That was after my role in Blade Runner when I got a single card credit and had to think this up on the phone because they were doing the after credit role in New York in some Compositing studio. So I thought I have always done future stuff and it has always been visual, so that's where it came from. It was that quick. It's comprehensive, a bumper stick title that is strangely, explicitly vague.
Did you have any contemporaries or did you feel isolated with these visions of the future?
Well I really didn't have much interaction with anything. When I grew up, I could draw very, very well when I was aged 11 or so and by the time I was in high school I started a graphic novel, never got quite far with it because I was using prisma coloured pencils which was a very laborious colouring process. But my parents gave me a book, Chesley Bonestell's 'Conquest of Space' and Chesley visualised very accurately what the East Coast, for instance, looked like from orbit. He painted views of the planet surfaces of the moon, so he was very influential in my life in helping me think about rendering things that hadn't happened yet and might not ever happen - like fantasies. But techno fantasies was a particular thing that I enjoyed because being an industrial designer without education you essentially fabricate something in your mind based on construction principals and fabrication methods that don't exist. You keep up with a wave front of technology and what's happening and you extrapolate from that and you can come up with possibilities that are really quite interesting and then because things look the way they do because of how they are made that influences the whole pictorial process too.
Were some of your visions shaped from what happened in dreams or the sub-conscious?
When you're visualising scenario you have to be there, so I would be working for instance, on architectural illustration and in my dream I would be in the illustration and realise the lighting was wrong or something was the wrong shadow, and I would go in the next day and correct it. So to that extent my brain was helping me along, I suppose you might say that.
Does that become problematic when you are working on a dystopia like Blade Runner as opposed to the utopia of what a future society could be?
No, in Blade Runner I helped Ridley Scott professionally produce a dystopian, exotic world, which was really just an illustration of Philip K. Dicks rather dire story and so that has nothing to do with my personal point of view. That was a job and I did it very well and imagined techniques that didn't exist. You know I had to design a vehicle for Sebastian made from junk that you would find in a junk yard in 2019, so I had to make it all up. What I really did was essentially industrial design in reverse.
You had been doing commercial design work and illustration for 20 years before getting into movies. What part did the Army play in your early career?
I graduated from high school, then I had about a year and a half in junior collage in Colorado Springs with a couple of part-time jobs and then a full-time job and then the draft happened for the Korean War. I was at the ripe age for cannon fighter, you know young. So I joined to control my future to the extent that I knew where I was going. They gave preferential treatment to people who joined in terms of working towards an MOS (Military Occupational Specialty). So I ended up as a training sergeant in Okinawa for an engineering company, you know all Garrison duty. I missed going to Korea by 3 pages of general order, so that's fate, you can't control that. After the Army, which I processed out in 1956 – early part of the year – I flew down to Art Centre, was accepted on the spot, went back home to Colorado Springs filled out the summer doing shop windows and stripping cars and then started Art Centre and graduated in 1959.
After the army you travelled to Asia and were very fortunate to be exposed to opulent and exotic places. Did that influence your future designs?
Not really... no. When I was in the Army a buddy of mine took a months vacation in Hong Kong. Okinawa is oriental of course, and I was brushed up against part of the culture and profile but not that really much. Hong Kong was a bit more intense and between the time I quit Ford in '61 and was hired by a small company in Chicago, I took a round trip to Tokyo in Japan because I knew student graduates there from Art Centre. I met a German fellow there named Hans Bretzner, he was the one who started Mitsubishi's automobile styling studio. He was an ex-GM junior executive. My first visit to Japan was in 1961 so that was a long time before Blade Runner and so people say "Oh well, you were inspired by the Ginza" and I say no that's not true.
Is there a scenario approach to the creation of vehicles in your images?
Well there is always a story, because then it makes it easier to think up and flush out the illustration. You know how the people are dressed or maybe there is a social implied or more elaborately depicted social situation and the vehicles are sort of inspired by shape and just to make them look cool.
You've gone far further than just industrial design and you seem very savvy with current engineering technology. What references tend to fascinate you?
Well Discovery magazines, Scientific American, the Economist and all these do a very excellent job of sort of de-tuning high technology for readability. I just discovered that some Swedish scientists have just perfected a thin film, light omitting, organic LED which can be made by the metre so you can have pictorial wall paper by the metre it doesn't matter how big you want it. They are now starting to experiment with printing live cell structures and eventually to create new duplicates of internal organs. You can have a duplicate liver or heart or pancreas or kidney growing somewhere and if something goes wrong you just get a new one. That is fantastic.
Do you sometimes question why the delay with realising ideas you have initiated?
Well the public and society is the ultimate machine. If you invent or create something and nobody likes it, then you might as well not have done it. You may be honoured later on like Teslar or Buckminster Fuller or different people who were really ahead of their time, but they had another problem - they were ahead of their time. The public mentality didn't know what they were doing and it didn't drop in conveniently to an existing function slot. For technology to be widely accepted it has to be at least as good as what it is replacing and if it is really a leap forward then it will catch on very quickly - like the Internet or miniaturised electronics. The future came through little bits and pieces of consumer items. The overall infrastructure, and this is all countries, was just eaten up by very narrow slices of social entitlements and things like that and the infrastructure separate. There is just not enough money to go around.
Popularism doesn't necessarily lead to the greater good. Do you find some directions we shouldn't be going in the future?
