There are architects who know all the rules about building a lair — but only so they can break them. Let’s meet the production designers who build the homes of cinema’s most evil masterminds…
The problem with most Bond baddies is they never feel quite real. The villains themselves are often great, with memorable performances from actors like Rami Malek (No Time to Die), Javier Bardem (Skyfall) and Christopher Walken (Licence to Kill), but their bases are often more cartoonish than they are convincing.
Behind every iconic villain is a production designer who has spent months, sometimes years, finding the ideal spot for them to construct their megalomaniac dream.
The Bond franchise has a long history of creating some of the most memorable villain bases in cinema history, from Thunderball’s palatial mansion, to the Venetian carnival mask lair from GoldenEye, or even the classic volcano base from You Only Live Twice.
But these productions are only a part of the long list of cinematic masterminds who have been given an ideal environment by the architects of cinematic villainy to plot their world domination.
Gassner
Dennis Gassner, who took over the role of production designer for the Daniel Craig Bond films from the late long-serving production designer Ken Adam, told In Sight over Zoom from his home in California, “All the villains are trying to have the lair fit their personality. Bond villains are villains who want to own the world, so they need space and power, and of course they need somewhere to put all their gadgets.”
Gassner is something of a modern master of the villain’s lair. While his work on earlier Bond films such as *Casino Royale* and *Quantum of Solace* has an element of grandeur, when the Craig era rebooted his production design approach changed.
Instead of designing from scratch, he made a deliberate decision to place more importance on finding real locations that would fit with the narrative needs of the film.
“It became necessary that these locations needed to have a reality to them, so I was saying to Craig and the directors, that these were real spaces, not fantasy, that this could really happen,” Gassner explained.
Ken Adam
If the Bond films are the gold standard for designing a cinematic villain lair, then one of the best known is Ken Adam’s iconic volcano base from *You Only Live Twice* in 1967.
Adam worked on 11 Bond films in total, but it was his work on *You Only Live Twice* that set the standard for designing the bases of future villain masterminds. He was able to do this through attention to detail, but also through an understanding that it is the mundane reality of everyday life that gives a sense of believability to the secret lair.
He was the son of a master builder, and had trained as an architect in the UK, but it was his upbringing in Nazi Germany as a Jew that shaped his understanding of what makes a great villain lair.
Adam escaped to Britain where he served as a Royal Air Force pilot during the Second World War. He was shot down over France, but evaded capture and made his way back to Britain. He became a British citizen, and after the war he began working as a draughtsman in the movie industry, before eventually moving into production design.
The lessons he had learned from his early life were to inform his approach. Adam realised that to create a sense of reality you had to understand the logistics, how a place would work on an everyday basis.
This led to his approach to designing the Bond films from the 1960s onwards. To construct the volcano base for *You Only Live Twice* the production team had to build one of the largest film sets of its time, including a working monorail and helicopter landing pad. The budget for the set, without the film extras or design fees, was more than some entire productions.
It was the painstaking level of detail that made the set look real, it was where the atmosphere was built, where things felt believable. The production team had taken into account every aspect of daily life at the volcano base, including sewerage systems, how you would heat and cool the building and even how you would access and use all the secret passages.
Adam was also a draughtsman and had worked at the studio of Eero Saarinen, who he credits as a major influence on his production design career.
It was a love of architecture, an understanding of the purpose of design in space and how things worked that gave a sense of reality to Adam’s Bond productions. It made the whole thing feel believable.
“The villain has to feel big and powerful. So we create spaces for them that dwarf the human characters,” Adam told *Production Designer* magazine in a 1995 interview. “The lair has to make the Bond characters feel like vulnerable little ants, scurrying around. But at the same time, there can’t be a feeling that it’s a show set. There have to be the mundane little details that make it feel real, like a normal place where normal people work. Even if those people are trying to take over the world.”
It was the philosophy Adam brought to the production design of the James Bond franchise that has become the standard by which villain lairs are judged.
