Longstanding family friend and regular interviewee Michael Pickwoad told me on various sets: “A production designer should think like a director and behave like a producer,” trying to combine the creative with an acute sense of the bottom line. He saw his job as “fun” – challenging to entertaining via plain good.
Quentin Falk
I worked on location in Bucharest with Michael Pickwoad on a BBC version of Sweeney Todd (2006), directed by David Moore.
We were based in a studio where an ill-fated production had partially built multiple sets for a film about the Vatican. Michael, spotting them on the back-lot, saw a way of cannibalising these unrelated and at first unpromising structures to recreate part of Victorian London – even providing for the suggestion of the River Fleet running beneath the city.
As well as designing a series of exquisite interior sets, Michael commissioned huge painted backdrops which provided perspective and depth to street scenes and allowed for an authentic flow of interior to exterior action. Our small budget was enriched beyond measure, and although Michael balked at the lack of available funds, once his vision and ingenuity came into play he knew he could provide what was needed with the support of his colleagues on the production.
Caroline Hewitt
In 1984, Michael Pickwoad was finishing a painting of Queen Victoria on a film set (for the eventually uncompleted The Bengal Lancers!) in the Umaid Bhawan Palace, Jodhpur, in India. During a break for Christopher Lee’s sideburns to be refixed I went over to compliment him on the deceptive new wall he’d had made blocking the corridor in true Edwin Lutyens style. He looked dull and unanimated – not his usual self. Normally his face was so lively that all the parts of it would seem to be working independently.
“I’ve been up all night on this,” he said – showing me the nearly completed queen’s portrait. “For some reason ours didn’t arrive from London. We even had the measurements, so the frame has already been made here. But the painting didn’t come, so last night I set to. There was a full moon, and I was painting outdoors. I became aware of a strange noise – I couldn’t work out what it was at all. It sounded like gas escaping from several gasworks, mixed with the roar of central heating flues. It would take almost a minute to die down, then start up again. It was weird.
“Eventually I climbed the wall and found myself looking down into the yard beyond. There was a heap of our eight elephants – asleep. They were snoring. Their breathing out took so long to filter down through their long trunks.”
Stephen Weeks