Ken Adam and the Art of Production Design

Ken Adam is acknowledged as the world's greatest living production designer: creator of the look of the James Bond films, winner of Oscars for Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" and the film version of Alan Bennett's "The Madness of King George". Now he explains his own scarcely understood contribution to the art of cinema. Ken Adam is a German who left Germany in the 1930s - and his work was heavily influenced by the German Expressionist cinema of that time. After serving in the RAF during the war, he became involved in production design in 1948, getting his first Art Director credit on "Around The World In Eighty Days" in 1956. Since then he has designed 75 films, creating the bold and revolutionary designs for the first seven James Bond movies, as well as the startling war room in Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove". Since 1999 an exhibition of Adam's work has been travelling around the world, but the force and variety of his achievements in cinema have not been properly acknowledged until this volume, in which Christopher Frayling expertly conducts a career-length interview with a man whose designs have enriched some of the great films of our time.