Sir Ken Adam - Filmsets are Forever
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The Berlin-born production designer Sir Ken Adam has been designing for international films since the 1950s. After studying architecture in London, his early years in the film business started with working as a craftsman and assisting the art directors of the CRIMSON PIRATE and BEN HUR. Later Ken Adam went on to win two Oscars for the Best Art Direction/Set Decoration for BARRY LYNDON and THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE. He created the unforgettable look of the early James Bond features, a series he influenced from its very beginning in 1962 with Terence Young’s DR.NO.
From futuristic films to historical pieces, musicals, fantastic films or realistic dramas his spectrum is extremely diverse. Using original sketches, scribbles and film clips, Sir Christopher Frayling, Director of the Royal College of Art and publisher of numerous books on popular culture, will interview Sir Ken Adam on how his creations emerged, and how he proceeds to invent the look of a film that will stay forever in the memory of the audience.
Christopher Frayling:
Ladies and gentlemen. Sometimes people ask who is the real star of James Bond, is it Sean Connery, Roger Moore, George Lazenby, or is it Pierce Brosnan, or Timothy Dalton? Please welcome the real star of James Bond, Ken Adam.
I want to start Ken by taking you back to DR NO, which was in some ways a starting point. You had already been a production designer since the 1950s, you joined the business as a draftsman just after the 2nd World War, and then became an assistant art director, and then a production designer in the late 1950s. And DR NO came out of the blue in a way. Could you evoke for us when the script first arrived.
"STYLISE WITH REALITY"
Ken Adam:
Well, when the script first arrived, there were only 100 pages and they were pretty awful. And I wasn’t sure if I should do this picture and I gave it to my wife, Letitia, and she said you cannot prostitute yourself to do this film. And then I decided maybe because I knew the director Terence Young, and I had a good relationship with Cubby Broccoli, I had just done a picture with him called THE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE. So I said maybe it is not as bad as I thought. They offered me at the time a percentage which I turned down and instead got a fee. And that is really how it started.
Christopher Frayling:
It was such a big film by British standards at the time, to imagine sets on a large scale. It wasn’t even a large budget film for a start, I think about 1 million dollars total. How much did you have to spend on the design?
Ken Adam:
Well I felt, I was very accurate in those days on my budget, and I made the budget out to 14,200 pounds and Cubby and Harry said, ?you cannot get that money, we can’t afford it.? So I said, ?well I can’t do it for any less?. So then they came up and said we’ve got 6,000 pounds stashed away for an emergency. And they gave those 6,000 to me I think my whole budget was 20,000 pounds and I went about 500 pounds over budget.
Christopher Frayling:
And is it true that you built a lot of the sets whilst the crew was away shooting in Jamaica and when they came back they saw them for the first time?
Ken Adam:
Yes. It was quite a unique situation really, because it was a low budget picture, the whole film 1 million dollars and we had to shoot very quickly. We were shooting on location in Jamaica and I had sets to build on location. Then I had a meeting with Terence Young, who knew me, although we had never worked together. He knew my work, and I knew his work. He said to me, ‘Spend 20 minutes with me because I want to know where you are going to put entrances and exits so I know how to plan my action and so on. As far to the look, I leave it entirely up to you.’
So I went back to England and suddenly realised I could more or less do what I wanted to do.
And I always wanted to get a chance to create my form of reality and here was a chance to show our present age of engineering and electronics, remember it was 1961, which up to then had not really been shown. And people were still using old materials and old filmmaking methods and the last futuristic or modernistic films were THINGS TO COME or Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS, and I thought, well this gives me a chance in a small way to express our present age slightly ahead of time with tongue in cheek approach.
And I was backed up by the staff at Pinewood, who were fantastic and who said anything you can dream up we will come up with it. And I said: ?Bring me new materials!? They came up with metals, new painting materials and that encouraged me to fill three stages at Pinewood full of sets before the producer, director and main unit came back. I mean it was a little crazy really, because if Terence hadn’t liked it, or if the producers hadn’t liked it, I don’t know what would have happened.
Christopher Frayling:
We’ve been looking at drawings whilst we have been speaking, behind you. And already in DR NO a trademark emerges. One of them is interiors, which are very textured with metal texture and stone textures but also a strange mixture of antique and modern which you get already in DR NO, where in his apartment, carved out of the rock with antique furniture and the modern aquarium, on the one hand, but on the other hand this gigantic laboratory with gantries and thousands of people running around and in this case a water reactor in DR NO and this contrast between the domestic villains headquarters and the giant lab (of which there is a drawing behind us) is already there in DR NO, even for just 14,500 pounds.
Ken Adam:
I had two scientists from Harvard who were advising me on the nuclear water reactor and I came up with this design. And a lot of the antique furniture that you see in the Dr No’s apartment belongs to me and Letitia, because we did not have that much money. And I always wanted to mix antique with modern. The one great error was we didn’t have money to send a unit to shoot the fish for the aquarium and we had to get stock footage and when we projected it. It was stock footage of goldfish-size fish, who suddenly became 18 times their size and Terence said to put in a line in the dialogue ? minnows dressed as sharks.
THE LOOK AND THE SUCCESS
Christopher Frayling:
So already on this low budget, the look of the movie becomes an important part of its success. Were you surprised with its success?
Ken Adam:
Yes, because it was an ordinary who-dunnit. Nobody took it too seriously. And the interesting thing about that set with the grill, and I always have circles somewhere in the ceiling, was an afterthought, Terence and I had forgotten about this then. And in the last week of shooting you’ve got to give me a set when Dent arrives in Crab Key or wherever it was.
And I came up with this very simple design. And I had about 500 pounds left in the budget, so it had to be simple, and we built in on a platform like here. And Terence was very excited. But he said, ?listen Ken, you have to learn something. If you want me to see the whole circle you have to extend the ceiling piece by another six feet. Can you do it in the next half an hour?? And I said, ?sure, I will do it?. And that’s why you get that whole circle in and in a way lately in the last 10 years, critics have said, this has been the stamp of all James Bond films to follow, this very simple set, which just has this disembowelled voice of Dr No.
