The man behind the futurist aesthetic of early James Bond, a key collaborator with Stanley Kubrick on Dr Strangelove, and the mastermind behind many a far-fetched gadget, Ken Adam is a living production design legend.
We were lucky enough to meet him to talk about his new book Ken Adam Designs the Movies: James Bond and Beyond, a fantastic retrospective illustrated with some stunning line drawings, and especially to ask him about some of his favourite memories.
LWLies: Tell me about Dr Strangelove. How did you come up with everything? Particularly the War Room?
Adam: Well, it was at an early meeting with Stanley Kubrick, and when he explained to me the idea of the film, the War Room obviously was an important part of it so I started doodling. I had, in fact, come up with a two-level set you see; I already had the table there. And he liked it very much so I thought it was easy working with Stanley Kubrick, everyone thinks he’s such a difficult man and here I am and he likes my set. And then two or three weeks later he changed his mind. He said, ‘What am I going to do with all these people sitting up there?’ I said, ‘Stanley, you’re the director, that’s not me.’ ‘Well they’ll all look like they have egg on their face, I’m afraid you have got to start again.’ So then I started doodling again, came up more with this sort of triangular shape, eventually that ended up in the War Room.
LWLies: Looking back on it, watching the film now, is there anything you’d change about it at all?
Adam: No. I’m very happy with the film and the more I look back on it, I think it was probably, particularly with the War Room, one of the best designs I ever did because it fitted so well into the dramatic screenplay and the actors felt at home and it inspired them – Stanley was inspired. And it still hasn’t aged. You know, I’m very proud of my work on that.
LWLies: I thought the map wall was especially striking.
Adam: Yes, because we didn’t have really computer-generated stuff or anything. We could have projected the various symbols you know, with 16mm projectors, but then I decided we needed about 40 projectors and if one goes wrong the whole film unit is held up. Stanley said to me, ‘You have to make it, you know, functioning practically’. So I blew up the maps – I designed the maps on about elephant-sized drawing boards and then we blew them up to this size and pasted them on a plywood background and cut out where the symbols were going to occur and put 60 watt lightbulbs in them which were controlled by switches and also perspex over the box like a lightbox. I didn’t realise that over 1,000 or 2,000 lightbulbs gave off so much heat that the photographic material started lifting from the plywood so we eventually cured it by putting three air-conditioning plants in the back to cool it down, otherwise we couldn’t have shot it. You live and learn.
LWLies: It’s funny that it’s so manual when it looks so high-tech.
Adam: Yeah I know. Sometimes it’s better to go to the old methods when you don’t do things in time and you know it’s going to work. I mean, I didn’t know the material was going to blister off it you know, but again I’d no idea what a nuclear bomb was going to look like so we came up with those funny, you know that in the Second World War in bomber command, people used to write messages on the bombs.
LWLies: What about the plane shots?
Adam: We designed the models, and we built various sized models. I was very proud I had a model builder who specialised in it, who’d build a very large, I think 12-foot wingspan, with every ripple of the skin showing and so on but when we filmed it, it looked phoney, whereas the four-foot model looked fine. And then I remembered, I should have known better, because the eye never sees every detail, particularly not on a plane. What I learned as an art director is that if you paint a background to a window, let’s say the opposite side here, if you do every brick and everything it’ll look phoney, whereas if you paint it loosely it’d look right because your eye is not in focus all the time. So almost all the model shots were with a small model because you just couldn’t use the big model.
We had a second unit which filmed in Norway and somewhere in the Arctic from a B-52 or something, all those incredible shots of the snowscapes and all that, and of course I designed the cockpit which was very realistic if you consider that we had no cooperation from the Americans at the time because the film was considered anti-American. But I got all the information from Jane’s Fighting Aircraft or one of these books, or Flight magazine, and then we had an American Airforce unit come and visit the set and then they all went white because it was so accurate. I got a written message from Stanley the next day saying ‘You’d better remember where you got your research from because we may well be investigated by the CIA’. So it was very accurate. And Stanley of course, who was a brilliant photographer, before filming the inside of the cockpit looking out at the back projection of the flying and so on, tested each shot, it must have been nearly 100 Polaroids at the time to get the right balance between the inside of the cockpit and the outside of the aircraft. It wasn’t perfect but it was very good.
We ended the film with a gigantic pie fight, it was a pie fight to end all pie fights. I think after we shot eight or nine days, I had ordered something more than 5,000 custard pies and it was fantastic. It ended up with the President of the United States, Peter Sellers, and Peter Bull, the Russian Ambassador, sitting in this mess like kids building sandcastles out of the pies. Then unfortunately JFK was assassinated and in our dialogue there was, ‘You can’t allow the president to be struck,’ so it didn’t work any longer and Kubrick decided not to use it. We were trying to gang up on him and saying you have got to use it, it’s brilliant but you just have the big nuclear explosions instead.
LWLies: James Bond. First of all the cars. Did you just let your imagination run wild with them?
Adam: Yes. And remember I drove a sportscar myself at the time, not an Aston Martin but an E-Type Jaguar. The problem was, in those days, they didn’t have a bumper going round the front and so on, and every time I came out somebody had banged or bashed the front, so I got my own back.
//LWLies//: You set a precedent really for all those gadgety cars.
Adam: Yes. I came up with this idea of the Lotus as a submarine for The Spy Who Loved Me. That’s an actual Lotus submarine underwater doing seven knots, but the people inside it had to wear oxygen equipment as it wasn’t pressurised. I also had a small model which I sometimes used.
