Sir Ken Adam discusses his favourite James Bond sets

The name's Adam, Ken Adam, and he created many of the most iconic sets for James Bond's screen adventures. He fills in Johnny Dee on some of the behind-the-scenes dramas - reports The Guardian.

The work of the film production designer is always overlooked when people discuss their favourite movies - the actors, directors and writers get all the attention and hoopla. If a film stars a dog it's likely to be paid more. The people who design the sets and choose the locations don't get fan mail or pestered for autographs in Morrisons and there are only a handful of books dedicated to their art. But there is one star in this field - Sir Ken Adam, a cigar-chomping 84-yearold gentleman whose career spans 65 films, a couple of coffee bars and an opera.

It is because of him that people believe criminal masterminds oper ate from the insides of dormant volcanos and travel between their sumptuously decorated lairs on chrome-plated monorails. It's his fault that we think gold bars are stacked in vast cathedral-tall warehouses and that secret agents escape capture by using jetpacks or ejector seats.

Despite the fact that he invented the war room in Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, sketched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and won an Oscar for The Madness Of King George, or even the fact that before he worked in film he led an incredible life that saw him flee Nazi Germany and become the RAF's only Jewish German pilot, Sir Ken Adam will always be the man who made James Bond. His sets for the seven Bond films he worked on (Dr No, Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker) are as iconic as the movies themselves and set the benchmark for every blockbuster. Sat in the front room of his house in Knightsbridge, London, surrounded by his original sketches, he lights a Cuban cigar and reveals his favourite Bond sets.

Fort Knox, Goldfinger

"No one was allowed in Fort Knox but because [producer] Cubby Broccoli had some good connections and the Kennedys loved Ian Fleming's books I was allowed to fly over it once. It was quite frightening - they had machine guns on the roof. I was also allowed to drive around the perimeter but if you got out of the car there was a loudspeaker warning you to keep away. There was not a chance of going in it, and I was delighted because I knew from going to the Bank of England vaults that gold isn't stacked very high and it's all underwhelming. It gave me the chance to show the biggest gold repository in the world as I imagined it, with gold going up to heaven. I came up with this cathederal-type design. I had a big job to persuade Cubby and the director Guy Hamilton at first. They said it looked like a **** prison but that was the idea. Then when Goldfinger was released people were asking why a British film unit had been allowed to shoot inside Fort Knox when even the American president was not allowed in it."

Dr No's apartment

"The budget for Dr No was under $1m for the whole picture. My budget was �14,500. I filled three stages at Pinewood full of sets while they were filming in Jamaica. It wasn't a real aquarium in Dr No's apartment. It was a disaster to tell you the truth because we had so little money. We decided to use a rear projection screen and get some stock footage of fish. What we didn't realise was because we didn't have much money the only stock footage they could buy was of goldfish-sized fish, so we had to blow up the size and put a line in the dialogue with Bond talking about the magnification. I didn't see any reason why Dr No shouldn't have good taste so we mixed contemporary furniture and antiques. We thought it would be fun for him to have some stolen art so we used Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington, which was still missing at the time. I got hold of a slide from the National Gallery - this was on the Friday, shooting began on the Monday - and I painted a Goya over the weekend. It was pretty good so they used it for publicity purposes but, just like the real one, it got stolen while it was on display."

The Disco Volante, Thunderball

"We had to use special effects but, unlike special effects today, they were real. The jet pack we used in Thunderball was real - it was invented for the United States army. Bloody dangerous, and it only lasted a couple of minutes. The ejector seat in the Aston Martin was real and Emilio Largo's boat, the Disco Volante, was real. You had power boats at that time but there were no good-sized yachts that were able to travel at 40 to 50 knots so it was quite a problem. But by combining a hydrofoil, which we bought in Puerto Rico for $10,000, and a catamaran, it at least looked like a big yacht. We combined the two hulls with a one-inch slip bolt and when they split it worked like a dream. We used lots of sharks for this movie. I'd rented a villa in the Bahamas with a salt-water pool which we filled with sharks and used for underwater filming. The smell was horrendous. This was where Sean Connery came close to being bitten. We had a plexiglass corridor to protect him but I didn't have quite enough plexiglass and one of the sharks got through. He never got out of a pool faster in his life - he was walking on water. But I was more concerned with the woman who owned the villa. She was inclined to drink too much, so I had to have guards at night in case she toppled into the pool."

Blofeld's volcano headquarters, You Only Live Twice

"We had the idea when we were scouting for locations in Japan. I showed some sketches to Cubby Broccoli and he said, 'That's quite a good idea, how much is it going to cost?' I said, 'I have no idea.' He said, 'If I give you a million dollars, will you do it?' And I said, 'I'll do it.' Although I had no idea if it was possible. The height of the volcano crater lake from the floor of the set was 120 feet, the crater lake diameter was between 60 and 70 feet and I built it on an incline so you could see the whole circle. The diameter of the interior was about 400 feet so it was a huge structure. There were lots of problems, the pressure that the film would be on release in five months' time and the people who lived near Pinewood hated it -they never expected to have a volcano on their doorstep. Then the plasterers and riggers demanded danger money because they were working so high up. But, as often happened on the Bond films, the team got so excited about doing something that had never been done before that they ended up working day and night, and at the weekend they'd bring their families along to look at it. I suppose now you'd use CGI but we tried not to cheat the audience. When we showed 500 stuntmen sliding on ropes down from the roof there really were 500 men."

Aston Martin DB5, Goldfinger and Thunderball

"I had an E-type Jaguar in the 60s and I remember the debate about which sports car Bond should drive. We decided on the sexiest British sports car at the time and John Stears from special effects and myself went to Newport Pagnall, where they made Aston Martins, and they weren't at all helpful. Reluctantly, after the big boys from the studio stepped in, they let us have two, but after the Bond film their sales went up by 47% and there were no problems getting cars after that. I never owned one myself - if I remember correctly the clutch wasn't all that good. In America they were much more progessive. In Goldfinger we had three brand new Lincoln Continentals and there's a scene where one is crushed in a breaker's yard. I remember being among the British crew as they watched it. It was as if they'd been castrated. There was silence: they couldn't believe it, this beautiful car being crushed into a cube. But Lincoln didn't mind."

Sir Ken Adam is a special guest speaker at the Thunderball 40th Anniversary event in London on Sunday November 20th 2005. Click here to book tickets.

Thanks to `Kyvan` for the alert.

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