Behind the scenes

He looks more like a country squire or a senior cleric than a film designer, but Assheton Gorton’s screen career has spanned almost half a century and brought him into contact with some of the great figures of the cinema. Gorton cuts an imposing figure, with his big, handsome head, sturdy physique and deceptively stern expression. He comes from a long line of clergymen, and it doesn’t stretch the imagination to visualise him in a pulpit, preaching fire and brimstone to a rapt congregation. He has, at various times in his long career, become disillusioned with the film business, but right now, with two new films awaiting release, Shadow of the Vampire and 102 Dalmations, he’s as frisky and forward-looking as someone half his age.

“I’m not at all social,” he confides. “In many ways it’s surprising I’ve lasted as long as I have. I’ve never networked and I hate parties. If ever I have to go to one, I’m in and out as quickly as possible. What reputation I have is what gets me the work.”

It’s a reputation that was established way back in the 1960s, with three seminal films – The Knack (1965), Blow Up (1966) and The Bedsitting Room (1969) – each one very much of its time. Then came the 1971 gangster classic Get Carter, starring Sir Michael Caine, recently re-made in the US with Sylvester Stallone replacing Caine as hard-man Carter, hell-bent on avenging his brother’s murder.

The link between those cult successes was ABC Television, where Gorton cut his teeth in the 1950s, first as a draughtsman, then as a production designer. Both Dick Lester, who directed The Knack and The Bedsitting Room, and Mike Hodges, who penned Get Carter, started there at the same time. “The average age of the creatives at ABC was 27, so the energy level was amazing. We did live drama in those days, things like Armchair Theatre, extremely pressurised, very exciting, never enough time. We had a brilliant young head of design, Timothy O’Brien, who taught me everything. I’m sure some of the things we did were as good as anything being done in feature films,” says Gorton.

Gorton took 12 weeks unpaid leave to make his film debut, The Knack, directed by Dick Lester, who had just had a huge hit with the first Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night.

“I spent a lot of time rooting around junk shops for props,” he recalls. “I knew how to do the creative stuff, but this being my first film, I wasn’t very good at sticking up for my rights and demanding an assistant to do all the donkey work. Besides, I was very particular about what I wanted.”

The Knack won a major award at Cannes, as did Gorton’s next film, Blow Up, considered by many to be the seminal film of the 1960s. Despite its quintessential Britishness, Blow Up was actually produced by Carlo Ponti and directed by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, whose way of working was quite different from any other.

“Antonioni looked for the locations first, then wrote the script to fit the locations, which made me pretty crucial to the whole enterprise. When it came to the final sequence with the clowns miming a game of tennis, I found a perfect location in a park in [east London’s] Woolwich. Antonioni wanted to use as little colour as possible, so we had to paint the red paths black. There was a row of houses at the back of the park, and he asked me if I could obtain permission to paint them white. Needless to say, that wasn’t possible, so he said, ‘Oh, never mind, we’ll just have to build some.’ We built a row of houses so that he could get the shot he wanted. It seemed extreme at the time, but it turned out to be the key to the whole sequence,” he says.

The Bedsitting Room, a comedy about the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, was filmed on bomb sites and wasteland all over the south of England. Gorton’s challenge was to make it look like a barren, de-populated landscape – there were only 25 people left alive – without it looking too dreary.

That, too, became a cult success and it’s a film that Gorton holds in particularly high esteem. His extraordinary run of success came to an abrupt, self-inflicted halt in 1971, when Gorton decided, following a bad experience with a film version of Alice in Wonderland, to drop out. “I’d done a lot of painstaking and detailed preparatory work on Alice in Wonderland, so when the producers turned round and said the budget had been cut in half, I thought ‘I’m not having this’ and left,” says Gorton.

He returned to his roots in the Lake District, and spent the next six years sketching and painting the scenery, communing with nature, and designing the occasional TV commercial to keep his hand in. The drawings and watercolours he made during this period, confined to dog-eared sketch pads, are exquisite. Like most of Gorton’s private art work, they remain undiscovered and un-exhibited.

Appropriately, the film he worked on after this period of creative replenishment was The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), memorable as much for its painterly visuals as for the twists and turns of John Fowles’ narrative. All the exteriors were shot in Lyme Regis, in Dorset. “They closed the main street down for two days. If you looked down the street where we were filming, it was all 19th century period detail, an old clipper in the bay, sheep being herded across the road, then you turned round and, looking up the street, all you could see were unit vehicles, generators and local people, leaning out of first-floor windows and balconies, craning to watch the action. It was a wonderful piece of theatre,” he recalls. “I watched it the other day, the first time for ages, and I felt very pleased with what we’d achieved. Each space had a different tale to tell.”

Karel Reisz, who directed The French Lieutenant’s Woman, recalls Gorton’s passion for long shots. “He was always trying to talk me into long shots rather than close-ups, even if we only held the shot for a matter of seconds,” says Reisz. “He felt you needed a sense of the bigger picture before you could enjoy the details. It wasn’t enough for him to create a Victorian drawing room. That room must express the character of the person who owns it.

“Literal detail is not what it’s about for Gorton. It’s about structure and character and feeling. He focuses your mind like nobody else.”

At a time when ordinary mortals would be considering retirement or at least slowing down a little, Gorton has been working harder than ever, with two Disney blockbusters under his belt – 101 Dalmations and the sequel, 102 Dalmations, and Shadow of the Vampire, about the making of the silent classic, Nosferatu, the first ever vampire movie.

John Malkovich plays FW Murnau, the director of Nosferatu, who would deliberately frighten his actors in order to achieve realistic effects. “We had 36 days of shooting, with nearly 50 sets, so it was extremely hard work,” says Gorton. “But I was pleased to find that I could still withstand 19-hour days without any ill effects. It was a young team and a gruelling schedule. Just about everything I’ve learnt as a film designer over the years came into play.”

The biggest challenge of 102 Dalmations, due for release in December, was to construct a bakery in which the evil Cruella de Vil finally gets her comeuppance. Gorton says, “I wanted to dispatch Cruella in spectacular style so the bakery became ever more complex as we worked on it, eventually filling the whole of Shepperton Studios’ biggest stage.”

One of the most gratifying aspects of working in films, says Gorton, is that you gain insights into other creative disciplines. “I like the idea of all these different skills and crafts feeding into a central idea,” he says.

Does he ever think about retirement now that he’s entering his eighth decade? “I’m wary of admitting my age because people tend to assume you’re past it, but to my mind it gets more interesting as you get older. You have more to offer, not less. No, I shall carry on as long as I’m in demand.”

102 Dalmations is released in the UK on 8 December, and Shadow of the Vampire is due for release at the end of December