Catacombs Credits GuideKeith Wilson interview
Catacombs Credits GuideKeith Wilson joined A.P. Films in 1961 as an assistant to art director Bob Bell on Fireball XL5, Stingray and the first season of Thunderbirds. He received his first credits (as Designer) on the second season of Thunderbirds and the feature film Thunderbirds Are Go, continued in the same capacity on Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons and became Set Designer on Thunderbird 6. For Joe 90 and The Secret Service, Keith was promoted to Art Director, having over-all responsibility for the design of both series. He provided graphics for the live-action feature Doppelgänger and once again assisted Bob Bell on UFO and the second season of The Protectors.
In 1973, Keith found work as Assistant Art Director on the feature film The Revenge Of Dr. Death before returning to the Anderson fold as Production Designer on the first season of Space: 1999 where he once again had total responsibility for the look of the series, designing not only all the sets but also all the alien costumes. On the second season of 1999, Keith redesigned the Alphan uniforms and also, designed all the 'space animals' and monsters in addition to his set design duties. Between the two seasons, he was production designer on Star Maidens, a short-lived Anglo-German series, and after Space: 1999 ended he became production designer on the six UK-based episodes of The New Avengers' second season. From there, Keith has gone on to a prolific career in film and television which has included work on International Velvet, A Man Called Intrepid, Yesterday's Hero, Memoirs Of A Survivor, Great Expectations, The Old Curiosity Shop and The Governess.
Chris Bentley spoke to Keith for FAB last September.
FAB: Keith, could you begin by telling us a little about your background, and how you came to work for A.P. Films?
KEITH WILSON: I was born in Kent and I went to art school at the Medway College of Art in Rochester where I trained as a theatre designer. I knew what I wanted to do for a living - I wanted to work in film, but living down there I had no connections at all. I had no idea how to get into the film industry, but I knew that' s where I wanted to be, and I thought theatre was probably the nearest I could get.
There were three of us at college, one of them being Ian Scoones. We were at the same school together, we grew up together, and he was the first one to get a job working in the film industry, doing special effects for Les Bowie. This was the time of the early Hammer films. He came home one weekend, I met up with him in a pub, and he said there was a job going at a company called A.P. Films, and they were looking for young, talented, interested people.
The art director was then Bob Bell and he was working with a couple of assistants. I really had no idea, no concept of film making or anything. But I phoned Reg Hill the next day, and I was given an interview. Reg used to be the art director on the very early shows and Bob was his assistant - when we came to do Fireball XL5, Bob Bell took over, and I eventually became his assistant. Anyway, I was interviewed by Reg Hill at the studio on the Slough Trading Estate. It was actually just one small building. i got the job and within a week I was working for Gerry Anderson. And it was easy because the unions couldn't stop him. He could do what he liked - he was so specialised in making that kind of show, they simply had no suitable people to give him to make it, so he was able to take on new people. It was a great opportunity for myself, and for people of my generation, to get into the film industry and get your ticket. It was very important at that time, you couldn't work without one. So it was a back door into the film industry, and a lot of people used that back door, but a lot of us stayed on - I actually stayed with Gerry for about fifteen years continuously.
I remember very well when I first went to A.P. Films, they had literally just wrapped on Supercar and all the puppets and sets were still around, but when ]joined them we started to setup for Fireball XL5 and that was the first thing I worked on. I actually worked for Derek Meddings on my first day. We had this huge aluminium globe that had just been made and they wanted a moon surface on one side and an Earth surface on the other - for the titles or something - so I spent my first few days working in the film industry applying Plasticine to this huge ball, and turning it into a moon surface.
Then we went on and made Fireball XL5 and a lot of young people were joining the industry at the time - it was in the Sixties, it was The Beatles, it was Thunderbirds, everything. It was all part of that era, part of that atmosphere, and when you stunt looking at the old shows now, the atmosphere is there. You didn't realise at the time, but now I can actually look at the period and say the influence that it had was really quite strong.
After Fireball, of course, then we did Stingray which was one of the first television series in this country to be made in colour. We had a lot of problems on it, because colour television was just coming in and we had to paint the sets strange colours, and we couldn't use certain colours. It was really quite an interesting period, to be part of that leap from black and white to colour and to learn about the whole business of working in colour television. Now we take it for granted, but at that time it was really quite tricky.
