Ken Adam on designing for Bond and Kubrick

Adam, you see, who turned 90 in February, and who is about to be fêted with a Bafta tribute, is modest to a fault. In person he is an inveterate chuckler, still speaks with the guttural German inflections of his childhood and sits attentively on a stiff-backed chair in the study of his Knightsbridge home, surrounded by books and notepads, a plethora of awards and two Oscar statuettes, both of which stand humbly askew on a pile of documents. He has lived here since 1959, with his Italian wife, Letizia (they married in 1952), who breezes by, cigarette in hand, and calls him, “dalling!” He, in turn, calls her “Lady Adam”.

He speaks about movies without a hint of self-importance. Even though, as one of the industry’s pre-eminent production designers (the job fundamentally entails liaising with directors at the earliest possible stages and conjuring complete visual worlds out of brief sketches and conversations), he was responsible for everything from the Bond movies’ eye-popping lairs down to their souped-up Aston Martins (Goldfinger) and underwater Lotus Esprit (The Spy Who Loved Me). In Dr. Strangelove it was the infamous round-table War Room that made his name. And in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang it was the car, the castle, the airships and even the windmill of Caractacus Potts (Dick Van Dyke). His work alone makes a mockery of the industry-wide belief in the director as the pivotal creative force on every movie project. And yet Adam, typically, never yearned for greater credit.

“I never felt disgruntled,” he says. “If the work was photographed well, and helped the movie, I was happy. And the directors I worked with generally liked what I did. My only battle was on Goldfinger. When I planned the Fort Knox set as a cathedral of gold, 50ft high, with gates and arches, [the producers] Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman saw the designs and said, ‘What the f*** are you doing? It looks like a bloody prison!’ But in the end I won the battle, and after that nobody questioned me.”

His anecdotes, naturally, from 60 years in the business, come thick and fast, and are certainly star filled. Of Marlon Brando, for instance, he remembers the actor’s eccentric working methods on The Freshman, one of Adam’s later projects. “He used to have a girl next door on a microphone, reading all his lines, which he could then pick up in an earpiece. But even when he was doing that, he was still fantastic. He had a presence which I found incredible.” And he remembers arguing with Stanley Kubrick about the director’s over-use of Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove. “Stanley had cast him as the president, as Dr Strangelove, as the RAF squadron leader and the bomber pilot. He said, ‘I think Peter Sellers is the greatest actor alive!’ Well, we strongly disagreed on that, and eventually even Peter admitted that he couldn’t do the bomber pilot role, which went to Slim Pickens.” And there’s Kubrick again, a veritable recluse in 1974, refusing to come out of his home to work with Adam on Barry Lyndon. “He had received these terrifying threatening letters after A Clockwork Orange. He only showed them to me, not even to his family. And he said to me, ‘Have you got a gun?’ I said, ‘No’. He said, ‘But, oh my God, if someone wants to assassinate me, they really have the advantage!’ And I said, ‘Yes, Stanley, they do! Ha-ha-ha!’ ”

And yet there is darkness, too, in the many recollections. Adam admits, for instance, that he was on tranquillisers while working on You Only Live Twice. Back then, in 1964, in order to build the infamous crater lake set (130ft high with a diameter of 440ft) he was handed $1 million by Broccoli (a phenomenal sum at the time). “And that’s when the worries started,” he says. “If the slightest thing went wrong. You know? We had to have a full-size helicopter go through the crater. Plus we had so many stuntmen abseiling down from a roof that was 130ft high. So, I had anxiety problems.” It was even worse, a decade later, on Barry Lyndon, dealing with a reclusive director and endless night shoots that could only be lit, on Kubrick’s orders, by candlelight. “We spent the whole time talking about candle power,” he recalls. “I had to get double-wick, treble-wick, quadruple-wick candles. Kubrick was being impossible, in many ways. Shooting in England, then going over to Ireland and changing everything again. I’m laughing about it now, but at the time it was terrible. They gave me an Oscar for it, but it nearly cost me my life. The Oscar didn’t make a difference.”