Christopher Frayling:
But it is more than that. Given your formation, growing up in Berlin in the 1920s and early 30s, the era of CABINET OF DR CALIGARI and METROPOLIS, which I know you saw in England after 1933, that’s a very expressionist scene, you’ve got the spiders web, throwing its shadow on the floor and the tarantula, and it is almost like something out of DR MABUSE. And you may not have been conscious of it at the time but there is a strong expressionism in your design work I think.
Ken Adam:
There is no doubt about it. People always try to find what makes you tick as a designer and I think in this respect there is no doubt that I was influenced by German expressionism or so later.
MEETING STANLEY KUBRICK
Sir Christopher Frayling:
Then Stanley Kubrick came to see DR NO, was impressed with what you had done, particularly on a budget, and asked you to design DR STRANGELOVE. When you first met Stanley Kubrick and he approached you to design DR STRANGELOVE, how did it go?
Ken Adam:
It went extremely well. He was somewhat younger than me but I was very young. And we were really like two boy scouts together and I thought he was very naive. Little did I know. He was so curious. He had that Brooklyn, New York curiosity. He questioned everything. He wanted to know about my war time experience and then eventually we got down to the film. And I thought this is going to be easy. Because I was doodling at the time and as I was doodling, he said let me look at these things.
They were some of these war room ideas and he said fantastic. Everybody at that time was saying Kubrick is so difficult. He had done LOLITA, he had done PATHS OF GLORY, he had done SPARTACUS, he is the most difficult director, yet here in this first meeting with him everything was okay. Then later I learned differently of course.
And it really threw me, because I was not experienced enough to take these kind of knocks because I started the art department, everyone working out on these first ideas, to be ahead of him. And I also drove him, as everyone knows, in my E-Type sports car to the studio and that’s 2 hours a day as I wasn’t allowed to drive faster than 30mph. He insisted on this. But if you think you drive for 5 months for 2 hours every day, you get to know each other pretty well you know. Particularly in an E-Type.
And after about 2-3 weeks, he came up and said, ‘Gee Ken, that second level of the war room doesn’t really work for me. I am going to have a crowd of 60 people.’ And he said: ‘What am I going to do with 60 actors up there’? And so the result was I had to rethink after 3 weeks completely my design. And I became very neurotic. We were shooting at Shepperton Studios, and they have beautiful gardens and I started walking to calm myself down. And then after I was sufficiently calm I went back to the drawing board and started coming up with different ideas, and Stanley was standing behind me and when he saw me come up with this idea of the triangular set he said, ‘Gee Ken, triangle is one of the strongest geometric forms’. I said: ‘Of course.’
And he said: ‘What are you going to use in terms of material’? And I said, ‘reinforced concrete’, so he said ‘like a gigantic bomb shelter’ ? and so that was the idea. The problem with Stanley was that you really had to intellectualise your ideas, which is not always that easy because they are often intuitive. And this sold him and then he of course came up with that circular table and that circular light fitting. And then he said: ‘Can you cover the table with felt? I want the whole film to be like a poker game. Like the general staff and the president and everybody is playing like a game of poker for the fate of the world.’ And then remember Stanley was probably the most brilliant visual director I had ever worked with.
He was a brilliant photographer, he had started his career as a photographer and he decided that he was going to light the 36 actors sitting around the table from my light ring. And in order to do this he used to spend hours in my office at night time and he had photofloods suspended at certain angles until he was certain it would work. And the whole of that scene in the war room is lit from the light ring. There is not even any fill light. We see a bit of beams from the side but that is how he lit this scene.
MAPS AND BLACK FLOOR IN DR STRANGELOVE
Christopher Frayling:
There are two other elements apart from the poker table and the light ring. The shiny black floor which is like one of those vast sound stages of a Fred Astaire movie and secondly the maps with the lights orienting you where all the bombers are going towards the Soviet Union. Can you tell us about that?
Ken Adam:
Well, it was a disaster. The first disaster was the shiny black floor. Which was my idea because I thought it would be interesting to have these reflections in the map on the floor and also everybody else reflected. I remember the Fred Astaire movies and I didn’t think it would be a great problem. Remember it was 1962 and they had already invented a block board with a baked on shiny black surface so everybody thought this is going to be easy.
Well, after we had covered two thirds of the floor, and remember, this is a big stage at Shepperton, Stanley and myself walk on the stage at it looks like a seascape, like waves. And what we then found out that all these stages are old. We didn’t have thick enough floor underneath, we had to scrap it all, get heavier boards, redo the floor below until it was acceptable.
Christopher Frayling:
Did you have to re-shine it after each take?
Ken Adam:
No, we were all wearing felt shoes. And they used to mop it after each take. I encountered this problem until recently. On every film when I wanted a dance sequence, because I remember these fantastic Fred Astaire sequences, because no one is alive who did those films. And then from the next generation I found out they made these floors out of paper on a sub-floor and lacquered this paper, and after each take repainted it. And so you never see a scratch on these floors.
Christopher Frayling:
Behind them there is this map. And of course today with digital screens and so on we are terribly used to dials and lights and so on. But this is bits of cardboard with holes in and a bulb behind each one, isn’t it?
Ken Adam:
Well, it was bits of cardboard, but basically my department, the art department, designed these maps. They were about 4 feet by 2 foot 6. We used to design them on an imperial drawing board in black and white. And then we had them photographically blown up to 40 feet by 26 feet, or whatever the size it was, and I had worked it all out except for some mistakes. You see we glued this photographic material to plywood and since both Stanley and myself decided it was too dangerous to project all these images (remember computer generated images didn’t exist in those days) he said let’s do it mechanically.
So wherever there was a symbol I put a plexiglass Perspex light box behind the symbol with a 60 watt, 100 watt, photoflood in it. So we had something like a 1,000 photofloods, which was on a switch circuit. What I didn’t realize was that the heat generated by these light bulbs was so enormous that the photographic material started lifting off the plywood which was a disaster. So we had to stop shooting and bring in three or four air conditioning cooling plants. Otherwise we couldn’t have shot the whole sequence.
THE CUSTARD PIE FIGHT
Christopher Frayling:
A little known fact about DR STRANGELOVE is that originally there was a sequence at the end where Peter Sellers stands up from his wheelchair and says: ?My F?hrer, I can walk!? And you immediately cut to footage of a nuclear explosion. And it has always struck me as rather a sudden moment. In fact there was a whole sequence in between those two moments that was shot, a gigantic custard pie fight in the war room with everyone chucking custard pies at each other, which was cut at the last minute. Can you talk about this Ken?