'The company had started to grow and we moved to a new location which was again on the trading estate, but it was much bigger. In fact, Les Bowie took over the building that we originally had. We moved premises because we had these huge water tanks built for Stingray, vast flat tanks which stood upright. The glass was only a few inches apart and we filled them with water and fish, and we'd film through them so it looked like everyone was underwater. I think they had been made by London Zoo, or they had advised us how to do it. I remember one day these special tanks were standing on an empty stage and we were just standing about talking, when all of a sudden one of the tanks exploded! There was water and glass everywhere. It was just as well that we weren't in the middle of shooting, because someone could have been really hurt.
Then, of course, we moved on to Thunderbirds and that just became so huge, it was a whole way of life. We hardly ever left the studios and on many occasions you'd find people sleeping in the theatre at night. We had so much work to do - we were working late, we were starting early and there was no point In going home. But it was a wonderful atmosphere. It was like being at school really and we were playing. We were all roughly the same age and there was this wonderful feeling of it all happening. Out of the people that worked for Gerry, of course, were a lot of very important film technicians of the present day - Oscar winners and Emmy winners have come out of that school. It wasn't like work, it was more like fun, We'd stop for two weeks in the middle of summer and have a holiday, but it was a proper job. The moment we'd finish one series like Stingray there was no break for people like myseIf. We just went straight on and started planning the next one. It was a continual job and I did that until the end of Space:1999.
After Thunderbirds, we started to do Thunderbirds features as well. As you can imagine, it was a beehive: the place was swarming with people, there were models, sets and puppets everywhere and it was an amazing atmosphere. The programmes were immensely popular and we could see what Gerry was thinking -he was thinking, "Another Disneyland" and you could see the whole future laid out. Every building nearby had been taken over by Gerry as we got bigger and bigger and bigger. All of a sudden we had an empire: we had workshops, we had studios, we had where they were doing the comic, we had four special effects stages and two big puppet stages and it was just getting massive, You could imagine the gates going up with 'AndersonLand' over the top of them. That's the way it looked and everyone thought it really could happen.
What would have been the extent of the manpower in the art department on something like Thunderbirds?
Bob Bell was the art director and Grenville Nott and I were his two assistants. I would work on one episode, Grenville would work on the other, and then we had a whole team of young people that were building and painting the sets. It was like a huge warehouse, with workshops full of people making models and props and sets, but I would be on one stage, Gren would be on the other and that's the way it worked. And we'd paint the sets at night, anything to get it ready.
You've reminded me of some of the things I used to do. I was very close to Gerry and Sylvia when we did Thunderbirds, because even though Bob was the art director, I had a lot of underlining to do. For the launching of the "Lady Penelope" comic, I handmade a dress for Lady Penelope, and hand-painted it with flowers. Then it was decided that Sylvia wanted the same dress. So they made the dress, I hand painted it to match Lady Penelope's, and this was for the grand opening of the comic. So there were all these different influences I had. In a lot of the episodes, the Tracy boys look quite trendy. I used to hand paint all their shirts. So my influence was always there, right from the beginning.
When you got to Captain Scarlet, it's apparent from watching the episodes that you seemed to have much more of a creative influence over the design of the show.
Yes, I suppose Bob left it to me a lot more as time went on, and that's when John Lageu was brought in, John and I had an off ice, and we'd just sit and design all day. We still ran the whole situation -it wasn't that we had nothing to do with everything else, but Bob was in his office and I was in another office in-between the two stages. I was designing, but I was working on the stages too, as was John and the whole team of people that we had working for us. So we were overseeing everything, rather than having to worry Bob Bell with it, and we were actually doing it all. Grenville Nott was there, but he didn't have much of an influence artistically. He was very "nuts and bolts", just like Bob really, but he was very talented.
While Joe 90 was in production, Bob went to work on Doppelgänger, and that was the first time that you'd worked as art director.
That's right. Actually, my first credit came upon the last few Thunderbirds and I got a credit on Captain Scarlet as production designer, but then I became the art director with Grenville Nott. Gren didn't do much, he was more mechanical, he would make things work and leave me to do all the designs, so really the whole of Joe 90 I designed. Bob was involved at the beginning of Joe 90 when we started designing all the mechanics, like B.I.G.R.A.T., though I designed them. Bob then moved over to Pinewood Studios to do Gerry's Doppelganger, and we were left alone to do Joe 90, and then I was really on my own when we did The Secret Service. I didn't have a great deal to do
I was more involved in doing Joe 90, but I did a lot of artwork - I did sculptures and paintings and I did a lot of the graphic stuff on that, but really just to be part of it, as my main involvement was at the other studios.
