Keeping It Real
I went to see a great Q&A with Sir Ken Adam at the BFI earlier in the week. Sir Ken is one of the most celebrated film production designers, who is probably most famous for his work on the James Bond series of films. If you can think of a crazy futuristic looking megalomaniac’s lair, chances are he designed it.
As emerged during the Q& A, one of the most amazing things about Adam was his startling originality. His influences were discussed, amongst them Impressionism and the architecture of a local sports shop, but for the most part his visions came from his own imagination. Considering how prolific Adam was this is pretty fucking amazing, and it got me thinking about originality and what a scarce commodity it is these days.
In terms of mass media, there is very little original around us, when you stop and think about it, it’s pretty depressing. Whether we’re talking about Holywood’s continued rape and pillage campaign of cinema’s heritage by ‘re-imagining’ films like ‘The Lady Killers’, or lazy advertising ‘creatives’ ripping off the latest on-line content, we are constantly being force fed old ideas dressed up in snazzy new clothes.
I’ve sat in countless meetings where people continually reference other campaigns (for better or worse I work in advertising) and ideas saying “we could do something like that…” and it drives me up the fucking wall. This is why we’re flooded with such derivative shit. I don’t buy the old “there’s no such thing as a new idea” line. I think thats bullshit. I think we’ve all got lazy (myself included). Rant over. For now. Back to Sir Ken.
The other thing that really got me about the Q&A was what he said about how stuff was made back then compared to today. If Ken was working these days, he would probably be forced to make most stuff in CGI. We’ve become so used to the idea of films using CGI to create environments, that it’s almost hard to believe that when these sets were built a few decades ago, they were actually made for real.
To make this point, Adam talked about the scene in ‘You Only Live Twice’ where a helicopter flies in through the mouth of the volcano and into Blofeld’s lair. This wasn’t done with models, but for real, and was by all accounts bloody dangerous. This story came as a precursor to a discussion about CGI and what his opinion of it was. Adam commented that it was impressive technology, but warned that it should be used sparingly, as it lacked verisimilitude. Again, he got me thinking.
I went to see the most recent Star Trek recently with some mates. It was a CGI fest, and definitely a spectacle, but it left me totally cold. Obviously it’s set in a futuristic and fantastical time, but there was nothing real about it, if that makes sense. This may have been partially down to the cast’s acting ability, but knowing and seeing that pretty much everything else on screen was created by computers made it seem even less real, and therefore to me, less believeable.
The original Star Wars trilogy was by no means Oscar winning in terms of acting, but it felt, and still feels to me much more real, and therefore more engaging, than something like Star Trek. In my mind the lack of CGI and the use of real sets goes along way to explain this. This line of thinking reminded me of when ‘Jurassic Park’ came out. I remember how excited eveyone got about the dinosaurs. There was a real frenzy about it, and all I could think was, ‘but they’re not real’. Maybe I’m retarded.
Either way, I’m glad Sir Ken was working at a time when he could keep it real.
