Behind the scenes with 007`s grand designer Sir Ken Adam

From Dr Strangelove to Dr No, Ken Adam has set the standard for providing lairs for megalomaniacs, writes Karin Goodwin in the Sunday Times.

A vast concrete bunker, its shiny black floor throwing up sinister reflections and a ring of lights illuminating the powerful politicians gathered at the huge circular table below. This spellbinding setting convinced film buffs the world over that the war room in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove really did exist.

But it was all a fake, the contrivance of Ken Adam, who worked out every last detail. Kubrick was “the most demanding director ever”, Adam reflects, on the eve of his address to the Edinburgh International Film Festival. But the result of the pair’s collaboration was a spectacular success.

At 84, Adam has never slipped into the category of household name. Yet with more than 70 big film credits under his belt, including the production design of seven Bond films, Kubrick’s period piece Barry Lyndon, the award-winning The Madness of King George, and even Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, those unfamiliar with any of his work are few and far between.

The people who relied on Adam’s set wizardry read like a film industry’s Who’s Who — from Sean Connery, via the Bond producer Cubby Broccoli, to the Last Tango director Bernardo Bertolucci, the writer Dennis Potter and the period duo Merchant Ivory. In his heyday Adam confesses: “I believed I could design anything in the world.”

But it was a 1959 meeting with Broccoli that changed his life. Adam was made production designer on Dr No, the first of the Bond films. The sensational success of the film convinced its backers that they were on to a winner.

“Gradually we relied on the Fleming scripts less and less and concentrated on creating the spectacle,” he says. With Broccoli and co-producer Harry Saltzman, Adam flew round the world, searching out locations, which became his inspiration for ever more adventurous sets. “In You Only Live Twice we were lucky to find a volcanic area in Japan that I thought was really interesting, then it meant my designing the interior of a volcanic crater,” he explains.

“Where does one begin to look for inspiration for a volcano crater? I knew the interior was going to be very dull in reality so I just invented the most spectacular place possible.”

And yet he says, people believed in his sets. “That is what I consider to be my best achievement. I didn’t want to fool them for the sake of it, but create another reality for them.”

Born into an affluent German Jewish family, Adam experienced some of the horrors of Nazi rule. At school his maths teacher, who wore an SS uniform, sadistically punished him. The family’s business was boycotted, anti-Semitic slogans covered the windows, and his father was arrested and held for 48 hours. The family decided to flee Germany in 1933. After an unhappy period at a private school in Edinburgh, Adam settled with his family in London. After the war he took a post as a junior draughtsman in a film studio and rapidly progressed through the ranks, working on films including Around the World in 80 Days and The Trials of Oscar Wilde.

But it is his work on the Bond movies that is best known. The gadgets, the ballpoint pen that doubled as a gun, the radio transmitter watch, were all part of Adam’s vision.

“We started Bond in 1960/61 and the whole country was undergoing this amazing period of change, a renaissance,” he recalls. “All sorts of people started expressing themselves — Mary Quant, the Beatles — it was a kind of revolution.”

These days critics claim the Bond films suffer from an overemphasis on special effects and a loss of the quintessential Bond magic. To Adam the problem is simple: there is too much reliance on computer- generated imagery (CGI).

“It’s a great tool, but if it’s used too much you lose the effect,” he explains. “Actors rely on the atmosphere of the settings to give their best performance — they need it there. With CGI they are standing in front of a screen and have no atmosphere so the technique is affected.”

It could sound like the griping of an old man. But when you consider that last year Adam designed the computer game GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, his complaint cannot be so easy dismissed.

“They were all youngsters and I found that very stimulating. I said, ‘I’m a dinosaur’. They said, ‘No, we want you’, and so that was great.”

Sir Ken Adam is scheduled to appear at the Thunderball 40th Anniversary Screening on November 20th 2005 in London, UK. Click here for full details.

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