The way Gassner builds his sets has also become a part of this long history. His work has been used as research for projects from *Terminator: Dark Fate* to Marvel’s *Guardians of the Galaxy* and *Thor: Love and Thunder*. In recent years the shift from more traditional studios to location shoots means more use of existing and interesting locations.
Gassner explained, “Places have to have scale, a sense of drama, or something that is odd or different that pulls you in.”
Gassner’s work on *Skyfall* is one example of how he has been able to help forge the latest evolution in villain lair design. In the 2012 Bond film Silva’s island was based on Hashima Island, a disused former Japanese coal mining facility in the ocean off the coast of Nagasaki.
Silva’s lair was not a set but rather a real location. This put more onus on the production design team to make sure the details fit together and reflected his personality as a villain.
He explained, “We felt that what Silva wanted was a place to make his plans but that he needed to be removed. There are many amazing places in the world that have been abandoned for a reason, and of course they get taken over by nature.”
The finished production for the location was based on many real examples around the world that had inspired the design. Gassner said, “The ability to place the camera where it needed to be to show the space was important. If we were shooting in an office we had to find office spaces that could do what we wanted, but we also looked at real abandoned military and industrial facilities as well.”
As well as using a real-world location for Bond villain Silva’s lair, the other area where the film marked a turning point in villain base design was the need to make sure that the technology, or at least the ability to use the technology, was accurate.
Gassner said of *Skyfall*, “The difference in working on Bond now is that people are much more aware of technology than they were. In this new era, the technology in Bond films has to be accurate. It is just the reality of the day, what a computer can do and what a computer can’t do. So, we have to make sure that what they are doing in these spaces can actually work.”
And that work has to be realistic, whether it is the physical set or the equipment being used. Gassner continued, “For example, I remember spending time with the production design team in *Skyfall* figuring out how Silva could get electricity back to areas of the island, how he could establish internet and data. We had to understand how technology that was 30 years old could be resurrected.”
It is this type of research and knowledge of what is possible that has led to a change in villain base design. Audiences are more aware of architecture and technology so sets have had to become more realistic, or at least more believable.
Adam’s approach in the 1960s was to build things that dwarfed the characters, which makes them feel small and vulnerable, but at the same time sets have to be more believable, according to Gassner.
While the work has had an influence on a number of recent films, from Bond to Marvel, it also meant that the physical production process had to become more accurate in terms of how things worked in the real world.
For Gassner, the experience of working on the Craig era Bond films and the way the aesthetic of the villain lair had to adapt has led to a further evolution of the design, both in Bond and beyond.
It means that each new Bond villain lair is built with the audience’s heightened expectations in mind. Bond villains have been a mainstay of 007’s history from the first film in 1962 and the original team of producers, including Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, did all they could to make sure the films were up to date with current design trends.
Back in the 1960s Broccoli asked the production designers to bring in cuttings from architectural magazines and catalogs to look at different elements and approaches. And it is this standard that has been the benchmark for later Bond villains, from Goldfinger’s vault to Quantum of Solace and the work of Gassner and his team.
“We realised early on that it was important for the villain’s lair to be something people could relate to, or more than that understand,” he said. “In the design world everything we do now is based on the fact that people are much more aware of technology and architecture.”
The next Bond is being made, as Gassner explained, but it’s hard to tell what the next evolution will be in villain lair design, even for one of the longest running franchises in cinematic history.
This new awareness means a different approach and a new reality has to be adapted to, one where the architecture and location design is based on real locations, with a keen awareness of technology and what is possible.
That may mean more Gassner locations, more adaptations of real places as the sites for villain lairs, as there are so many interesting places in the world that have been abandoned for a reason.
“We need more amazing spaces around the world to explore,” Gassner said. “If people get stuck in the right location then the camera can work and the production design can work, it’s an amazing feeling when that all comes together.”
If one thing is clear it is that the evolution of villain lair design is a journey, not a destination, and there is a long road ahead for the latest evolution in cinematic megalomania.