Well society or empires traditionally go through an S curve and they flourish and get to reach the top of their exoticness, their development and so forth, and then they decline based on how fast the social structure collates upwards to an elite - which becomes bureaucrats or royalty or essentially financial equity royalty. That's exactly what's happening in this country for sure and in many of the countries. Where you have financially blessed elite then the money goes to the top and the pyramid starts to flatten out.
Some would say that to predict a future trajectory, you must acknowledge the past and it sounds as though you have put this in a greater context. When did you start thinking along these lines, was it as early as 1950?
No, recently... In the 50s and 60s in the developed countries (maybe not so much Europe) there was an exuberance after the War finished in ' 45 of consumerism and the future was going to be fantastic. We had the technology to do some really surprising things, even back then, compared to what had happened before. Through the War effort boosted scientific exploration radar and some electro-magnetic techniques and so forth and even nuclear energy for that matter and then it slowly slowed down because the infrastructure suffered. In this country, if we hadn't built our interstate highway system when we did, the Eisenhower administration, I don't think that would have ever happened.
There is a whole world that knows you essentially for film and video, which only equates to about 20% of your work. You have worked with some of the largest clientele, biggest companies, and biggest names with the most ambitious projects that the popular culture could attribute to one individual. What has been the most satisfying challenge in your career?
Well, one of them came true and the other one never did. One of them was designing the interior of King Fahd's private 747 and that was challenging because I had never done it before. Secondly, I was working with some very intelligent people in the aircraft industry and I had to insert a palace inside of a flying aircraft and we did that. The second marvellous thing never happened. The 747 happened and was flown off to Saudi Arabia, it's meant to have been refurbished 3 times and they tend to discard things when they get old, even 747's. The other project that was huge and I was working for a fellow in Rome. This was a one billion dollar first phase extravaganza which was supposed to be located in Singapore between Changi airport and downtown off the coast. It was very ambitious, he flew in, his estate was outside of Rome, he had a sit down dinner for 200 people, travel agents, the whole spiel they say and I was there doing part of the presentation and it never happened.
Will art work of that be published in the future?
It has been visualised and I'll show one of those images in the presentation that I have prepared for our four city visit this time.
Will more biographical material be released in the future?
Well Century 2, we are working on that right now. I've placed all the images, I'm using Quirk Express as the software and so essentially I'm writing text. Actually, writing the text is the hardest part of even a picture book because you know it's not a novel and it has to be descriptive, concise and it will only fit 2, 3 and 4 edits like I did for the other book which was the 1st Century. So this will be Century 2. I suppose the title might be judged prosaic, it is in chrome and it satisfied my whole fascination with cars, badging and it looks mechanical which is part of my shtick.
Has awareness of climate change had any impact on your designs?
Well no, no not really. The global climate change thing is of course happening. It is observable, that's for sure, with satellites. The computer models for what is actually happening are woefully under-qualified to make a definitive answer. To the point if we did shut down the carbon omissions and so forth, we don't have the technology and may not have for quite some time to find out if what we did actually was what influenced it. Carbon Dioxide - we need that on the planet for life. It is what plants need to live and we breathe it out. I mean there are 6 billion people in the world and I don't know how much carbon dioxide they breathe out. Termites actually produce more methane than all the cattle in the world. The bio-mass of the insect world produces enormous amounts of methane for instance so all these factors come in to play.
The beautiful thing is your designs house the mechanics and should that machinery evolve, then your designs will always remain relevant.
Technology has tended to be both a curse and a blessing depending on how it is put into use. My favourite example is a very sharp knife. You can bone a duck or carve a steak exactly or you can stab somebody, so you don't get rid of all the knives in the world otherwise we would all be eating with our hands like they did 4,000 years ago. It's all about using the technology. There is a new, smaller nuclear power plant that can be made rather cheaply compared to the huge big ones for 700/800 thousand dollars, it churns out enough electricity to power and light maybe 8,000 houses and there is a company that is now going to produce it. The whole crisis that technology produces is usually solved by the curiosity the companies using technologically to advance in the first place.
Have you ever seen your work being reproduced or presented in a completely opposing manner to which you conceived it?
Sometimes you come up with an idea, and it is a good idea and you think it is a good idea and wonder why don't we travel around like this? Years and years ago in the 60's I was rendering for Automobile Quarterly, which is a hardcover periodical and it showed a single wheel device balanced by a gyro and then the Segway comes along - which is really quite astonishing. But the Segway is rather cumbersome. It's very heavy, you can't lift it once you buy it and you have to park it. Some fellow has just invented a semi-circular bicycle that folds up, you can carry it under your arm onto the bus or train, tuck it under your bed and it is an electrical bicycle. The rear wheel folds out and it literally becomes a little metallic, carbon fibre package that you can easily carry under your arm. So that is quite amazing.
Have you thought of patenting some of the concepts?
Well that goes in the manufacturing. I know several people that have gone into that process. That is taxing, it can be fruitful, but it is a very hazardous route to go on. I respect very much the people that have the financial wear with all and the persistence to pursue these things, because it can be a complete disaster or it could be very successful, you really don't know.
What future have you forged for yourself?
Oh gosh, I'm not going to retire because I don't know what I'd do. We have friends that are well funded that cruise the world constantly, I think that would drive me mad. We have a cruise to Sydney that will be 17 days and I have never been on a cruise ship for that amount of time, neither Roger nor I have, so we'll see. It will be an adventure.