As well as the art direction, you found the time to co-write the episode, Lone-Handed 90.
I certainly did, myself and Des Saunders. Des is a friend of mine and has been for thirty-five years, and we wrote it as a joke. There were a lot of in-jokes in it, so we did it as a gag more than anything. We thought it'd be rather fun to do a Western and we wrote it in our spare time. I think it worked quite well.
Its a fan favourite. It's just so...
So stupid!
With a barmaid called Sylvia, and a piano player called Gerry!
You can imagine what was in it originally! Actually, there was a Thunderbirds script written once. Alan Pattillo was the script editor as well as a director, so he had a lot of influence. He was probably the best director we had when we were doing the puppet shows. We were great friends, we got on extremely well, and we'd planned this script for Thunderbirds that was totally obscene. I don't know what happened to it - I'd hate to think that any of you guys have got hold of it! It really was totally obscene, But it was a joke, it was just for a gag. What I am trying to say is that because it was such a fun thing that we were doing, we couldn't take it that seriously. Of course, it was serious - we'd have budgets and schedules to keep - but it was playing as well and you couldn't take it too seriously, so a lot of fun things did happen, like that particular script.
The later Supermarionation shows seemed to reflect that more - there's more of a sense of whimsy, particularly with The Secret Service.
Yes, David Lane and myself worked very closely on that. Dave was producing it, so he had more influence than anyone, and I designed all the sets and all the gadgetry. So that had a different look and I was really rather fond of that show - we did some nice things. The sets were nice, as were the ones in Joe 90, the interior of the cottage and B.I.G.R.A.T. for instance.
I always thought that The Secret Service was a very nice little show, I can't say I've ever actually seen a completed episode, but from what I saw of it, it had a quality all of its own. It was rather sad that we didn't do more, but then by that time we were starting to go into live action anyway and we were moving to the MGM Studios at Borehamwood to do UFO.
Those last Supermarionation series were set very much in the 'near future'. Did that limit your creativity?
Yes, you can get away with a lot more when if s totally futuristic, but when you start mixing and matching to real situations, you have to be more careful.
Which did you prefer at the time?
Oh, total science fiction, total design. It gave me much more freedom, and it was fun to do.
You dropped back to Assistant Art Director on UFO.
Well, I was Bob Bell's assistant on that, but I was doing a lot of the designing I designed all the clothes. They're under Sylvia Anderson's name but I actually designed them. And I was designing a lot of the sets, the interior of Skydiver, sets like that. There was going to be a second series of UFO, but it turned into Space: 1999 and this was how I separated from Bob.
After UFO, we did two series of The Protectors which was all set in the present day. When we started to set up Space: 1999, Gerry and Reg were planning to do a third season of The Protectors at the same time and Bob was given the choice: he could do the next series of The Protectors, or he could do this brand new series that was coming up. I think Bob was a little tired of doing science fiction and I think he was enjoying doing the contemporary things on The Protectors, nipping all across Europe -we had great fun doing it. Bob was leaning more towards that sort of thing, so it left it wide open for Sylvia to ask me whether I'd like to do Space. I jumped at the chance - to have the opportunity to do something totally different, to try and take it away from what Gerry had done before, to give it a new look, with a new influence - my influence. It was a bit unfortunate for Bob, because the third series of The Protectors ultimately fell through and he was out of a job.
We shot Space: 1999 at Pinewood Studios and for two Christmases running, we were the only company making any sort of film there. The place was a ghost town. We used L & M Stages - the same stages that Gerry's recently been using for Space Precinct.
The way that worked was really quite interesting. I had these two stages. One housed the permanent standing set, Moonbase Alpha, which took up a whole stage, and the other stage was for anything else I had to do, like the moon surface, planets, spaceships - whatever came up each week. Moonbase Alpha was designed in such a way that I could revamp it very, very quickly. I designed a modular system of 8' x 4' panels. Some had perspex in, some were clear, some were doors, some were windows, but based on that 8' x 4' system, I could build any size of set. And if you look at the series now and watch the set, it's really one set. But very quickly we could make it into a corridor, Helena's apartment, Koenig's apartment - I could make it into whatever I liked very quickly. We had ten days shooting per episode, so it was actually quite a quick turnover for some of the elaborate stuff we were doing.