Ken Adam:
We shot the custard pie fight for about ten days and I had to provide about 4000 custard pies and the actors loved it. I mean George C Scott swinging from the light swing and hitting Peter Sellers with a custard pie and so on.
Christopher Frayling:
Has anyone seen THE GREAT RACE, which was pinched from this sequence? And the gag is from that is that Tony Curtis stands in the middle of this custard pie fight and all of the custard pies whiz past but none of them hit him. Until at the last minute. And it seems this is what happened in this sequence, only it is the president, played by Peter Sellers, who gets the pie. And George C Scott says you have struck down the president in his prime and that’s the point I think.
Ken Adam:
Yes. Because shortly afterwards John F. Kennedy was assassinated and so Stanley said we can’t use a pie fight. And we were all ganging up against him because we thought the pie fight was sensational, a pie fight to end all pie fights, and it ended the sequence so incredibly. If you think of the war room floor all covered with pies and there is the president Peter Sellers sitting like a child opposite the Russian ambassador, also like a child and they are building sand castles out of these pies and it was I thought a brilliant concept.
What happened was, about 2 or 3 years ago, someone wrote a biography on Stanley or an article and said: ?Ken, I have permission from BFI (British Film Institute) to look at this pie fight. Would you like to see it with me?? And this is 40 years later. And we looked at the pie fight and it is brilliant. But stylistically we both felt it didn’t fit the picture because Stanley was playing around with slow motion and effects, which he didn’t have in the rest of the picture. So I am sure that was also a reason why it wasn’t in the picture.
THE ASTON MARTIN IN GOLDFINGER
Christopher Frayling:
Now while making DR STRANGELOVE and a few other films you didn’t make FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, the second Bond film, but then you go back to Bond with GOLDFINGER, which was made in 1964 by Guy Hamilton. And I think as far as the design of GOLDFINGER is concerned there are two elements that really stick in audiences? minds. One of which is the Aston Martin, a drawing of which is behind us, and the other is the interior of Fort Knox.
So to the Aston Martin, we all know you liked fast cars, you were driving an E-Type at the time, you drove fast airplanes in the 2nd World War, you like speed, but this was, if you read the novel of ‘Goldfinger’, Bond goes to be kitted out in the quartermasters store by Q, who is not much of a character in the books, he trades in his Bentley for this Aston Martin DB3, in the book, which simply has reinforced bumpers and maybe a gun in the glove compartment. In turning that car into the car in the movie, I think is one of the turning points in the entire Bond series because it is the first of the really elaborate gadgets. Can you tell us more about this?
Ken Adam:
Well we had long discussions because at one time we were going to use the green label Bentley, the Brooklyn Bentley. Then we decided it should be a sexy British sports car. We could have had a small MG. I had an E-Type which I frankly preferred to the Aston Martin. The Aston Martin cost three times as much money and had much more prestige back then. So Johnny Stears who was the special effects supervisor and myself, drove down to Newport Pagnell, and tried to get two Aston Martins for free of charge to use in this 3rd Bond film, saying it will be good publicity for you, and they were not at all pleased. We drove back to Pinewood and told Cubby and Harry Saltzman, and they said, ‘don’t worry’, and they took it up with David Brown who was running the Aston Martin factory, and they finally got two. One for all the things like the ejector seat and all my gadgets, and the other one for the practical racing and running and so on. And I want to finish that just to say Aston Martin were in serious financial trouble but after the film their profits rose by 60-70 percent.
INSIDE FORT KNOX
Christopher Frayling:
The 2nd thing in GOLDFINGER, which I always remember, is the interior of Fort Knox. What I think is interesting in this, like with DR STRANGELOVE, you are taking us into a place we could never get into. So we all imagine what it is like, if there was a war room, now in everyone’s mind this is what it would look like how you designed it. And in everyone s mind this is also what Fort Knox looks like. Does it bear any resemblance to reality?
Ken Adam:
None at all. I was allowed into the vaults of the Bank of England and I found them very dull. There were vaults and gold stacked up very high. And my feeling was that the audience wants to see gold. And so I stacked gold up 40 foot high and behind a grill and all over the floor and so on. And when people ask me about production design, it is not just a question that you come up with a concept, but the other thing is you have to sell that concept to the producer and the director.
And I will never forget when I showed this sketch to Cubby and Harry and they said it looks like a prison and I said that is what I want. The gold behind the bars and the audience outside. And Guy backed me up and that is how I won the argument. After that I didn’t have many other problems with them on the future Bonds. But the interesting thing was after the film came out, United Artists received something like between 200-300 irate letters from the American public asking how was it possible that a British film unit were allowed to shoot inside Fort Knox, when the president of the United States is not even allowed.
SETS AND REALITY
Christopher Frayling:
Wasn’t there a similar situation with the war room when president Reagan was first elected?
Ken Adam:
Yes. He asked his chief of staff to look at the war room when he became president and the chief of staff said: ‘Mr President, which war room’? And he said: ‘The war room of DR STRANGELOVE, you know’?
Christopher Frayling:
He could never tell the difference between movies and real life unfortunately. But moving on?
Your sets are more real than real. There was a famous story about when George Roy Hill made the film BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID in the late 60s, there is a moment in that when Butch and the Kid go to Bolivia and they arrive at the station in Bolivia and you know it is Bolivia because there are two llamas standing outside the station. And someone asked George Hill: ‘Don’t you realise, Mr Hill, that there aren’t any llamas in Bolivia?’ And he paused and said: ‘Well, there are now.’ And I think it is exactly the same with your sets. This is what Fort Knox now looks like and the war room now looks like DR STRANGELOVE because you have created a larger than life vision that sticks in the mind and imagination much more than the real thing would. It has lodged there forever I think.
Ken Adam:
Well, I like to stylise with reality. And I think, when I started thinking about designing in films and theatre I was never quite sure if I wanted to be a theatrical or film designer so I combined the two qualities. I never wanted to imitate reality but to create a form of reality which I thought would be more acceptable to the audience.
Christopher Frayling:
And where did these huge sets come from? They are architectural in scale, which was unusual for films of that time. Because you are thinking on a huge scale by now Ken. Where does that come from?
