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KEN ADAM

81 - The war room

We all got so involved in it. It... it was really fantastic, I think, for all the people who were involved in the picture. And... we tried to do it with very simple means. I mean I took him to meet Charlie Staffell, who was working at Pinewood. He was a great special effects there, back projection king, you know – they had built those tunnels through the stages, and so on – and asked him how he would project all these symbols on to these gigantic screens. And Charlie had suggested something like 30... 60mm projectors, back projectors, and Stanley said to me, ‘If one breaks down we can lose half a day of shooting. You’ve got to come up with something’.

[Q] Is this for the wall maps?

For the wall maps, yes, these enormous sloping wall maps, and the way I had made them in the art department, on a double, elephant-sized drawing board, we drew up these wall maps and then had them enlarged or blown up by companies who did photographic backings and so on, to the size we required. And then to get all the symbols, rather than projecting them on, I had the wall maps glued on to plywood screens or... cut out where the symbols were, and put... hung a 100 Watt bulb inside. It was like a little box that was perspex, and that went over. But what happened to my... was a disaster, that the heat given off by these, I don’t know how many hundreds of 60 Watt was so much that the paper used to lift... lift off of the Perspex. You know, so we came up then with installing two or three air-conditioning units behind the screens to keep it cool, and then it worked.

But, you know, there was always a first time... problem, like the floor, which, I wanted a smooth, black, shiny floor. Well, the first time we did it, it looked like a seascape, you know. It really did, so then the construction department came up with putting a block wood floor down first and then another floor on top of it, with a much heavier gauge of plywood, and with the black lacquer on it. And then it worked, more or less. Not perfect, but more or less, you see, and it was, of course, fantastic, because it reflected these inclined surfaces in the floor, and you thought you were walking on air. And it was so important for the actors.