The Architecture of Movies

At first glance, architecture and cinema would seem to have little in common. Architecture is with most of us almost all the time; it’s where we live, where we work, where we shop, where we do nearly everything we do. Architecture is actual structures creating real three-dimensional spaces we can see, touch, hear, and smell [1]. Cinema, on the other hand, is nothing but illusion, taking advantage of the brain’s knack for perceiving a rapid series of still photographs as moving images. Cinema creates the illusion of physical structures and of three-dimensional spaces, but when the lights go on (or the power goes off), all we have is a blank screen.

But we can also find similarities between the two art forms. They both involve large teams of highly trained professionals spending other people’s money (and often a great deal of it) to create the final work. And in both cases, those large teams are led by architects and directors who are, at least to the general public, the primary creators of the building or movie. But I want to look at a third similarity: when filmmakers use physical three-dimensional spaces—in other words, architecture—to create their movies’ illusions of space.

The movies I’ve chosen to talk about are a personal selection; they’re movies with interior sets that have amazed me [2]. They each feature spectacular—and real— interior spaces that create the illusion of spectacular interior spaces. In other words, they don’t rely on matte paintings, models, or computer graphics [3]. What we see on the screen was actually designed and built. Who designs these spaces? The terms we find in the credits may be art director, set designer, or production designer, but in many ways what they do is similar to what architects do: They create spaces. So let’s talk about some awesome—in the word’s traditional meaning, “worthy of awe”—movie spaces.

Royal Wedding (1951), design by Cedric Gibbons and Jack Martin Smith

The room is nothing special, just a simple sitting room. A man in a top hat, top coat, and tux enters, holding a woman’s photo. After sitting down and admiring the picture, he jumps to his feet and begins to dance while singing “You’re All the World to Me.” Then the unexpected happens: He dances up the right-hand wall, across the ceiling, and down the left-hand wall to the floor, and repeats the trick two more times. The actor is Fred Astaire, and for Royal Wedding, he was faced with a challenge similar to what makers of today's action movies face: how to create a dance scene different from, and more spectacular than, any previous dance scenes. To accomplish this bit of movie magic, designers Gibbons and Smith built the set within a revolving barrel, with the camera and camera operator fixed on the room’s floor, so they spun with the room. The four-surface dance appears to be in a continuous shot (although there are two barely perceptible cuts during the dance) [4]. The effect is remarkable even today. This set and the five-minute dance scene may be the only reason people remember this movie.

Rear Window (1954), designed by J. McMillan Johnson and Hal Pereira (upper image above)

All of Rear Window takes place either within Jimmy Stewart’s second-story Greenwich Village apartment or looking through the apartment’s rear window into a courtyard [5]. To create the 98-foot-wide, 185-foot-long, 40-foot-high set, Johnson and Pereira (the brother of architect William Pereira of Transamerica Pyramid fame) not only took over Paramount’s largest soundstage but also removed the floor so they could use the basement to get extra height. In addition to building four-story facades for each side of the courtyard, the designers built 31 apartments behind the facades, with at least eight of them fully furnished. We even can see, between two of the buildings, a street with cars and pedestrians and a building across the street [6]. To add to the set’s complexity, it required multiple lighting setups to simulate various times of day and night, and included weatherproofing and drainage for a heavy rainstorm scene. Few movies have relied so extensively on a single set.

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), designed by Ken Adam (lower right image above)

German-born Adam attended architecture school in London before joining the Royal Air Force in World War 2. After the war, he became a draftsman in the British film industry, eventually advancing to production designer by the late 1950s. He designed Dr. Strangelove’s war room, where a third of the movie takes place, as a cavernous concrete bunker with a sloping roof, a leaning wall of gigantic illuminated screens, and a gleaming black floor. The set was 130 feet long, 100 feet wide, and 35 feet high at its highest point. In the center of the room is an enormous doughnut-shaped table with a ring of lights suspended above [7]. Every shot within the war room has some part of the set looming over it. Steven Spielberg has called it the best movie set ever built [8].    