I wish we'd done more 'tricks'. I saw Another Time, Another Place again last night and it showed one or two tricks that I thought worked well. Really very simple stuff. You saw a shot of them leaving the Eagle and walking out onto the Earth's surface, but all I actually built were the steps. The front and back of the Eagle were photographs and Brain Johnson did them. All there was was a piece of the set and Brian put in the back of the Eagle - we photographed the front of the Eagle, and it looked like they were coming down the steps. Simple stuff and I wish we'd done more of that sort of thing. I certainly think it opened the series up, and gave it more scale. They were basic trick shots that have been around for a long time. I still use them today because they still work.
I prefer the first series of Space personally. I didn't like the second series very much. It became too small, it lost its scale. I look at the Main Mission set now in the reruns and I'd forgotten just how wonderful it looked, and how big it looked. It had scale, and not even Star Trek had that sort of quality, I don't think.
Everything was just so vast. The interior of Arra's ship in Collision Course, and Gwent from The Infernal Machine. When Koenig, Helena and Victor go through the sliding doors into the ship, it looks huge - it seems to go right up to the ceiling.
It did. It went right up to the top of the sound stage. But that's what was so nice for me, because I had total artistic control. I actually had a kind of script approval. Gerry would show me the script first, before the director, and say "Can you do it? And if not, what can we do?" So I would have to come up with some idea, something visual, something new, to make it look different. That's what was so exciting, coming up with these new ideas each week.
If the script said "Moon Surface", I would ship in tons and tons of washed ash from the gasworks - and we'd have to do this in a couple of days. We had all the backings already painted but they still had to move this stuff and cover the whole stage floor with it. It was a huge job, and when we were finished we had to take it up again and take it all outside so I could build the next set. So it was really quite an undertaking each week to have to come up with something new. But it allowed me to be a bit silly sometimes. The surface of Piri for example, was fun to do nobody knew what it was, but it didn't matter. You had to accept something different: you were on a strange planet, so rather than just a rock in the corner, I was trying to come up with new images all the time and that was one of the most extraordinary ones.
You had a bit of a problem with the Ultima Thule set on Death's Other Dominion.
Yes, well you probably know the story about that. I built the set out of rubbish, literally. I went around the lot at Pinewood, collecting all sorts of bits and pieces. We compiled these shapes, and then we covered them with foam, to lose all the roughness and give it nice icy shapes. They used formaldehyde to create the snow, but it did leave an odour. It was a 'bleach' smell or something like it, and it made your nostrils tingle.
The set was huge, it covered the whole stage. We were due to shoot on it on the Monday and we were dressing it over the weekend. The set was finished with all the snow on it and when Gerry brought Martin and Barbara in to show them, it made their eyes water, This immediately caused a panic: 'We're shooting on this on Monday. What are we gong to do?" It was ridiculous, because once you got used to it, you couldn't smell it any more and it wasn't harmful to you in any way. There were men working on the set, sitting there eating prawn sandwiches in their break, saying, 'What smell?" They had scientists and all sorts of people doing tests, and of course at the end of the day they all said it was unpleasant but totally harmless. Nobody expected such an overreaction, but it did cause quite a stir.
Did you have much contact with the model department when you were creating sets that were supposed to be inside things they were building?
Oh, yes. Brian Johnson and myself worked together very closely. Brian joined the film industry before me, he worked for Les Bowie, but I think we actually joined Gerry Anderson on the same day, because we're about the same age. He went on and worked with Derek Meddings and I went on and worked with Bob.
On Space, I'd design the interior of a spaceship and he'd have to do the outside, or vice versa. Sometimes I'd design a planet surface that looked good on my drawing board, like Piri, but when Brian actually came to build it in miniature, it was a little bit strange. Building it life-size on the stage, it works, but he may have had a problem in reducing that to make it believable , No, it does work, but that was just one example - it happened lots and lots of times obviously.
What really impressed me about Guardian Of Piri was that it was the first time a television science fiction show had done something so strange, so imaginative. I think that's my favourite set of the whole series.
