Sir Ken Adam comes to the door of his home sounding more Blofeld than Bond: he has a marked German accent. Now 85, he grew up in Berlin, but served in the second world war as an RAF pilot. His Typhoon squadron was made up of fellow Europeans, but he was the only German Jew. He regularly flew over enemy territory, in itself exceptionally brave – if captured he would have been sent not to Colditz but to Auschwitz.
Adam wheezes slightly, talks grumpily of an impending doctor’s appointment, but refuses to give up the Havanas. He takes a seat in the front room of his house, which for decades he has used as a studio. With its Anglepoise lamps and minimalist leather furniture, it is the room of a working draughtsman. There is not a computer in sight. "Design is design," he says, "I never use computers."
"Brand Bond" continues to go from strength to strength under the watchful eye of the indomitable Barbara Broccoli, daughter of the original Bond producer, the late Cubby Broccoli. Casino Royale, the 22nd Bond film, is due out on November 16.
Art direction has been crucial from the very beginning. To a cinema audience emerging from post-war austerity and casting off the gloomy shackles of the kitchen-sink dramas, the Bond films offered fantastic escapism, not least through the remarkable sets and gadgets created by Adam. The look of the films, which reflected Adam’s training and roots in modernism, helped to define Bond as we came to know him. Without such memorable sets as Dr No’s lair in Jamaica or the rocket-swallowing volcano in You Only Live Twice, the Bond franchise might have disappeared into an anonymous archive labelled "1960s action movies".
He was born Klaus Adam to an upper-middle-class family in Berlin in 1921; his father was the owner of a fashionable department store, S Adam, that had been in his family for several generations. The family approached Mies van der Rohe to produce designs for an updated store in the Bauhaus style, but the war intervened. In 1934 the family were forced to flee to England, where Adam was sent to St Paul’s school, London, and then to London University, where he studied architecture.
From the RAF, he went into the film business as a junior draughtsman, eventually winning two Oscars for art direction for Barry Lyndon and The Madness of King George. Adam has also worked on Dr Strangelove, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Last Emperor. But he talks most enthusiastically of his work for the early Bond films – hinting at the ground-breaking scope of the designs, quite unlike anything that had come before. And the film of which he is most proud is the first Bond, Dr No.
The villain’s lair is a mixture of kitsch and high-tech, with a huge fireplace at its centre giving off a glow that would warm the heart of any visiting psychopath. "I’m most happy with Dr No," he says, "because I went away from the traditional way of designing sets and designed using imagination and a tongue-in-cheek interpretation that caught on, the budget was under a million dollars, and we made it all at Pinewood." In the early 1960s, production costs of $1m might have seemed large, but they were soon dwarfed by the ever-escalating budgets of subsequent films in the series.
By the third Bond outing, Goldfinger, Adam was well into his stride – and his bosses’ production budgets. His designs had become all the more spectacular, the money he had to play with ever more elastic. He dreamt up Bond’s gadget-laden Aston Martin DB6 – the machineguns mounted on the bumper came from a fantasy he had of dispatching motorists who bashed into his beloved E-Type. It was also Adam’s vision of Fort Knox that formed the backdrop for the film’s spectacular ending, which culminates in Oddjob’s death by electrocution from his bowler hat.
Forty-two years on, it is Adam’s imagined Fort Knox that most Americans envisage whenever the Federal Gold Reserve is mentioned on TV or radio – for security reasons, no official pictures of the inside of Fort Knox exist. Adam’s eve-of-Armageddon design for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove also went on to have a subsequent resonance – when Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the president, he asked an aide: "Where’s the war room?" There isn’t one.
Adam’s sets for You Only Live Twice, the fifth Bond film, were even more memorable. The script marked the first significant departure from a Fleming plot, and as a result Adam was given a much wider canvas. His minimalist sets for Osato’s office in Tokyo were hugely influential. He worked with stainless steel, slate and other industrial finishes 40 years before they became fashionable.
With his generous Bond budget, Adam was also able to create more striking set pieces. "We covered Japan in a helicopter, but found nothing that Fleming had talked about. With a week to go, we flew over an area full of volcanoes, and that triggered off the whole concept," he says of the film in which lost Soviet and US spacecraft are eventually traced to the inside of a volcano. "We built the volcano at Pinewood. It was a big gamble – the first time a set cost over a million dollars. I went crazy on that with the false perspective and the lake – it was 460ft in diameter, the biggest set they ever built. Even the monorail worked."
Working gadgets were a hallmark of the Adam Bonds, up until his last, Moonraker, in 1979. "Nowadays, special effects are computer-generated and the films suffer as a result – they’ve lost their believability. It was always Cubby’s policy that we cheated the audience as little as possible. So the jet-pack in Thunderball is a jet-pack invented by the American army that actually existed. Bloody dangerous, I can tell you. All of those things, within limitations, we did for real."
Filmography
•Around the World in Eighty Days 1956
•Dr No 1962
•Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 1964
•Goldfinger 1964
•The Ipcress File 1965
•Thunderball 1965
•Funeral in Berlin 1966
•You Only Live Twice 1967
•Chitty Chitty Bang Bang 1968
•Goodbye Mr Chips 1969
•On Her Majesty’s Secret Service 1969
•Diamonds Are Forever 1971
•Sleuth 1972
•Barry Lyndon 1975
•The Spy Who Loved Me 1977
•Moonraker 1979
•The Last Emperor 1987
•The Madness of King George 1994
