Creating the Looks That Thrill

There must be an Aston-Martin with an ejector seat in the garage of production designer Ken Adam. Or perhaps he works out of a hollowed-out volcano, traveling to and from Harrods in a helicopter.

“No. My house is not James Bondish at all. Sorry,” laughs the German-born, English-settling Adam, ending the hope that the man who created these canonized images on screen would have carried some of their powerful ingenuity into his home.

Better, though, that Adam, 80, shared his imagination with the world, creating the “frameworks for actors to play in” on more than 70 films, including seven Bonds, from “Dr. No” to “Moonraker,” two Stanley Kubrick films, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” and “Barry Lyndon,” as well as “Sleuth,” “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and “The Madness of King George.” “Lyndon” (1975) and “King George” (1994) earned him Oscars for best art direction.

Adam is in Los Angeles this week to be honored by the Art Directors Guild Film Society, an evening that will include a screening of “Dr. Strangelove.” A 53-year veteran of the field with no plans to retire, Adam is clearly a highly celebrated figure among his peers.

“Ken Adam was the first production designer whose name I knew. He turned me on to the whole concept of film design,” says John Muto, founder of the film society.

Even a visual effects designer like John Nelson, skilled with a computer in the way Adam never was and up for an Oscar for “Gladiator,” says he is “in awe of all the films Adam has done.”

“I showed Ken some of my ‘Gladiator’ work and got compliments from him, which was so important to me. He’s just one of those inspirational figures who’s done it all with such grace,” Nelson says.

Adam calls “Strangelove” “without a doubt one of my most important experiences because it was--and still is--a brilliant film. It hasn’t aged. It’s all the things I like. A black satire of a horrifying subject, for all of us who were scared over the Cuban missile crisis.”

Among his creations for “Strangelove” is the interior of a B-52 bomber so accurately re-created from the pages of a technical journal that Army personnel visiting the set threatened Kubrick with an FBI investigation. And, of course, the infamous war room, a set so dead-on that “once you have seen it, you can’t imagine superpower confrontation happening anywhere else,” a critic for the London Evening Standard wrote.

Adam certainly knew something about war by the time he designed “Strangelove’s” centerpiece. Born in Berlin to a Jewish family, Adam left Germany in 1934. He was 13 when the family arrived in England, and he didn’t know a word of English. Nevertheless, he had little difficulty adjusting to the new country. It was his father, Adam says, who never got over the move, dying of a heart attack in 1936.

By 15, Adam knew he wanted to design sets for a living--”to invent reality,” as he says. He started off in architecture school as a means of learning the basics, but World War II pulled him away before he could work his way into film.

Adam served as a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force--a German native fighting for the Allied side. Some cite his war experience as the reason he excels at creating such startling, often dark images. Adam himself says it was the speed of the war planes that inspired him most. James Bond’s endless and enviable supply of impressive transportation supports his belief.

After the war, Adam worked as a draftsman on 1948’s “This Was a Woman,” which led to a series of assistant-designer jobs that strengthened his experience but caused him to worry about a designer’s version of typecasting.

“After I did the ships for ‘Captain Horatio Hornblower,’ I suddenly became a naval expert and did four or five pictures--’The Crimson Pirate’ [where he met and married his wife, Letizia, after two weeks], ‘Helen of Troy’ in Greece and so on. I said to myself, ‘Wait a moment, I’m in this beautiful Mediterranean country and the weather is wonderful, but I don’t want to be known all my life as a naval expert.’ ”

His breakthrough came in 1956, when “Around the World in 80 Days” not only led to Adam’s first art-director position, but also to his first Oscar nomination (there would be four more). It was also on this film that, as assistant to associate producer William Cameron Menzies, an Oscar winner for his design work on “Gone With the Wind,” Adam worked alongside his first mentor.

“He spent all his spare time with me, and I benefited so much from his brilliant mind. He encouraged me with all the things that I liked, stylization of sets, using color in bold ways and creating a reality which is not reality,” says Adam.

