.

On The Spy Who Loved Me, Grover was tasked with editing the iconic pre-credit sequence that culminates with Moore skiing and then parachuting off a cliff. With Glen stationed with the second-unit team in Switzerland and then in Baffin Island, Canada, Grover waited back in the studio for the rushes.

“I was in the cutting room preparing, waiting for film and it didn’t come in, because they couldn’t shoot it,” he said. After a 10-day wait because of atrocious weather, the crew was able to film the spectacular jump during a 15-minute break in the harsh conditions.

In his final edit, Grover snuck in a music box he was given on the set of Doctor Zhivago that played “Lara’s Theme” and was used by Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) in The Spy Who Loved Me. Composer Maurice Jarre received royalties for the brief use of his leitmotif.

Born on Oct. 24, 1938, in Barnet, Middlesex, England, Grover enlisted in National Service as a teenager. Upon his return, he started as a numbering boy at MGM Studios, where his uncle was supervising editor, earning 6 pounds 10 shillings a week.

Grover said he enjoyed working with Lean, who was opinionated yet open to collaboration. “He’d say, ‘Get everybody in here, let’s have a look at this, what do you think?’ ” he noted. “He’d listen to you, provided you had an answer.”

He recalled that Zhivago’s 70mm Los Angeles premiere was interrupted by a loud bang from the projection booth at the first change-over reel. A gear box had exploded, causing the screen to plunge into darkness for eight minutes.

A larger disaster unfolded during the postproduction of The Living Daylights when a work print containing dialogue sequences was leaked and circulated on VHS.

Grover, who co-edited Timothy Dalton’s 007 debut with Peter Davies, was called into the office of producer Albert Broccoli and associate producer Tom Pevsner. “That was really frightening,” he remembered in 2018. “Of course we were the No. 1 suspects; we were in the cutting rooms, we were the only one who had access to it.”

But Grover revealed that whenever parts of the film were sent away, he would mark a single frame with an identifiable symbol and document who it was sent to. “We found out it had been copied and duplicated in New York by the trailer company, which immediately went bust,” he said.

After his retirement, Grover recalled the formula that Bond producers and directors used that helped make the franchise an everlasting success.

“Bad language was unacceptable, but some violence and sexual innuendo was OK,” he said. “Family entertainment was their motto. Grandparents could always take their grandchildren to see the films to enjoy them together.”

Moore was his favorite Bond actor, and his favorite 007 scene was the car and circus-train chase on railway tracks in Octopussy, he said.

“For God’s sake, we got on those pictures, and for nine months I basically would never go home,” he added. “So you had to have a good family behind you.”