One of my favourites was of the inside of Atlantis. Atlantis was the laboratory of Count Jurgens who was the villain in the Spy Who Loved Me. It gave me the opportunity to design a circular set with curves and so on, and I loved that because in all these circular openings there were fish swimming. The building’s set on two levels so that down below was more living, and up above was more functional. I’d done the super tanker interior you see which swallowed up the three nuclear submarines. It was a gigantic set at Pinewood, that’s when we built the 007 stage and it was actually opened by [Harold] Wilson, who either had been Prime Minister or was the Prime Minister, and hit every news surface in the world. But I was more pleased with the Atlantis because it looked like a giant spider coming out of the water. I had tapestries painted and as the tapestries go up, you know that you are underwater if you didn’t know. One of the tapestries was a painting of the Primavera by Botticelli. That was my own sort of tongue-in-cheek but rather cruel in-joke, the paintings go up and there’s the secretary who is projected into the shark pool and eaten by the shark, you know, rather cruel but it got a laugh.
LWLies: Where would your starting point be? Would you have to research things or would you just have this idea out of the blue?
Adam: No, I’d just have this idea. My research was a disaster. I think the only time I got stuck, Cubby Broccoli had heard there was an island, a floating island in Okinawa, which came out of the water and then sat on top. It was built for some exhibition around 1975-6. So he said, ‘You and I, we’d better fly out there.’ And we flew out there and it looked to me like a gigantic oil rig, nothing. It was a permanent structure like an oil rig sitting on top of the water. So he said, ‘Well, can you see? Because they have been very obliging to us. See if you can make it work in some way.’ and I spent a whole week at Pinewood with all the photographs of this bloody oil rig, trying to do something sexy and I couldn’t and that’s when I came up with these drawings.
LWLies: So did you have to have an understanding of cars or could you just come up with something and, say, make it work?
Adam: I felt at the time I could design anything and make it work somehow. I was very, very confident. I became more obviously with the Bond and I thought, ‘Come on, give me something.’ I tell you what was the most difficult design for me was the car in Chitty Bang Bang. I felt anything futuristic I can design or streamlined blah blah blah no problem, but to build a sexy car of the turn of the nineteenth century, I found very difficult. I liked the front of the Bugatti, which was a famous racing car which I knew, I liked some of these ship bodies of old Rolls Royces and so I came up with a combination of that and I built a full size mock-up. I drove everybody crazy because I came in and I didn’t like this so I changed that and I didn’t like that and so on. Because I wasn’t quite sure, you see. But in the end it worked fine. And in fact I got a letter from a fan only two days ago who built a full-size replica of Chitty at Pinewood and he wanted me to come out and look at it. It’s really very good. It also had to be a hovercraft you see. So the wheels folded in and it became a hovercraft, except I cheated there. To inflate it, or to make it work would have cost a fortune, so I put a speedboat underneath and the car skims over the water on top of the speedboat. Nobody knew it.
LWLies: So was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang different because obviously you had to make the car fit in with the plot a bit more, you know, it has to fly, it has to go on the water. With James Bond did you have a bit more freedom to just add whatever you wanted?
Adam: I think the problems were basically the same except in the James Bond it was more futuristic and in Chitty I went back. Goldfinger was the first film where we really came up with gadgetry, and Chitty was a musical but it almost was like a period James Bond. I had airships and all sorts of things and then we built a real airship. That crashed in Dorset because it was a terrible year that September, and I had it anchored outside somewhere in the Chilterns and it broke loose, crashed into some high tension wires and cut off all the electricity supply for the poor farmers who were trying to milk their cows. I was really worried they might get a lawsuit. So it was a real airship we built.
LWLies: What are some of your favourite James Bond sets?
Adam: This was the waterbed in Vegas with Sean. I had big problems because everybody said you can put fish in the waterbed but you can’t put fish in the waterbed, and these were very valuable tropical fish so I designed aquariums all the way around the outside of the waterbed and put the fish in the aquariums. Even then we had a disaster because one of the prop men at night switched off the heat of this aquarium and in the morning we came in and all of the fish were dead. We couldn’t get replacements so we put them on ice and we had dead fish floating around in the tanks around the waterbed. These things sometimes happen.
Then in Thunderball with the underwater scene we had sharks. In the Bahamas everybody tells you there are no sharks. And I was flying in a helicopter and you looked on location and you can see because the water’s so clear, there were at least 12 sharks. And also I needed sharks for a scene when Bond, Sean, has a fight in the pool with the villain and there’s some sharks in the pool. They have a famous sea aquarium boat in Miami and we fished in one night from our beach where we were swimming about 12 or 14 sharks and good size too. I mean, the big ones were 12-feet or something like that and we craned them into the swimming pool of a villa I’d found. Then there was a near disaster. I talked Sean into doing that scene in the swimming pool and I was going to protect him by putting 10×4 perspex sheets all along the lens with the sharks swimming behind like a corridor. And I ran out of one sheet so I had a 4 ft opening at the end. So we were using some of the Ivan Tours specialists who were in Miami making a series called Flipper and so I had one of their men in the pool to make sure that the shark didn’t come out of the gap. Of course this stuff always happens, I don’t know what happened to the guard but Sean was swimming around happily and of course the shark takes one minute to get out of the gap and we were up there screaming at Sean to get out and he never got out so quickly.
And the interior of Fort Knox. It was a completely impractical design but I thought if you’ve ever seen the biggest gold depository in the world, the audience wants to see gold, you know, but you never see gold stacked very high – about a maximum of two feet. I built it with gold stacked as high as that with an elevator in the middle and it was like a casino of gold. And it worked because after the film, United Artists got over 200 irate letters from the Unites States asking how was it that a British film unit was allowed to film inside Fort Knox when the president of the United States is not allowed to go inside. They accepted it.
