Making a spectacle of Bond

Ken Adam mixed the modern and the antique to create the look for cinematic classics, and define a decade. He talks to Donald Clarke

Strolling up the elegant Knightsbridge street where Ken Adam, the world's most celebrated cinema production designer, has lived for the past 50 years or so, I spy a white Rolls Royce Silver Cloud. This must be the place. Sir Ken, reassuringly sprightly at 84 years old, meets me at the door and leads me into a small, bright, studio. Two Oscars sit to the right of the drawing board. Elsewhere the document acknowledging his OBE - citation? decree? - displays the Queen's signature. These honours aside, the room where large parts of the 1960s were dreamt up is a humble enough business. An alarmingly fat cat sleeps on a chair. Ken's Italian-born wife, Letizia, frail, though still feisty, potters around.

"Ah, you talk!" she says to him in a faintly accusatory tone.

Explaining that he is allowed to talk during interviews, Adam persuades her to shuffle back towards the kitchen.

Our meeting has been prompted by the publication of a fascinating new book of conversations between Adam and Christopher Frayling, professor at the Royal College of Art and chairman of the English Arts Council.

As Letizia points out, Ken does know how to talk. In Ken Adam: The Art of Production Design, the two men muse at length upon a career which saw Adam design the visuals for Dr Strangelove, Barry Lyndon, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Ipcress File and, most famously, the greatest of the James Bond films. The combination of stark modernist lines with hints of the antique that he devised for Dr No and Goldfinger was as influential during the swinging decade as were the clothes of Biba or the furniture of Habitat.

Years later, the architect Norman Foster confessed he had Adam's sets in mind when he designed the grand Underground stations on the Jubilee Line extension. Was Sir Ken aware that he helped define a decade? "I think one was aware of that," he says. "It really was like a revolution in England at that time. It was a complete renaissance. I could only compare it with what happened in Berlin between the two wars when the arts flourished and cabaret took off. I was very conscious on Dr No that I wanted to express that new electronic age. I wanted to do away with the old methods and introduce new technologies."

The most memorable sets from the Bond films were the huge lairs within which the villains plotted global domination. Pondering Adam's upbringing in Germany, many critics have insisted on finding allusions to the Nazis in these constructions. Klaus Hugo Adam was born in Berlin to a middle-class Jewish family in 1921. His father, the owner of a sporting-goods store, was a furious optimist and continued to believe he would be able to remain in business until as late as 1933. Adam maintains that his dad, who died at 56, never quite regained his self-belief after the family fled to Britain the following year.

So are all these Teutonic lunatics with their Persian cats and their underwater bases versions of Hitler? "No. I think that is just neat story for critics," he says. "I have thought back about it and, yes, I was without any doubt influenced by German expressionism and the Bauhaus. But those megalomaniacs I did much bigger than life. I did it tongue in cheek - always with a sense of humour. Whereas I could never have designed films set in the Nazi period that way. I don't think it created a big influence on me. Really, I would like to think that I am an instinctive designer. I use reinforced concrete. I put modern surfaces with antique furniture. I just instinctively came up with that style and it worked."

One of the few German-born fighter pilots in the RAF, Ken Adam had a very good war. Though he had begun training at an architect's office before hostilities broke out, he always longed to move into cinema. His break came when his sister, then working in public relations at the United States embassy, met a movie property buyer scouting for bits of Americana and persuaded him to secure her brother a job as a draughtsman. By 1950 he had become an art director and found himself working on productions as forbidding as Raoul Walsh's Captain Horatio Hornblower and Mike Todd's lavish Around the World in Eighty Days.

When, in 1957, he made Jacques Tourneur's classic horror film Night of the Demon, he was credited as production designer. The term was little used then and is still not well understood by the cinema-going public. "Yes. We have never much been in the limelight. Our work is to translate a script into visual terms, to find a visual reality for the film. I wanted to be a production designer when nobody else was; it gave me the opportunity to work really closely with the cameraman and the director and the producer. Some people call the production designer the eye of the director, but I think that is a little pretentious."

