MI6 caught up with underwater engineer Jordan Klein to talk about his early career and his first brush with James Bond on "Thunderball"...

How long ago did you learn to dive and how did you become interested in subsurface activities?
I was in the Navy during World War II, I went to diving school. It was hard-hat diving at the time, and I learned one thing about it, I didn't want to be a hard hat diver. After the war, the Aqualung was getting popular in Florida. I opened a dive shop on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, "Underwater Sports", and sold Aqualungs and other SCUBA gear. I also had a dive boat - I think it was probably one of the first, if not the first, dive boat on the east coast of the United States. At any rate, that's how it all started.

How did you get involved in filmmaking and was diving a natural segue to this or vice-versa?
Even when I was a teenager before the war, we built our own breathing equipment. We used five gallon steel milk cans for our diving helmet, soldering on a port, made fins out of tennis shoes and cut out pieces of tire and riveted it onto the bottom of the shoes; cut a donut out of an inner-tube and made a little copper ring that would hold a piece of glass in the front and put that on for a face-mask.

After the war I brought a boat from the University of Miami Marine Laboratory and called it "Arbalete", and used it for taking diving trips off the Florida coast as well as through the Bahamas. The dive trips were very lucrative, so I brought an 80 foot PT boat surplus for $25,000. I had a lot of well-known people like Cary Grant, William Randolph Hearst Jr, and Errol Flynn on the boat. I realised that it would be tough to earn any serious money running a dive boat for the rest of my life.

I started manufacturing underwater photographic equipment and built MAKO housings for many still cameras and Bolex 16mm cameras. I patented a camera called the MAKO SHARK and sold it for $19.95. Rexall Drug Stores sold about 55,000 of them. That's what got me going financially so I could start designing and manufacturing the housings for theatrical application, mainly for Arri 35mm motion picture production cameras.

Ivan Tors was in Miami at the time, having built a studio there. He offered me the opportunity to shoot the "Flipper" TV series - and that was the beginning for me. I ended up in the IA and started filming because there wasn't anyone else, only me and a great cameraman named Lamar Boren, who was the underwater DP on "Thunderball" and Ricou Browning was the underwater director on "Flipper" and "Thunderball"...[MI6]

Dive shaken - not stirred

The Omega Seamaster James Bond Limited Series watch, featuring the classic gun barrel emblem. This James Bond edition will be one of the first 007 watches to feature Omega's new Co-Axial Escapement: the proprietary Omega technology that considerably reduces friction in the heart of the watch mechanism and offers improved long-term reliability and accuracy. Performance is further improved by a free-sprung balance that allows for more precise adjustments of the watch. The mechanism is sealed into the case by a screw-down back on which the series number of each Limited Series watch is engraved as well as an embossed 007 gun logo.

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