You Only Live Twice (1967), designed by Ken Adam (lower right image above)

Adam designed the first James Bond movie, Dr. No, and ultimately six more. His memorable Bond spaces include Goldfinger’s Fort Knox and The Spy Who Loves Me’s supertanker [9]. But his most amazing Bond set was Blofeld’s volcano headquarters in You Only Live Twice [10]. The set was too big to fit into any soundstage, so Adam had it built from scratch as its own structure at Pinewood Studios. The interior of the volcano was 400 feet in diameter and 120 feet high, with a 70-foot-diameter sliding door in the roof (through which a 100-foot-high rocket is fired). Around 700 tons of structural steel supported the set, making it more substantial than many actual buildings.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), designed by Ernest Archer, Anthony Masters, and Harry Lange

The longest of 2001’s four segments takes place in the spaceship Discovery, where the living space for the two awake and three hibernating astronauts consists of a large spinning wheel that uses centrifugal force to simulate gravity. To create this set, a Ferris wheel–like centrifuge was constructed at MGM-British Studios outside London. The set’s interior was eight feet wide (the width of a typical hospital corridor) by 38 feet in diameter, giving the astronauts around 960 square feet of living space for their 90-month voyage. The wheel was built in two halves with a narrow slot between them; this allowed the heavy 65mm camera to be mounted to the studio floor while the wheel spun past it for the 360-degree shots of the jogging astronaut [11]. For other shots, the camera was mounted to the wheel and spun with it. Since the wheel was a self-contained set, all the lighting had to be built into it. In a movie famous for its special effects, one of its most amazing effects was this physical set.

The Shining (1980), designed by Roy Walker

Most of The Shining takes place in the Overlook Hotel, the design of which Roy Walker based on the interiors of Yosemite’s Ahwanee Hotel [12]. The Shining was one of the earliest movies to use the newly invented Steadicam, and to take advantage of its ability to move fluidly through spaces, the Overlook interiors were built as though the hotel was real, with most of the spaces connected to each other. Thanks to detailed floor plans created by obsessive conspiracy theorists [13], it appears that most of the Overlook’s interiors were built as three sets. One includes the Colorado Lounge (where Jack writes his book) on the first floor and hotel corridors and room 237 on the second floor. The second has the reception area, the lobby, Ullman’s office, and the rear storage corridor. The third has the Gold Ballroom and the red restroom. To create the illusion of sunlight coming through the Colorado Lounge’s large windows, each window was illuminated with 700,000 watts of lights. Because the movie was shot in the order we see it, the entire set remained in use throughout the year-long shooting schedule.

Raiders of the Los Ark (1981), designed by Norman Reynolds

Norman Reynolds was the art director for Star Wars and the production designer for The Empire Strikes Back, so he was used to designing impressive sets. The standout set he designed for Raiders, the Well of Souls, was built in Elstree Studio’s Stage 3, where parts of the Overlook Hotel had been built. Sixty tons of plaster were used to create the Well of Souls walls and the 37-foot-tall Egyptian jackal sculptures. The screenplay required that the floor be covered with snakes, but the set was so large that the initial batch of around 2,500 snakes was nowhere near enough, requiring another 4,000–7,000 (various sources give different numbers) to be added.

Das Boot (1981), designed by Rolf Zehetbauer

Unlike the expansiveness of many of the sets in this article, Das Boot’s interior set of a full-size submarine was cramped. To capture the intense confinement, nearly all the shots within the submarine set were taken without removing the set’s walls, giving us such a sense of sweaty claustrophobia that we’re as relieved as the crew when the sub surfaces for sunshine and fresh air [14]. To simulate the submarine’s 45-degree dives and the shocks of detonating depth charges, the set was built on a hydraulic structure 15 feet above the soundstage floor.

Titanic (1997), designed by Peter Lamont

Lamont was an assistant art decorator on You Only Live Twice, and he advanced to be production designer on most of the Bond movies starting with 1981’s For Your Eyes Only. For Titanic, his challenge was not only recreating the ship’s interior spaces but also designing them so they could be tilted and flooded with water. His most lavish set was the Grand Staircase Room, which was physically destroyed in its final scene when 90,000 gallons of water were dumped onto it [15].

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), designed by Grant Major and Dan Hennah

Major and Hennah faced a challenge the other designers we talk about here didn’t have to worry about: They had to design cinematic spaces that would satisfy the many thousands of the book’s demanding fans, all of whom had their own imaginary versions of Middle Earth. The designers succeeded beyond expectations. If their Rivendell, Moria, Gondor, and the Shire weren’t exactly how each viewer had imagined them (and how could they be?), they were close enough. Each set was designed to architecturally match the culture that, in the story, had built them (e.g., Rivendell/elves, Moria/dwarves, Gondor/men, the Shire/hobbits). While many of the Lord of the Rings sets were enhanced by CGI (the Mines of Moria weren’t really as vast as what we see in the movie), Bilbo Baggins’s underground home, Bag End, was built full size. Actually, two full-size Bag Ends were built, one scaled for 3?-6? hobbits, the other for 5?-11? Ian McKellen.