As the 1960s swung on and Adam's renown grew, he began to exert a greater influence on productions than his job title might suggest. Many of the gadgets that appeared in the early Bond films were his idea. He was, for example, closely involved in decking out the Aston Martin in Goldfinger with its various weapons. "I had an E-Type Jaguar at the time and there were a lot of problems with it, so I worked out all my frustrations by designing this Aston Martin. But it is very difficult to say whose idea was whose. We were very democratic in those days."

One of the great attractions of the Bond films was the way they cast a profoundly old-fashioned government hood - drinking Dom Perignon above 38 degrees Fahrenheit was, according to 007, "just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs" - adrift in a thrillingly modern environment. Adam's combination of modernism and tradition reflected that contrast nicely. Was he conscious that, with such visual flourishes, he was helping lighten the tone of Ian Fleming's coolly sadistic novels? "I didn't read them really," he chuckles. "I read about 100 pages of Dr No and I was faintly horrified by it. It was so bad my wife said: 'You are prostituting yourself here.' "

But the design, the ambience and the style of the films were all as significant as the plots. "Yes. I think so. It was about finding the most exotic locations. Normally the script is the most important element, but with Bond it gradually became about finding the biggest spectacle."

Though questions about the Bond films follow him around, Adam maintains that his design for the war room in Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove (1964) - the best film set ever, according to Steven Spielberg - is the work of which he is most proud. A huge construction, consisting of a round table tucked beneath a slanting wall of illuminated maps, the set nicely illustrates Adam's commitment to suggesting reality rather than recreating it.

"I was very good friends with Stanley," he says. "But when I first met him I thought him rather naive - but with a brilliant brain ticking behind. He was not a designer, but he knew every technical job: editing, sound, photography. Nobody could say: 'This couldn't be done.' They would have been fired immediately. He questioned everything and you had to come up with explanation for your ideas. That was difficult, because I was an instinctive designer. Sometimes he would help you out with that though: I came up with this triangle design for the war room and he pointed out the triangle was the strongest geometric shape. It was just an accident really."

Kubrick's notoriously obsessive behaviour made life obscenely difficult for Adam. Later, after turning down an offer to design 2001: A Space Odyssey, he swore he would never again work with the director. But he was somehow lured back in 1975 for Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, much of which was shot in Ireland. Adam's work on the picture subsequently secured him his first Oscar (the other was for The Madness of King George in 1994), but the experience was by far the most traumatic of his career. In thebook he suggests the unusual demands of the shoot - filming solely by candlelight; seeking to replicate images from various 18th-century paintings - eventually induced a severe nervous breakdown.

"Oh yes, a terrible breakdown," he says. "We were working these incredibly long hours. And there was the closeness to Stanley, who was so completely disorganised. We didn't have a script as such. He had just Xeroxed pages from Thackeray's novel and then discovered that didn't work; I could have told him that at the beginning. We were chasing around all day looking for a location and then shooting all night. If a scene didn't work it was, of course, the fault of the location. I took all Stanley's problems on my shoulders and ended up apologising for things that were nothing to do with me."

Working on films such as Tinto Brass's Nazi romp Salon Kitty and Herbert Ross's Sherlock Holmes adventure The Seven-Per-Cent Solution helped Adam regain his confidence, and he settled back into a rhythm as cinema's most sought-after designer. Sadly, his last experience in Hollywood - on the dodgy 1999 remake of The Out-of-Towners - was not a happy one, and he now accepts that the grand projects he used to design will in future mostly be rendered on computers.

Adam has, however, no plans to retire - "my wife won't let me" - and, eager to stay busy, has recently ventured into new fields. He just finished working with Electronic Arts on Goldeneye: Rogue Agent, a James Bond video game. "I am still something of a minimalist and that is how I designed it. I forgot that the game-boys need all these places to hide and shoot from," he sighs.

More significantly, in 1998 he was approached by the curator of the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin and asked to design the core of that museum's millennium exhibition. That must have been an emotional experience. "I had been there often before, of course. But now here I was receiving this enormous adoration. Suddenly I am the big hero after being kicked out as a boy. That was important."

So is a little bit of him still German? Sir Ken Adam OBE frowns slightly as he contemplates this. "Oh no, I don't think so. I mean have you been watching the cricket this summer?" Outside, the Rolls Royce Silver Cloud gleams in the autumn sun.

Ken Adam: The Art of Production Design is published by Faber & Faber at £20