Ken Adam:
I think it was probably Mike Todd who was responsible. He was an incredible showman, but a monster, you know, another story, but I did the European settings for AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS and it was Mike who said to me think big Ken, because at that time I was still trying to be a little more realistic. But I think it became second nature to me.
Christopher Frayling:
Your drawing style also changed round about that time. From the rather tight technical drawings of your early career to this rather loose drawing style. You loosen up from the mid 50s, you let rip a bit.
Ken Adam:
For that I must give credit to my wife, Letitia, who is born with an Italian good taste. I was very tied to my architectural background and I was very clever by doing camera projections of settings and sketches which were absolutely right. I spent days doing enormous sketches and I said Letitia what do you think of that? And her reaction was not very positive. And the next thing I knew was that she had dug out of the waste paper basket my little thumbnail sketches which were my first concepts.
And even though I was fighting with her I eventually accepted her criticism. And a famous curator Lotte Eisner, running the Cinematheque in Paris, came to London in the early 60s and she and Letitia collected all my little scribbles and said they are much more alive.
But it is not as simple as that. It had to do with my early family background being rather conservative in the way I was educated and brought up. And I was really scared of expressing myself, whereas I could draw beautifully, I could sculpture very well as a boy of nine. I could copy anything you asked me to copy. But now to express myself was a different thing. And then studying at the Bartlett School of Architecture, which at my time then it was very traditional. Dickie Richardson was the President of the Academy and he asked me to design only in Georgian or Queen Anne style. So I became very tight and I felt safe being tight. I knew with my set scale I could do all these things but now to express myself it was like a liberation. Like having an orgasm.
INFLUENCES
Christopher Frayling:
Let’s do a flashback. Another picture. You are born in Berlin in 1921, as we have said your formation is Weimar, Berlin with Bauhaus, with CALIGARI, German expressionism, with Max Reinhardt in the theatre, with all that, which doesn’t necessarily come through till much later, but it is there programmed into you. You come over to England in 1934, your father runs a big sport shop called ‘S-Adam’ in Berlin and kits out a lot of UFA mountain films in late 20s, including Murnau, so there is a movie feeling in your upbringing. There is a famous photograph of you standing with Jackie Coogan, Chaplin’s kid when he came to Berlin. So you are on the edges of the movie business in a way.
You come over to England in 1934, go to a British public school where you have to wear a top hat and tails and then in the late 30s, as you say, you go to the Bartlett School of Architecture, in the University of London and simultaneously you are working for a practice called Glovers which is much more modernist than your course. Bartlett, as you have said, was very traditional, Georgian, country house architecture, but the man Glover, there was a man who really rated Mendelssohn and Gropius.
Ken Adam:
Not him. Captain Glover was a genius. He was an acoustics genius. Probably the greatest acoustic expert at that time. But he had a junior partner, who had been assistant to Mendelssohn. So when I cried to him about what was happening to me at the Bartlett School with Dickie Richardson who didn’t like my designs he said don’t worry, you stick to your guns. And remember I was very young, I was only 17 years old. But I was a rebel at heart. And one of the nice British characteristics that I discovered then was all these famous professors who gave more time to me as an external student seemed to like the fact that I didn’t just accept everything and even though they corrected my drawings they were fascinated.
ADAM'S FAMILY
Christopher Frayling:
And also your mother ran a boarding house in north London where a lot of migros from Germany were staying and they were very much in the artistic community as well, architects, painters, musicians. So you are encountering that sort of slightly left wing Bauhaus influence in your domestic life. Then during the 2nd world war you fly hawker typhoons, fighters. In fact you are the only fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force to have a German passport.
Ken Adam:
Well, eventually my kid brother got in as well.
Christopher Frayling:
Which is very strange, as your brothers are interned on the Isle of Man as undesirable aliens, you are flying fast airplanes. You joined the film industry in 1947, working as a draughtsman on films like QUEEN OF SPADES by Thorold Dickinson, but by the early 50s, for some reason you have become a specialist on ships. You do a whole series of movies where you are doing the design for ships. Can you talk about those a little bit?
Ken Adam:
I was interested in cars. I was interested in aircraft because I had just spent 5 years flying them. And I was interested in ships because in Germany in my childhood, we had had a country place by the Baltic and I used to build my own sort of boats and ice-sledges an so on. And that was my interest in ships. But that is typical for the film industry. When Warner Brothers decided to make one of the first major productions in England after the Second World War it was Captain Hornblower.
And the man who was running Warner Brothers at the time in England decided that I should deal with the naval part of it. And I knew nothing about it. So I spent 2 or 3 weeks at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, which I would recommend anybody to go to, and researching sailing ships of the 18th century. And then I got a free hand more or less, which was amazing because remember, I had just started in films and they sent me to the south of France because they said there might be some house available on the north African coast and so I was on my own.
I eventually found a hull near the Spanish border which had been used for cod fishing for 3 months on the banks of Newfoundland and I bought it for 5,000 pounds and I had met a young shipbuilder in Villefranche and we had the whole thing towed back to Villefranche and we had the whole thing built there.
THE CRIMSON PIRATE
Christopher Frayling:
And it is so successful that it leads to you becoming Mr Ships in Hollywood in Europe. You do this whole series of Hornblower movies as you say, there was HELEN OF TROY where you were working on Greek galleys. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? I think you only had one ship and the rest were painted in, but nevertheless, you had the one ship.
In 1952, you work on a film that is very close to your heart, on the island of Ischia where you met Letitia. It is THE CRIMSON PIRATE by Robert Siodmak. It is a wonderful romp. If anyone hasn’t seen the film, it is extremely interesting for many reasons, not least because it is the origin of PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, the idea of a pirate movie that is a complete romp with a lot of improvisation and sending up of the genre at the same time.
Ken Adam:
It didn’t start out that way.
Christopher Frayling:
It was meant to be serious?
Ken Adam:
Yes. It was meant to be serious. Burt Lancaster, whose company was producing the film, Robert Siodmak, who was a famous director with UFA, who then became a famous director in Hollywood, they all formed the team and every night they rewrote the script and obviously I was called in to come up with ideas of 18th century submarines and balloons and so on. And Jack Warner didn’t know what he was getting. And to finish this discussion, they received a telex from Jack Warner saying he was going to cancel the picture because it was not what it set out to be. And I was absolutely panicked and Burt said don’t worry because we have shot more than half the picture. If he cancels the picture now, he’s got nothing. He’s got to carry on. And that is something I learned.
