Introducing Ken Adam, Kubrick’s confidante, 007’s creative mastermind, and possibly the biggest movie star you’ve never heard of...

Next month, James Bond will swagger into our lives for the 22nd time in Quantum of Solace. This time around, old blue eyes will be pitched against an eco-warrior gone bad; a man hell bent on controlling Bolivia’s water supply at any cost. Audiences, it seems, have become too clued up to believe in the Bond villains of yore, those cat-stroking loons who, instead of just going to a desert to launch a nuclear warhead, felt the need to hollow out entire volcanoes and ocean lagoons. But for all the people wrapped up in Daniel Craig’s CGI enhanced short shorts, there are millions who would secretly prefer a return to the halcyon days of jet packs, ejector seats, suitcase helicopters and underwater sports cars. One of them is Sir Kenneth Adam, the iconic production designer who single-handedly created the visual aesthetic for seven Bond films, two Kubrick masterpieces and over 75 movies, from the Ipcress Files to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Holding court in the study of his palatial Knightsbridge town house, Ken, as he prefers to be called, has lived a life most people can only dreamof.

“That was the plane I flew in the war,” he says, pointing to a model plane sitting in the corner of the room. “A Hawker Typhoon. But that was long before your time.”

Situated just a few feet away from his OBE, a couple of honorary doctorships and two Oscars, the tiny toy symbolises the start of one of Hollywood’s most amazing, yet comparatively underreported, journeys.

Born Klaus Hugo Adam in Berlin in 1921, Ken had an early affinity with model making and design, spending hours sketching sports cars, planes, and buildings. After his Jewish family fled Nazi persecution in 1934, Ken went to school in Edinburgh and London, eventually studying architecture at UCL’s prestigious Bartlett School.

“As a teenager I was never quite sure whether I wanted to be a theatrical designer or a film designer,” he states with a still noticeable German twang to his English accent. “I always knew I wanted to be one of them, particularly after watching The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. That film was so imaginative. It made me want to incoporate theatrics in actual film design.”

However, before he got his first movie job, he signed up as a pilot in the RAF, earning the distinction of being the only German national to fight for the allied forces. Some critics have pointed to his war years as being the inspiration for some of Bond’s darkest death traps - concentration camps manifested as stylised tropical subterranean lairs run by crackpot tyrants. Ken, however, is ambivalent about the comparison.

“My work on Bond had nothing to do with my past, in relation to Germany and the Second World War. I always did things tongue and cheek. I never took it very seriously and I think that was very important, certainly on the Bond films.”

“I had a 19 year old assistant called Chris Blackwell,” Ken recalls, folding his arms onto his belly. “We used to water ski a lot in Kingston harbour, which was foolish in those days because it was full of sharks. One lunchtime we had been drinking quite a lot and I decided to go waterskiing. And would you believe it, the towrope snapped! I had seen a white shark a few minutes before it happened and now I was just floating there! Chris circled around and picked me up before I cold get eaten, thankfully. He really wanted to be in film, but I said ‘Chris, you are so musical, you know every jazz group on the island, follow that.’ We were great friends but we drifted apart after he set up Island Records. But, you know, it’s understandable, he became a billionaire.”

After his shark experience, Ken flew back to London and filled up three sound stages with a nuclear reactor, a tarantula room and Dr No’s sleek apartment, which was offset by artwork from the Old Masters. He then waited nervously for producers Cubby Broccoli and Terence Young to come back from Jamaica and pass judgement. They loved his futuristic vision and two years later asked him to re-create Fort Knox for Goldfinger. In typical grandiose style he created a monument to gold, reasoning that bank vaults were too boring for an audience to look at.

“I sketched something that resembled a prison. It was 40 foot high and full of grills with the gold situated behind them. None of the producers liked it, but I convinced them that the audience wanted to be in the position of Bond – looking at this gold from outside the bars. They finally agreed. That was the last time, certainly on a Bond film, that I had a problem convincing anyone of my ideas because they became less and less about the books, and more and more about the visual look.”

In-between Dr No and Goldfinger, Ken was hired by Stanley Kubrick to work on his cold war satire, Dr Strangelove. It was the start of an intense working relationship that would eventually win Ken an Oscar, but also set in motion events that would lead to a nervous breakdown.

He sketched out an idea for the film’s centrepiece – a split-level war room. Kubrick liked it at first but scrapped it after wondering what he would do with the second level. Ken then drew an imposing triangular design, with the director standing behind him commenting on every stroke.

“We were too close. It was like a marriage. He was unbelievably possessive and very difficult to work with because he knew every other part of filmmaking, but not design. He was suspicious and I had to intellectually justify every line I drew. That can be so destroying to deal with day after day.”