Yes, it was certainly interesting. I remember the whole story, Catherine Schell was lovely and I designed her frock on that particular episode. Of course, she came in later on to do Maya and I designed her completely. I had total control over her look. I'd built up a little studio in the corner of the stage and I had Catherine to myself - between my department and the make-up department we just went ahead and did anything we could think of, We had a little video camera, so that the people in America could see how the new characters were coming along, and we spent weeks doing this, until we came up with the look that we ended up with.
I think the thing that I hated about the original series of Space were the uniforms. I hated them, because they weren't flattering to any of the artistes, they were so restricting. I've been watching the show again and they walk around the set, but they've got nothing to do with their hands. As soon as we did the second series I said "Right. Great! We don't have to stick to the uniform do we?" and they said, "No, we can do what we like." So then we altered it. We gave them skirts, we gave then boots, we gave them patches and pockets, and the actors felt more comfortable. They were so stiff in those initial costumes because they didn't have anything to do. They couldn't put hands in pockets or anything and they were frightened to move in case lumps and bumps showed up, which they did. I thought it was a big mistake that costume. Anyway, I didn't have control over that on the first series, but it was good that we were able to change it. I think that was the good part of the second series, the fact that we were able to make the actors more believable.
One thing about Space which I still think was extraordinary, was the casting. Some of the actors that we got on those shows were unbelievable. We had Richard Johnson, Leo McKern, Joan Collins, Judy Geeson, and a lot of them just had quite small parts. It was amazing. I don't know how they managed to get all those really quite big actors for the time on the show like that.
Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were also guests in different episodes.
Right, but they wore the same wig! I had it made for Christopher Lee first, the long white wig, and if you look at Missing Link, Peter Cushing was wearing it too. Well, they were chums, you know!
I had a little problem with Christopher Lee on Earthbound. In the first series, l had more of a total control over the make-up, the hair, the costume, particularly with our aliens. I would always design the alien, in Whatever form, even if it was Christopher Lee. I designed his out of it, and of course, when creating an alien like this, you're designing the makeup as well, so I would work with the make-up and hair departments. We built his nose up, I wanted it absolutely straight, but he didn't want this, he was not happy about having this on his face. And after the first day's shooting, they removed the make-up, and it took the skin off his nose!
Another famous guest star was Margaret Leighton in Collision Course, and it was the last thing she did before her death.
Yes, it certainly was the last thing she did. She was wonderful, but she didn't understand a word she was saying. She had a lot of nonsense to say and hadn't a clue what it meant. She was really quite worried about it. I designed her clothes on that episode a nd the interior of the ship. ,You'll see the throne she sits in pops up in a few more episodes, if you're very clever - or if I'm not that clever!
It's Leo McKern's bed in The Infernal Machine and cropped up again as Patrick Troughton's throne in The Dorcons.
That's absolutely right! But that was the whole point of the show, I kept re-using things. What was so nice about it from my point of view, was that each week I had to keep thinking of new things and I was looking at objects in a different way. I remember going to one of the companies in London where we'd hire furniture from. I'd got a lot of furniture, lighting and other things imported especially for Space:1999. All those white lamps, chairs and so on were brought in from Italy, and we were the first people to have them in this country. So I was in one of these hire houses one day and they had a pile of square chrome tables with all the glass tops taken off, and they were just stacked in a pile. They made a spiral, all stacked on top of each other, and I looked at this and thought, "That looks really good." So I hired it as it was, just two dozen tables without the glass in all stacked up, and I used it as a piece of sculpture. All the time I was looking for unusual things around me and turning them upside down and making them into something that they weren't. But that's what was so nice: that really nobody told me what to do. I could do what I wanted.
Do you not have that same kind of freedom in the work that you do now?
Not really, because my actual title of Production Designer is literally that, and it should be. It isn't always, depending on the subject matter. If it's a big design movie, like Waterworld or Thunderbirds, everything has to be designed - then the designer has a lot more influence. But if it's present day, I'm not going to worry about what costume that person's wearing, so I don't get involved in the clothes, but if it's a total design job, it's essential that I do. There's no point in a Costume Designer coming up with an outfit that looks ridiculous in a set that I've just built - the colours don't match or whatever - so there has to be a continuity of feel for anything artistic on the show, anything that needs to be designed. So my influence is obviously much bigger in a film like that.