Christopher Frayling:
Next sequence. For reasons much too complicated to go into, Burt Lancaster is in drag, and he rushes around and gets into a balloon and flies away. But what is interesting here is the 18th century gadgets, there is a kind of an 18th century ‘Q’ in this film. A professor played by James Hater, who comes up with an early machine gun and exploding devices. And your designs for this are like an 18th century JAMES BOND.
Ken Adam:
Like a period JAMES BOND. Of course we didn’t realise this at the time. But it was very complicated. Remember Ischia, in 1951, was a desert island. And so I brought with me about 16 construction people from Cinecitt’ in Rome who I had met. But even so getting the materials, the crossing took 2 hours in those days to Naples, and then you had another 2 hours train journey to Rome. So it wasn’t easy and we had to improvise a lot. But I was very fortunate in having a brilliant Italian staff with me.
WORKING WITH MENZIES
Christopher Frayling:
As you say, in 1955 you work on AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS. Mike Todd is asking you to think big, and he is getting together this mega production in Todd AO. Which stars virtually everyone in the Hollywood firmament and it is set in Victorian London. But the other interesting aspect from the point of view of production design is the associate producer William Cameron Menzies, the great, in fact the first man in Hollywood to be called production designer for his work on GONE WITH THE WIND. How was it to work with him?
Ken Adam:
Well, he was wonderful, except he was so scared of Mike Todd, and by this time, was unfortunately an alcoholic, and I remember he used to spend every evening with Letitia and myself in our small apartment in Bond Street and he went through a bottle of scotch every night, which I could ill afford you know. But at the same time I learned an enormous amount from him. He literally invented production design. He had every frame sketched out on GONE WITH THE WIND. They had several directors and they had to keep to his sketches and that is why Selznick gave him that title.
Christopher Frayling:
As a footnote, they fired three directors on GONE WITH THE WIND and Victor Fleming put his name on it although George Cukor did a bit, and all sorts of other people. But in the famous memo from Selznick, the whole thing was storyboarded by William Cameron Menzies, so if there is one intelligence behind GONE WITH THE WIND it is the visualisor, so we must invent a title for him to fit this role. Let’s call him Production Designer.
Ken Adam:
No. It was ‘Production Designed By William Cameron Menzies’.
Christopher Frayling:
And in a way, that is the first non-art director credit in history.
Ken Adam:
I know. They are now asking me in Hollywood who I would recommend for the Hall Of Fame. They said that they would like to put my name forward, ‘can you put some other names forward?’ And I said, ‘I think it is very nice of you to give it to me, I don’t think it is deserved at all’, and I put William Cameron Menzies forward. And then after some time, I get a letter, saying well we had a meeting at the Guild and we decided that really it should only apply to production designers who are no longer with us. I said, ‘thank you very much for telling me’.
Christopher Frayling:
Well William Cameron Menzies certainly deserved it. It is an extraordinary career. It starts out with Douglas Fairbanks’s film in the 20s, THE THIEF OF BAGDAD. He also directed. THINGS TO COME. 1936. The great reply to METROPOLIS. And then ends up making strange movies in the early ‘50s such as INVADERS FROM MARS.
BOND IN THE LATE 60S
Christopher Frayling:
Let’s move to the late 1960s. YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE directed by Lewis Gilbert, who remains a good friend of yours, and THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, directed also by Lewis Gilbert. Now the thing with YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE is it is the first of the Bond movies where it really does depart from the novel. The novel is set in Japan and there is a castle with a poisoned garden and it is a sort of fantasy medieval Japan. What seems to be happening, you go on a recce to look at the location, in this case Japan and you pick up things when you are on the recce and the script gets written on the hoof, so your sets become a key part in the framing of the story.
Ken Adam:
Yes. The problem was that the first time we recced the location and found that none of the Fleming locations he talked about existed. Remember it wasn’t that easy. We had to cover two thirds of Japan in about 3 or 4 weeks. So we chartered two helicopters. I was in one with Lewis Gilbert, who was a terrible coward because he had never flown in a helicopter. He always closed his eyes.
And then we found out that the pilot, who was sitting between us, his hands were shaking, and he said: ‘Ken, he is not a good pilot’, and we later found out he had been trained as a kamikaze pilot! But in fact he was a good pilot. So you had all those strains to deal with. And flying 7 hours every day in those tiny helicopters was very uncomfortable and the only good thing about it was that Cubby used to wire ahead so to ensure that we all had a massage wherever we landed.
But we didn’t find any locations. But, though we laugh about it now, the Bond people, my producers and United Artists, were so keen, that they committed themselves to the release of the film in three or four thousand cinemas all over the world and we didn’t have a script. So the first thing was that the scriptwriter was fired. And then by pure chance, on the southern island of Kujo, we flew over this incredible volcano-scape. There were about half a dozen, maybe 7 volcanoes, some of them still active I may add.
And not funny once you go into the crater. And when we landed, and I can’t remember who said what. Because there was Cubby, myself, Lewis and Freddy Young the cameraman. Harry Saltzman had disappeared looking for salt mines. I never understood why he was looking for salt mines but it was a sort of sign of desperation. And we started talking and I said, wouldn’t it be fun if our villain is in one of these disused craters. And this seemed to strike a bell. I did a sketch, And then Cubby said: ?How much is it going to cost?? And I said, ‘no idea’. I really had no idea. And he said: ‘If I give you a million dollars, do you think you can do it?’ And in 1966 a million dollars was a fortune and I said, ‘I will do it’. And that is how it started.
Christopher Frayling:
So the idea of missiles inside the volcano emerged during the recce?
Ken Adam:
Absolutely. We had nothing. They called in Roald Dahl as a scriptwriter you know.
THE VOLCANO IN YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
Christopher Frayling:
You are moving centre stage as the star of the movie by this stage because it is constructed around your sets.
Ken Adam:
It is not comparable with 99 percent of all movies where the script is the backbone and bible of the story. But by this time we had run out of scripts and original stories, so the design elements plus the exotic locations plus the gadgets became the important part of the film.