Eventually they came to an understanding, and Ken constructed the iconic set at Shepperton studios. Angular, dark, imposing and highly stylised, the War Room’s only source of light was a gigantic suspended ring of light above a huge conference table.

“Years later President Reagan asked his chief of staff to show him the War Room that he had seen in Dr Strangelove,” Ken chuckles. “He actually thought it was a real place!”

Even though the film was shot in black and white, the table was covered with green poker table felt, so the actors would feel like they were bluffing for the future of humanity. The mind games carried on behind the camera.

“I put a chess set on the War Room set because Kubrick said to me, ‘I’ve got to beat George C Scott every day so he’ll eat out of my hands’. He loved being in control. I used to drive him to the set and back again every day, at a top speed of 30mph because he was scared to go any faster. He was fascinated with my war experience and we talked about doing a film about fighter pilots in the First World War. We got to know each other pretty well and compared to most people I found him quite easy to take because I could argue my point. That changed eventually.”

In the months and years after Dr Strangelove, Ken made sets for The Ipcress File, Sleuth and fused together a Royles Royce and a Bugatti chassis to create Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s famous flying hovercraft car – or as Ken now refers to it, “That bloody car!” But all of these were small potatoes compared to his massive nuclear missile volcano set for You Only Live Twice.

“I could have built a model,” he ponders. “But then we couldn’t have flown a real helicopter into it or had 200 stuntmen abseil from the roof. It took three months to build, stood 120 feet tall and used 700 tonnes of steel. I did feel sorry for the men who had to hang up there in the middle of the night and make the fibreglass roof though. One night I drove out to Pinewood at midnight and gave them two bottles of brandy to keep them happy. They didn’t really mind, because something like that had never been done before.”

By the early 70s, Ken’s imagination had made him Hollywood’s most celebrated production designer, and in 1975 he got another call from Mr Kubrick who was preparing to come out of hiding after the fallout from Clockwork Orange. He wanted re-tell Barry Lyndon, Thackeray’s candle lit ode to the regency period. Ken reluctantly agreed. He had happily passed on the opportunity to work on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“Stanley had got very nasty menacing letters from people threatening his life, so when we were preparing for Barry he wouldn’t move out of his house for 5 or 6 months. I said ‘how can you make a film on location when you don’t go out?’ So he employed an army of young photographers to take pictures of stately homes. But you couldn’t say anything about his paranoia to anyone otherwise he would be on the phone the next day. He controlled everything you said in the press and on set.”

Physically exhausted, Ken had a nervous breakdown, and Kubrick fired everyone on set for six weeks to re-think the film’s strategy.

“It wasn’t normal pressure, I can cope with normal pressure,” he says, with a gutsy laugh. “I had to go into a clinic. Stanley was more worried than I was, but I was beyond worrying really. He rang everyday but wasn’t able to talk to me because my psychiatrist wanted to cut this umbilical chord between us. Which he never managed to do actually. When I finally came back to this house, he rang up and asked me if I wanted to direct a scene over in Germany. The moment I heard that I was back in the clinic. Crazy.”

“It was ironic,” he says seriously. “But nothing is worth that recognition if you lose your life. It was that serious.”

After Barry Lyndon, Ken went on to work on two more huge Bonds – Moonraker, and The Spy Who Loved Me, for which he designed the world’s biggest movie set – a nuclear submarine-docking bay. It was such a big national achievement the set was officially opened by the Prime Minister (“I have no idea why!” Ken splutters).

In 1993 he designed a gothic mansion for Addams Family Values, and a year later won his second Oscar for The Madness of King George. The film’s aesthetic was based on his pre-Kubrick ideas for Barry Lyndon.

Now 87 years old, Ken fills his days sketching new ideas, swimming, chuffing back big cigars, and driving around town in the gleaming crème Royles Royce he’s owned since 1969. In a few weeks he’ll fly back to Berlin to pick up a lifetime achievement by the Raymond Loewy Foundation, and the 50,000 that comes along with it. It may not be as prestigious as the OBE he collected from the Queen in 2001, but it seems fitting that Sir Ken is finally getting formally recognised in the place where his extraordinary journey all began.

“I recently found this interesting letter from Stanley,” he says, before reading a piece of paper sat next to his model warplane. “Ken, The fact that you have become a ‘star’ should not cause you to act like one. That was nothing! You should read the rest of it!”

Ken Adams Designs the Movies is published by Thames & Hudson. Thamesandhudson.co.uk

© TIM NOAKES 2008