Page 12 - 05_Bafta ACADEMY_Phil Jupitus_ok

Arts And Crafts
You simply cannot do a World War II film, said Mike Pickwoad, without sandbags. That was the certainly the case when he was working recently on the BBC’s justly acclaimed The Last of The Blonde Bombshells, about an all-girl band glitzing up the Blitz.
And it was equally true more than 30 years earlier when Pickwoad, then just a young draughtsman in the art depart- ment, was helping plan a home front sequence in Knutsford, Cheshire for the mighty Oscar-winning Hollywood epic, Patton – Lust For Glory.
Back then, his blueprint required no fewer than 6000 sandbags. He didn’t give me the figure for Bombshells, preferring to note instead – indeed, this was the spark for an otherwise rather arcane dis- cussion – that all the sandbags happened to have been constructed here in Victoria Park, coincidentally the East London loca- tion of his latest assignment.
A few yards away from us, director Mel Smith was running his co-stars, Minnie Driver and Mary McCormack, through a scene on Disney’s comedy- thriller, High Heels & Low Lifes, about a couple of cash-stressed career women who decide to try and profit from acci- dentally overhearing about a major bank robbery.
On the face of it, this kind of contem- porary, character-led caper hardly seemed to present the sort of challenge that has so regularly enriched Pickwoad’s intricate, often period, work on a whole range of films and TV, spanning Comrades, Withnail & I, The Krays, Cider With Rosie, A Rather English Marriage and, of course, Bombshells.
The great John Box once said that “designing is not just sets. It is, in fact, not a set you’re putting there, it’s an
image. And to get that image you must start by firstly thinking very carefully of the charac- ter, what he is doing, what he is feeling and thinking, and then arranging the setting, studio or location, around him.”
Pickwoad, a tall, shaggy-haired
fiftysomething, would
probably agree with the spirit of that acute summation as he explained about how, especially in the case of High Heels, design can “help flesh out the characters. The script will, in this case, tell you that one’s a nurse and the other’s an actress. We then try and provide a sort of ‘back story’ in design to suggest who they are by the way they live and by the sort of props around them.”
Long before his days as one of the British industry’s busiest craftsmen, Pickwoad once entertained the idea of becoming the next Brunel. That was after graduating from Southampton University with an engineering degree, but
as there seemed no obvious demand for visionary engineers at the time, designing films seemed the nearest to the art of making substance of dreams.
In an industry rife with nepotism, Pickwoad admitted that he had at least a partial entrée. His father was the late
character actor, William Mervyn, who was working at Shepperton Studios in the Sixties when he “had a word” with the art director who spoke to the chief construc- tion manager, with the result that Pickwoad got his initial break in the art department.
He got to grapple with the real “nuts and bolts” of production design working on a whole succession of cheerfully bar- gain-basement features – more than a dozen, in all – for the Children’s Film Foundation. On them, he recalls, “I was also location manager, construction man- ager, propman – everything. Sometimes I
even had to park the vehicles. That helped give an authentic sense of what was possible.”
It also instilled in him a desire to immerse himself early in the project at hand. “I spend a lot of time recce-ing, maybe more time, I gather, than many other designers. You then begin to get an early
idea of what you can deal with, what’s going to be expensive, what’s cheap ... all right, cheaper, because actu- ally nothing’s cheap these days.”
Walking a stretch of
coastline near Dublin - which was set to double for Folkestone circa 1830 for an all-star, Hallmark TV production of David Copperfield - he sensed, for example, just the right clifftop site for Betsy Trotwood’s cottage: “In film you need to condense reality. In this case, the sea was in your face all the time and it was as if the loca- tion somehow told the story. You can waste a lot of time if you can’t see every- thing at once. Here, you didn’t have to pan a camera to find it. It just felt where you’d want to put a house.”
Such creative ‘cheating’ is often the name of his fascinating game, whether it’s importing 150 tons of rubble to recreate a bombsite (on Bombshells) or building Victoria and Brighton stations in an empty shed under Spaghetti Junction (for Cruel Train, an ingenious World War II reworking of Zola’s La Bete Humaine).
“When we arrived,” Pickwoad recalled, fondly, “there was not a railway in sight. In the end, for £35,000, it became the biggest train set I’ve ever built. It was one of the few times I’ve ever walked on to one of my sets and believed it was real. Just for a moment, I thought, ‘Why didn’t I come here by train?’” ■
SETTINGTHESCENE
PRODUCTION DESIGNER MICHAEL PICKWOAD TALKS TO QUENTIN FALK
Photos from top left: The Last Of The Blonde Bombshells, Mike Pickwoad, Cruel Train, High Heels & Low Lifes and Withnail & I
10