On a wintry weekend morning in 1976, two figures crept quietly around a vast soundstage at Pinewood Studios, trying to solve a puzzle. One was burly, bearded, intense, American. The other was dapper, with a faint German accent. The pair and their clandestine encounter might have come from the pages of a spy novel, which was apt since the puzzle they were trying to solve was in the service of James Bond.
For four hours, the visionary film director Stanley Kubrick and the brilliant set designer Ken Adam moved together through the 45,400 sq ft space, dominated by a 1,200,000-gallon water tank in which Adam had deposited three submarines. The set was intended to represent the interior of a supertanker, so gigantic that it could roam the oceans, swallowing other craft whole. The action would play out on walkways, bridges and ramps built around the tank, around which the soundstage itself had been constructed for the Roger Moore blockbuster The Spy Who Loved Me at the cost of what in today’s money would be £8.3m.
Adam remembered: “I had designed that enormous set, the interior of the supertanker which held three nuclear submarines. And Claude Renoir, the cinematographer… he was very nervous – he’d never had to light a set like that; it was so big.
“I knew that if I could provide all the source lighting it would help Claude enormously. I phoned up Stanley. I said, ‘Would you be prepared to come to Pinewood and help me light the supertanker set?’ ‘You must be crazy!’ came the reply. ‘I’m working on another film [The Shining]. If anyone sees me at Pinewood or if Claude finds out about it, there’ll be pandemonium.
“I said, ‘Stanley, I guarantee you that there will be no one on the set. You’ll come in on a Sunday morning. I have the key to the soundstage. There’ll be only you and me.’ He came in his Mercedes. He set all the source lighting himself. To do all that in four hours and with the fear of being discovered… that’s friendship.”
Both men would have appreciated the challenge, the tension, the drama. But there was one more compelling plot point about this most cinematic of moments. When they had last worked together, Kubrick had driven Adam into a breakdown.
Had production design never featured in Klaus Hugo George Fritz Adam’s life, his would still have been an existence worthy of commemoration. Born in Berlin into a well-to-do Jewish family, Adam would follow his Iron Cross-winning father Fritz into the armed service; the only difference being that, when the son took to the air, he was fighting for the other side. The Adams had left Berlin for London when Hitler’s rise became irresistible, and young Klaus was renamed Ken.
Enlisting in the RAF, he secured a unique place in history, as Moore explained: “Ken was the only German citizen to fly fighter planes for the Allies. This makes him incredibly brave for lots of reasons, not least the fact that, had he been shot down over Germany, he would have been shot for treason as he was still a German national.”
Adam’s RAF instructors included future movie star Michael Rennie (The Day the Earth Stood Still), and he fell in with actor John Garfield while doing more pilot training in Florida. But his wartime heroism was also the stuff of cinema. Nicknamed “Heinie the tank-buster” by colleagues, Adam flew his Hawker Typhoon in support of ground troops on D-day and long-range US bombing missions over his homeland.
Demobilised and naturalised in 1947, family contacts eased Adam into a direction he had dreamed about since seeing The Cabinet of Dr Caligari as a Berlin schoolboy – the film industry.
Adam began to attract attention for his set drawings, made with a Flowmaster pen that allowed him to show how lighting would flow on to the action. He had a hit as production designer on Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957), and then came his big break.
Not that a gig on a spy picture called Dr No was the most attractive of offers. As Ken remembers, “I felt I needed to work in England pretty soon, lest I be forgotten. When I said ‘Yes’ to Dr No, I thought I was prostituting myself.”
With its realistic laboratories and nuclear water reactor, Adam set the production design standard for 007. He’d also caught the eye of an American film-maker now resident in the UK who wanted to make his own nuclear picture. “Stanley Kubrick was fascinated by my wartime record,” explained Adam of his time on Dr Strangelove. “I was a fighter pilot, he was a frustrated pilot, and we immediately hit it off. When Stanley saw my earliest designs for the War Room, he was delighted – ‘You’ve got it!’ Then, about a month later, we were driving to or from Shepperton, and it turned out he didn’t like it all. I was really thrown.”
Adam’s reimagined War Room is a design classic, so iconic that when he won the US presidency, Ronald Reagan demanded to see the room and had to be convinced that it did not actually exist. But because of Kubrick’s legendary perfectionism, it was designed on the anxiety medicine Valium.
“We were too close,” he said. “It was like a marriage. He was unbelievably possessive and very difficult to work with because he knew every other part of film-making, 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.”
Tempted back to work with Kubrick again on 1975’s Barry Lyndon, Adam ended up in a clinic. He remembered: “When I finally came home, 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.”
Adam won an Oscar for Barry Lyndon, but his greatest achievement is defining the look of Bond. His sets could be as sleek and mysterious as Connery, as suave and playful as Moore. Like Kubrick, his gift was to imagine and then realise the unimaginable, the unrealisable – places you could never go, places that could not really exist.
Goldfinger’s Fort Knox, Thunderball’s Disco Volante, You Only Live Twice’s hollowed-out volcano launch pad – all these and more leapt from Adam’s brain. He worked with class and distinction elsewhere too, winning a second Oscar for The Madness of King George in 1994. A knighthood followed in 2003.
Though the pair remained friendly, he never worked with Kubrick again and a few years before his death, he let an interviewer have a taste of why. Showing off a model of the Hawker Typhoon in which he had once soared and battled for his life, Adam picked up an old letter from Kubrick which sat next to it.
He read it aloud: “‘Ken, the fact that you have become a ‘star’ should not cause you to act like one.’” Adam laughed: “Believe me, that was nothing! You should read the rest of it!”
But the bonds of genius, of daring, of pushing each other to and beyond the limit were too strong to part Stanley Kubrick and Ken Adam – and will unite them for ever.