Christopher Frayling:
And this is completely non digital. What is the diameter of the aperture would you say?
Ken Adam:
Well, the artificial lake up at the top was 70 foot in diameter and was at a slant. And it had to slide open too.
Christopher Frayling:
Without CGI, 400 extras coming down ropes in the climax of the movie. The responsibility must have been awesome. I mean health and safety, construction, engineering, it is terrifying.
Ken Adam:
Yes. I was bright enough to cover myself by getting structural engineers to help me out, but it suddenly dawned on me, you are going crazy. And I broke out in eczema, and saw a psychiatrist and he said: ‘You need Valium, I can’t help you in any other way.’ And my construction manager was brilliant, who is still around today, Ronny Udell, was also getting worried. It is the biggest set ever done. And everyone said: ‘You are crazy, there is no cameraman in the world who can light it!’ And it was Freddy Young who said: ‘I can light it.’
Christopher Frayling:
And in his memoirs he says DR ZHIVAGO was a doddle, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA was a doddle, trying to light this volcano was like lighting a football pitch. Not easy.
Ken Adam:
It was about 240 feet to the long shot and I suppose 260 feet in diameter. And also to build it all 120 feet high. 700 tonnes of industrial steel.
Christopher Frayling:
It is the thing that everyone remembers about the movie. I defy anyone to remember a line of dialogue from YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, but you can certainly remember the missiles inside the volcano.
Ken Adam:
But also people said, you could have built it partly as a model, and I suppose I could have, but you wouldn’t have had the same effect and I think that is what people feel when they compare present day Bonds with those early Bonds. Even the kids of today knew those were real. We didn’t cheat. Or cheated as little as possible.
Christopher Frayling:
We are in Kyusho. And the helicopter flies into the real lake, quite low actually into the crater of the volcano which can’t have been easy, then we cut to Pinewood where the lake slides open, and you have the helicopter actually flying into the set. That is terrifying.
Ken Adam:
Yes. We were all terrified. Including the pilot. Because first of all, we nearly lost him in Japan because he had a very underpowered helicopter and we are all down below with cameras, watching and he disappears over the rim and doesn’t come up. And we start to think what has happened to him, he should be up by now, and he was caught by some down currents and just managed to climb out of this crater. Now this poor man has to go into my set which is a closed set which is like flying into something ten times the size of this projection theatre, through a hole in the ceiling and you don’t know what currents he is going to encounter. It is pretty frightening. It was all real. Unfortunately we had lots of serious accidents but not with this.
WANT TO TALK ABOUT BARRY LYNDON?
Christopher Frayling:
Now, on to what I believe is the masterpiece of your Bond films, THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, 1966, and because it is not one of the early ones, I don’t think it is rated as highly as the Sean Connery ones, but in terms of your designs. I think? What had happened between YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE and THE SPY WHO LOVED ME was BARRY LYNDON. Do you want to talk about BARRY LYNDON?
Ken Adam:
No
Christopher Frayling:
Simply to say after the experience of BARRY LYNDON which you described very graphically yesterday in the exhibition, after this experience, you hadn’t been very well and you came out roaring, because, with THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, you are completely letting rip on all cylinders, it is the most extreme of all your films in terms of design.
Ken Adam:
I had a serious breakdown on BARRY LYNDON and I had to learn how to live again, because I thought I was a complete phoney. I thought everything I had done in my life was not real. And fortunately I met an Italian director, Tinto Brass. I did his first film, SALON KITTY, it is a porno film, semi-porno film, on the edge. So I got some of my courage back. Then I did a film called the SEVEN PERCENT SOLUTION, a Sherlock Holmes film and then THE SPY WHO LOVED ME.
And as Chris said, I really exploded. It was an incredible reaction I could feel nothing was too difficult for me. And also I wanted to experiment not with linear shapes all the time. There was a French architect who had designed these houses in Sardinia and that impressed me and so I started designing Atlantis and things like that with this in mind.
THE SPY WHO LOVED ME
Christopher Frayling:
There are two great sets in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME. One is the interior of Stromberg’s apartment. Where there are various Ken Adam touches. One of them is your astonishing designs for office furniture. If you look at contract furniture in the catalogues it is dull as hell, but you somehow make it interesting. But more importantly, gigantic tables, renaissance style interior, Botticelli paintings, Mantegna and so on.
And the paintings go up and behind them these horrible sharks that eat people. You love doing that. Behind the art is something really horrible. And Stromberg hits a button and the curtain goes up and someone gets eaten, and then we discover we are under water and it rises and turns into this astonishing spider-like contraption which is Atlantis, a floating island. Let’s talk about this one first.
Ken Adam:
We went to Okinawa because Cubby had heard there is a structure that rises out of the water which is designed for some exhibition. So we fly all the way out to Okinawa, find the structure which looks like an oil rig and doesn’t come out of the water, it is stationary. It was very unexciting. But when you start off with something wrong as a designer, I have found, it took me a week to get over it because I tried to adapt this structure and I wasn’t pleased with it. So I threw everything away and came up with this spider-like very simple structure. And I knew when I had done something right, when it worked. So basically you have a curvaceous structure and I wanted to do everything with curves, and then I came up with the idea that I wanted Curd J’rgens in this renaissance type of room with a 60 foot long refectory table. And I had a very good scenic painter and we painted all my favourite paintings of Piero della Francesca, Mantegna and Botticelli.
But the reason was that I wanted to show the audience that we were under water because you suddenly find these tapestries go up and then now you know the whole structure is under water. Now of course, Lewis went further with the Botticelli ‘Primavera’. It goes up and you see the girl who betrayed J’rgens being eaten by a shark.
Christopher Frayling:
Not being psychological but behind the beauty of the facade, behind the travel brochure is a really horrible place, behind the art is a really nasty shark. And inside this beautiful yacht is a horrible little boat trying to get out that is going to whiz away and shoot people. What is it about you? You want to get behind all these facades.
Ken Adam:
You know, it is all tongue in cheek. Maybe I have got a slightly perverted sense of humour.
Christopher Frayling:
But it is secret places. Things are not quite what they seem. At first sight it is a Mantegna painting but actually if you look closer it is something else. You love that idea.
Ken Adam:
Yes, I do love that. What does that make me, a criminal?