He gives another phlegmatic chuckle, one that speaks of someone who has a greater perspective on the totality of life. And, undoubtedly, Adam’s formative experiences were far more punishing than any creative Hollywood hissy fit. His childhood in Berlin, as one of four children born to a successful Jewish sports shop owner, was blissful. He went to the best schools, his parents threw lavish three-day parties for the Weimar jeunesse dorée (his father, Fritz, knew everyone, from the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen to the American film star Jackie Coogan), and they owned a country house by the Baltic. At the latter retreat the ten-year-old Klaus Adam would play with the village boys every year. “And then, suddenly, some of them became less friendly, and I heard one saying, ‘Bloody Jew!’ I had no idea what they were talking about.”

Adam’s father was arrested one afternoon late in 1933. He was held for two days until, bizarrely, one of his own sports store department heads, who had recently become an SS-Obersturmführer, intervened on his behalf. “But my father saw the red light, and knew it was time to go,” says Adam, with the same resigned shrug. The family moved to England in 1934, with the help of a distant English cousin, but Fritz Adam was a broken man, and died of a heart attack two years later. Klaus Adam’s mother, Lilli, took charge of a boarding house in Hampstead, which was regularly packed with refugees, often Jewish intelligentsia, including professors, psychiatrists and architects — “Listening to the conversations around that table was an incredible education,” he says.

Adam, now the seemingly assimilated Ken Adam, studied architecture on the advice of his boarding-house contact and mentor Vincent Korda (younger brother of the British film industry bigwig Sir Alexander Korda). And yet he wanted more. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined a British Army unit created specifically for refugees, and was eventually accepted into the RAF (becoming the first RAF pilot to hold a German passport). He flew speedy Typhoon fighters, which was, he says, “exciting and terrifying at the same time”, but crucially allowed him to feel “like I was able to do something, as opposed to some people of my family who were gassed or killed in concentration camps”.

He races through a plethora of ebullient Boy’s Own anecdotes about his Typhoon days (classic line: “Pull up too slow and you get hit by your own explosion; pull up too quickly and the engine stalls, and you head straight for the ground!”), but he grinds to a halt with difficult memories of the 1944 Allied victory (or “massacre”) at Falaise. There, after being driven through the corpse-strewn killing fields, he was asked to bring a German officer’s car, minus its freshly killed occupants, back to base. “There was such a smell,” he says, miming a gagging motion. “I tried to clean it with every form of disinfectant, but I never got the smell out of it.”

After the war Adam snapped up a chance job as a draughtsman on the 1948 movie This Was a Woman (his sister introduced him to the art director), met his future wife, Letizia, while filming The Crimson Pirate with Burt Lancaster, and had ultimately begun a career that quickly segued into a high-profile world of Dr. No, James Bond and the grandest production design projects that Hollywood could offer.

He talks, of course, of being lucky, and of being in the right place at the right time. But there is also a sense in Adam’s work, in his best work (think of the War Room in Dr. Strangelove, or SPECTRE’s looming headquarters in Thunderball), of stunning self-expression. Can we not see in all these immense structural lairs and monstrous geometric caves the fear of anti-human authority gone mad? If you had fled the Nazis for your life, wouldn’t you do Cold War paranoia to perfection? “Oh, I’ve heard that argument before and I really don’t believe it,” he says, shaking his head dismissively. “Because I always did the Bond work with tongue in cheek. Maybe I was trying to satirise these ghastly people like Goering or Goebbels, but it was always tongue-in-cheek.” But could it have been possible that beneath the fun, and the cheeky tone, there was something serious going on? He pauses, and sighs, and answers (more to close the avenue of inquiry, you suspect, than to reach for the truth): “Yes, I think one can say that.”

He continues at length, about his instinctive methods (he could often doodle crucial designs while on the phone), about the secrets to his long-lasting marriage (he doesn’t have any) and about how modern computer-generated backgrounds can never replace the earthy reality of a lived-in film set. He tries, looking back, to pinpoint the highlight of his entire career, but there isn’t one. Although, he admits, the Strangelove War Room is indeed one of his best. He begins to reflect on his Bond work and to answer, once more, the vexing question of whether he really was the star of the Bond franchise, when he stops himself mid-flow and announces, slowly and clearly: “I actually think that the most important thing is when you’re happy on a film. Because when everybody is working together, and there is no friction or no fear, then, as a rule, you make a good film. Be happy in work. That’s the answer.”

The Bafta Tribute to Sir Ken Adam, including a belated celebration of his 90th birthday, takes place at 6.30pm on Monday in the Jarvis Hall at the Royal Institute of British Architects, W1. Tickets from bafta.org