It wasn’t long before he had a chance to prove what he’d learned. Director Terrence Young gave him a remarkably free hand to create the on-screen look for the film version of Ian Fleming’s spy novels; the first, in 1962, was “Dr. No.” Adam had no idea he would be building the framework for a genre.

“I thought the ‘Dr. No’ script was awful. But soon I saw the potential it gave me,” he says. “It started a whole new way of letting my imagination go, to use tongue-in-the-cheek, larger-than-life sets, with new materials that would express our neurotic technological age.”

Despite a small budget--under $1 million--and trepidation about its success, James Bond’s debut was embraced by moviegoers. Kubrick responded by calling Adam over to his London hotel to pitch him the prospect of “Strangelove.”

Adam quickly learned how difficult--and exhilarating--designing for Kubrick could be.

“He’s the most talented director I’ve worked with, but he’s very demanding and changed his mind many times--always for the better,” he says.

In designing the war room, Adam quickly scribbled a two-level set that Kubrick approved. But the art department had no sooner begun to build the models than Kubrick decided the concept wouldn’t work.

“ ‘What am I going to do with the upper level? It’s too costly to fill with extras,’ he told me,” Adam recalls.

After calming himself down in the gardens of Shepperton Studios, Adam began his second attempt, a single-level room with a circular table under a claustrophobic tent of military maps. Kubrick was pleased, with one addition: “Put green baize on the table. It’s like the president and his generals all taking part in a gigantic poker game.”

When “Strangelove” was over, Adam decided that for sanity’s sake, he would never work with Kubrick again. But his fondness for the man overwhelmed his practicality when the director asked him to design 1975’s “Barry Lyndon.”

Their second collaboration made “Dr. Strangelove” look blissful. Kubrick wanted an authentic period piece complete with interiors lighted only by candles. Shot on location, the film gave Adam no chance to work his studio magic.

“We were talking in wicks instead of watts. We had terrible arguments all the time,” Adam recalls. “We were so close by this time and he’s a very possessive individual, so I was working for him 16 hours a day. It eventually wore me out and I became quite ill. I had to leave the picture before it was finished. But I got a wonderful letter from him saying, ‘We did all the things you said and you were absolutely right’--probably in order to make me get better,” Adam says.

In the meantime, the Bond work continued, and as the number of films outgrew the number of Fleming stories, Adam’s designs became their true center. Villain lairs in extinct volcanoes and outlandish contraptions like killer hats were often created before screenplays were done.

Although Adam always intended to convince his audiences that they were watching a version of reality, even he was shocked when they fell for the Bond sets.

“I never thought they would believe that Ft. Knox [in “Goldfinger”] was real, with gold piled up 50 feet! But United Artists received something like 300 letters asking how the Bond crew had been allowed to film in Ft. Knox, when even the president is not allowed to enter,” Adam says.

Even more important to Adam than convincing the audience, however, is persuading the actors “to feel at home.” This emphasis on their comfort is one of the reasons Adam doesn’t worry about becoming obsolete in an era in which Kubrick could have filled that second tier of the War Room with virtual generals.

“The danger with computer-generated images is that the actors feel detached. Computers are an enormous help, but they’re still a tool that has to be programmed,” Adam says. “To re-create scenes in my latest film [“Taking Sides”] from 1945 Berlin, we used CGIs [computer-generated images] of what I remember, but first I had to tell the CGI boys what I wanted.”

Another aspect of filmmaking that has remained constant during Adam’s career is the abundance of egos that often makes collaboration difficult--particularly for the production designer whose loosely defined job has the potential to step on many toes.

“To be successful, you really have to put your ego in the background and try to be diplomatic to achieve what you want to achieve. With Kubrick and most film directors, they are in complete control, but,” Adam pauses with a smile, “one can influence them.”

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* “Dr Strangelove,” Sunday at 5 p.m. at the Directors Guild Theatre, 7920 Sunset Blvd., West L.A. A Q&A; session between Ken Adam and film society founder John Muto will follow. All film society screenings are open to the public. Call (818) 762-9995. Admission is free.