Christopher Frayling:
No, no. It makes you a great designer. But I was just pointing it out.
Here is a picture of Atlantis. A characteristic drawing and a model. This time it was a model.
Ken Adam:
Yes. I built one of the legs full size, in Sardinia, so that we could get an actual boat arriving there.
ORIGINAL AND ADAPTATION
Christopher Frayling:
Stromberg’s apartment and Atlantis rising to the surface of the ocean. That was the first of the sets of THE SPY WHO LOVED ME. But the second one is just as astonishing. lt is a supertanker and the front opens to reveal 3 nuclear submarines inside which is an amazing conception and nothing to do with the book at all. If you read ?The Spy Who Loved Me?, none of this is in it.
Ken Adam:
I don’t think this was my idea though. It came out of the script. They had a supertanker which swallowed up three nuclear submarines. And Cubby had a friend who had these oil tankers and he was willing to let us have this oil tanker if it was empty but we decided we couldn’t use it because with explosions it was too dangerous, even thought it was empty, so I had to build it.
Christopher Frayling:
Are these actual size?
Ken Adam:
No, about five eighths of the size. I felt I couldn’t reduce them any more because I felt they had to be in relation to human beings.
Christopher Frayling:
And this is what it ends up looking like. It is the most astonishing set.
You got an Oscar Nomination for THE SPY WHO LOVED ME.
Ken Adam:
Yes, the only one.
ADAM'S OSCARS
Christopher Frayling:
Can I talk about that for a moment? Of the two Oscars you have won, both very deservedly, the first was for BARRY LYNDON in 1976, and the second was for THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE in the 1990s. Both are wonderful pieces of design, but in my view not very characteristic of your work. Why did they never give an Oscar for your work in JAMES BOND? Is it snobbery?
Ken Adam:
I think it is partly snobbery. It’s partly that they were so successful financially that nobody really cared. You know today everything is on the Oscar, everybody is advertising? I must say it never occurred to me. I didn’t think about an Oscar. And when in fact I was nominated for THE SPY WHO LOVED ME it was a great surprise. Unfortunately I lost it to STAR WARS, deservedly, I think STAR WARS was beautifully designed. You never know with Oscars you know.
Christopher Frayling:
But it is odd. It is as if, thinking of the category Production Design people automatically think of period movie. It’s the obvious thing. I think that is a slight cliché that the best design must be historical. As you say, these films are one step ahead of contemporary. And it wasn’t really until after STAR WARS that science fiction came into the frame, from the point of view of the Oscars.
Ken Adam:
Well, last year we gave the Oscar to the New Zealand picture, LORD OF THE RINGS, the three pictures really because, we thought it was such an innovation and we mustn’t forget that because in terms of production design, when people ask me about the future, there are still great possibilities for young designers with imagination to express themselves. Today the technology is much more advanced so they can design anything.
Christopher Frayling:
But if they start giving awards to all those swords and sorcery you know they might get into bad hobbits!
STANLEY KUBRICK AND 007
Christopher Frayling:
Back to the supertanker. There is a secret here involving Stanley Kubrick. You only revealed this just after Stanley had died because you were sworn to secrecy.
Ken Adam:
At the Directors Guild tribute to Stanley Kubrick three years ago. I told them because I haven’t seen a lot of Kubrick in the 1990’s because we were living in Malibu in California. No, it was before that in ‘78 or ‘77. Stanley always said: ‘Your Bond sets are fantastic but the cameraman doesn’t do credit to your sets and the reason for that is they were usually, to use a vulgar term, shit scared of lighting these enormous sets and I couldn’t blame them.’ And on THE SPY WHO LOVED ME we had a wonderful cameraman who was the grandson of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and he was worried. You know what was he going to do with a set 400 feet long with three atomic submarines?
So I rang up Stanley and I said, ‘Stanley, can you come to the studio and help me to set the source lighting?’ Because for those kinds of sets the source lighting is really the key for the cameraman. And he said: ‘You must be out of your mind! I wouldn’t do that to Claude. And can you imagine me arriving at Pinewood Studio, and the press getting hold of this and so on, it is impossible.’ And I said: ‘Stanley, you know you owe me one or two favours, I can promise you that no one will ever know about this. You will hide in my car, I will drive you on Sunday to the studios, there will only be security and I have the keys to the big 007 stage. And we spend some time on the stage to advise me.’ And then he decided he would do it. And then he spent four hours with me crawling through that darkened stage where we found the safety lights and he advised me where to put source lighting.
Christopher Frayling:
You heard it here first, Ladies and Gentlemen. Stanley Kubrick lit the nuclear submarines in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME.
CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG
Christopher Frayling:
Now onto another kind of car. 1967, CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG. This is very much in the news in England because a musical has just come out, based on the movie, which has been fantastically successful. And which has all your designs in it. In particular the design of the car both before it flies and after it flies and you get a tiny little credit on the programme and that is it.
Ken Adam:
Yes. What do you want me to say? The car was designed for the film. I had personal difficulties because I found it difficult to design a sexy looking period car. You know it was second nature to design a new sports car. I had big problems but then eventually succeeded and we get into another discussion because obviously they own the copyright for the film and then thirty years later they use my designs for the musical.
Christopher Frayling:
Let me just get this straight. So you do the designs on contract for Eon Productions presumably, and they own the intellectual property for everything you did on contract. And can use it in various different ways.
Ken Adam:
Well. In those days I didn’t think. Even then I didn’t like that they owned the copyright of my designs for the film that the designs are made for. But I still don’t know if they do a musical and want to use my designs for a musical if that copyright law still applies.
Christopher Frayling:
If it is any consolation, apparently the best thing in the musical is the moment when the car takes off.
Ken Adam:
Yes, and they are making a fortune out of it. And it is going to New York.
Christopher Frayling:
One of the sets in CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG is interesting in the point of view of what we are taking about is the scene in the sweet factory. There is a musical number set here called Toot Sweet, a rather bad pun, and it is in black and white again with all the machinery and monochrome, with occasional bits of colour, which is the vats of toffee and all the different sweets. And so again, getting back to that DR NO set, you do like monochrome. In fact you use colour quite sparingly in your work. Is that a philosophy of yours?