Bag End was rebuilt for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, with Hennah returning as production designer. Again, two Bag Ends were built, but with a difference from Fellowship: the “real” Bag End we see in the movie, fully decorated and scaled to dwarves and hobbits, and a second, undecorated, green-painted Bag End scaled for Ian McKellen. While the dwarf and hobbit actors were filmed in the real set, McKellen was filmed separately but simultaneously in the green-screen set, and later digitally composited with the other actors into the finished shots.

The Terminal (2005), designed by Alex McDowell

When I saw The Terminal, I wondered how the filmmakers could take over an entire airport terminal for the months required to shoot the movie. Turns out, they didn’t take over a terminal; they built one. Three stories high and with roughly the area of four football fields [16], the terminal set was far too big to fit in any Hollywood sound stage, so it was built in an aircraft hangar at the Palmdale Regional Airport near Los Angeles. Inspired by the Dusseldorf Airport, the set featured working escalators and functional shops, and used 650 tons of structural steel (nearly as much as You Only Live Twice’s volcano).

Are Movie Sets Architecture?

I know many architects may not consider these sets as “architecture.” After all, they aren’t permanent, right? Well, permanence is a relative thing, and as much as we would like to believe the buildings we design will last forever, the sad fact is that many will not survive more than a hundred years. And some sets, such as the Overlook Hotel, may have lasted longer than the original Barcelona Pavilion, an undisputed work of architecture. Because interior sets take up valuable studio space, they are demolished as soon as they are no longer needed. But in a way, they do survive, for as long as their movies, and the technology to see them, survive.  

Follow the author on Twitter @bill_schmwil.

Footnotes:

[1] And taste as well, I suppose, if we’re so inclined.

[2] But not, it would seem, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. Of the eleven movies discussed in this article, only Raiders of the Lost Ark, Titanic, and Fellowship of the Ring won Oscars for art direction/set decoration (2001 was nominated but didn’t win).

[3] As an example, I might have included in this article the Hogwarts Great Hall from the Harry Potter movies had I not visited the set outside of London (it's open to the public). The set is impressive, up to around 20 feet. Above that, computer graphics were used to create the Gothic vaults we see in the movie.

[4] A particularly clever touch is that five props (top coat, tux jacket, top hat, chair, and photo) are shown to be loose early in the scene, yet move with the room, so they had to be replaced with fixed props before the dance begins. YouTube has this scene at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsoYyDlYU8M.

[5] Except for one shot near the end of the movie, which looks from the courtyard toward Stewart’s apartment. This shot shows that all four courtyard facades were built.

[6] The movie’s opening shows the full set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5It0nmoYE4.

[7] Even though the movie was shot in black and white, Adam covered the table with green felt to give the actors the sense that they were playing a poker game with extremely high stakes.

[8] Spielberg is quoted in Christopher Frayling’s book Ken Adam: The Art of Production Design.

[9] The supertanker set was as big as You Only Live Twice’s volcano, but instead of building a one-time-only set, Adam had a permanent new stage, the “007 Stage,” built at Pinewood Studios to hold it.

[10] In Ian Fleming’s novel, Blofeld locates his HQ in a castle on the Japanese coast. Adam designed his volcano set when, after weeks of searching, he couldn’t find a coastal castle in Japan, but did see a lot of volcanos.

[11] The astronaut running scene, along with a little centrifugal force science, can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wJQ5UrAsIY.

[12] The Overlook’s exterior was modeled on the Timberline Hotel, on Mt. Hood near Portland, Oregon.

[13] Conspiracy theorists have picked The Shining apart in minute detail to prove, among other things, that the Apollo 11 moon landing was faked. For more on this, see the weird but entertaining movie Room 237.

[14] Two bits of trivia: (1) The design of Das Boot’s U-96 is based on one of the few surviving U-boats, the U-505 at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry; and (2) the full-size replica of the sub’s exterior (it was nothing but an empty shell) was also used in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

[15] The Grand Staircase Room was built a little larger than full size, so that modern actors would appear slightly shorter to match the average height of people a hundred years ago.

[16] For more on using football fields as units of measurement, see my article at https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/football-field-time-2017-version-william-schmalz-faia