Ken Adam:
Yes I think it is a philosophy. I think I wanted to make a point of the colour. I think it was interesting to do this set in black and white and to use the colour of the sweets and so on to add the message. And it worked with the dance number extremely well.
PENNIES FROM HEAVEN
Christopher Frayling:
It is that interesting monochrome thing again. Whilst we are on the subject of musicals let’s move onto the final chapter of what we are going to be talking about, which is PENNIES FROM HEAVEN. A movie that not enough people have seen I don’t think, but it was 1980, directed by Herb Ross, a director with whom you worked many times in the ?60s, ?70s and ?80s, and it is a fascinating case study in the use of paintings and source materials of that kind in evoking a period.
Just to give the background. PENNIES FROM HEAVEN started as a BBC television serial, written by the great writer Dennis Potter and it was set in the 1930s in England about a sheet music salesman who has a fantasy life which he lives through the songs of the period. And you and Letitia really enjoyed watching this.
Ken Adam:
We loved it. It was a wonderful series. It wasn’t so easy to translate it into American terms. Dennis Potter wrote the screenplay but who is the cockney character played by Bob Hoskins? Everybody who saw Bob Hoskins on the screen knew he was a cockney, now who would be his equivalent in the United States? We eventually came up with the Middle West character during the depression played by Steve Martin. To cut a long story short, we first were going to shoot the street on location in Chicago, but for some reason Herb Ross and MGM decided to do it all at MGM Studios in Hollywood, and I had to design the L-street in Chicago. Now, it is one thing to design a street with a railway on top, but the shops are a problem. So I discussed with Herb and we came up with the idea for using famous American painters for some of the shops.
So we had ‘Nighthawk Caf’ by Hopper, we had ‘The Cinema’ by Hopper, we used the ‘Modelling Furs’ by Reginald Marsh, so the whole street were famous American paintings of the period. And I think this was the first time we used it. And also the inside of the Hopper Cinema, the usherette, I reproduced completely and set the whole scene in the cinema. There is a fantastic scene with Bagneris dancing PENNIES FROM HEAVEN in front of a 40 by 60 foot collage of the photographs by the depression photographer Walker Evans.
Christopher Frayling:
What I have got is the clip of the cinema, where you do something remarkable. You start off with the set that looks like a Hopper painting then you have Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters sitting in the stalls watching the Fred Astaire movie, FOLLOW THE FLEET, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, until they become part of the movie themselves and you have to reconstruct a chunk of the set from the Astaire movie for them to act in. That must have been difficult.
Ken Adam:
Yes. Well that was difficult because RKO, or whoever it was, didn’t have any of the set drawings. I got one 10 by 8 still and had to construct it from that. What was more difficult, although it was not my responsibility, but was the responsibility of Herb, the director, and the tap dancing choreographer, was Steve Martin was not a dancer. And he only had six months of dance training.
Now for Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters to dance in front of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and to look somewhat professional was almost impossible. That’s when I came up with the idea of the prison, it was also part of the story. They are in a prison, where the canes look like a prison. But again I had the problem of the black shiny floor. And this time it is MGM Hollywood and they have done shiny floors for Gene Kelly and everyone else. And I had a young construction manager, who said Ken don’t worry we know how to deal with that.
And I said: ‘I am delighted to know because I must warn you, every time we have tried we have had difficulties.’ Two days later, Herb and myself go onto the floor and it is like a seascape. And also MGM stages are very old and I told them to put a sub floor on and so on. They couldn’t do it. The poor man spent a sleepless night. Rang up all over Hollywood to try and find out. And then someone gave him the idea to spread the whole floor with terrazzo. Because terrazzo, like cement, when liquid finds its own level and you polish it and becomes mirror-like but the only trouble is it is hell for the dancers. There was no spring in that floor.
COMPUTER GAMES
Christopher Frayling:
Now Ken. A lot of what we have been talking about is retrospective going back 50 years in fact to when you entered the business. But only last year you produced all the settings for a computer video game called ‘GoldenEye Rogue Agent’. It is a JAMES BOND spin-off and gave you a chance to revisit some of your old sets in digital form for example the spectre now lives in a volcano. A nod to YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE.
Ken Adam:
Remember I did all those things in London and they were working in three studios in the United States, in California and one in Canada. And to talk about video games is another subject because I don’t know how to play them and I know nothing about computers but it seemed to work.
Christopher Frayling:
What sort of a budget?
Ken Adam:
About 40 million dollars. But remember, a video game lasts for 24 hours, has about ten levels, and each level is like a film on its own. I think it is a new art form because it has only been ?
Christopher Frayling:
I love this one. You have invented a fortress for DR NO that was never in the original DR NO. But this is an extraordinary video game that brings in a cast of characters. Yes you have a James Bond character but also Goldfinger, Scaramanga, from THE MAN WITH GOLDEN GUN, you’ve got Dr No, and they all pile up against the rogue agent. So it is like a change of partners really. And you go to Jamaica, you go to the Alps, you go to volcanoes. It is an anthology of some of your greatest hits from JAMES BOND in digital form.
Ken Adam:
What I want to say, it is a relatively new art form. The people I work with none of them are over 40 years of age. It is completely chaotic, at least this one was, they have some very talented people. But if you think each video game has an art dept of 80 to 100 people, animators, story board artists, and so on, and they work almost independently and you have no control over it.
So I send an email or a fax of my sketches, but you don’t know what they are going to do with your sketch. And nobody knows really there. I spent last year two or three weeks there in the studios in LA and I was just horrified because the one who was in charge of the game playing says I am too much of a minimalist designer and he has to create screens or extra walls for people to hide behind and so on. And so it is still very chaotic.
They use three studios to make this game so you can think of 240, 260 people working in the art department. Even if I had been living in LA I wouldn’t have any more control over it. Because no one knows quite what the next person is doing. But there is enormous scope in it, and you know it is in developing stages, even though all the people I was involved with are trying to get jobs in the film industry now. Because they don’t belong to any kind of association or union and that is where unions could be useful. They are burning themselves out. Working 25 hours a day. Getting no sleep getting a lot of money but what is the good if you don’t last more than a year or two.
Christopher Frayling:
Unfortunately we don’t have 24 hours -- unlike the game. Thank you very much for this fantastic amble through your career.
© Berlinale Talent Campus 2005
