Syd Mead: The man who created the look and feel of 'Bladerunner'

Linda Hales interviewed him for a story that appeared in this past Sunday's Washington Post.

Easily in my all-time top 10 pantheon of movies, "Bladerunner" blew me away when I first saw it.

I watched the long-awaited "Director's Cut" last year and though it was a much more understandable narrative, oddly enough it wasn't nearly as compelling a film as the original version.

Perhaps the suits in the executive suites get it right once in a while.

But I digress.

A documentary, "Visual Futurist: The Art and Life of Syd Mead," premieres this coming Sunday, July 23 in Los Angeles.

Here's the Post article.

Bleak Chic to Future Perfect

'Blade Runner's' Dark Look Can't Mask the Bright Ideas of Syd Mead

Syd Mead presents a strangely cheery demeanor for a guy who dreamed up the cinematic imagery for the collapse of civilization.

The legendary illustrator says happily, for instance, that science fiction is simply "reality ahead of schedule." This from the same mind that created the settings for the iconic 1982 sci-fi film "Blade Runner" -- a brilliant, disturbing vision of Los Angeles in 2019 that garnered him a reputation as Hollywood's most potent "visual conceptualizer."

By then, Mead had made his mark in the movies, designing the V'ger spaceship for "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" (1979). He would go on to define the electronic netherworld of "Tron" (1982) and design the Sulaco spacecraft for "Aliens" (1986), the Leonov ship in "2010" (1984) and the mask-making machine for this year's "Mission: Impossible III." He also updated the motorcycles for the video game Tron 2.0.

But nothing he's done has caught the popular imagination quite like "Blade Runner," with its spectacular flying patrol cars and societal decay. With the film's 25th anniversary next year and a director's cut due for release, Mead's futuristic perspective is on camera anew.

A documentary, "Visual Futurist: The Art and Life of Syd Mead," will debut in Los Angeles next Sunday. In it, the bespectacled guy at the drawing table is seen as a genius at fantasy. But how does the artist see himself?

"I think I'm disturbingly rational," Mead says in an interview. Or, make that "carefully crazy."

Mead, who turns 73 Tuesday, flew in from Pasadena, Calif., for a White House reception Monday for the National Design Award winners. The jury had a special commendation for Mead, honoring his influence on how others design for the future.

Richard Koshalek, president of Mead's alma mater, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, calls him "a major force" who anticipated the challenges of creating humane environments amid global urbanization and increasingly complex technologies.

Mead's role in the movies is pure art. He paints meticulous scenarios that bring scripts to life and provide the basis for prop and set construction. The visions are rooted in industrial design, as befits a graduate of the Valhalla of automobile design -- early in his career, Mead designed concept cars for Ford Motor Co. He left Detroit after developing "an uneasy feeling I was going to spend my life doing bumpers and trim."

He turned to illustrating corporate brochures. Wild, onion-shaped vehicles painted for a 1960s publication advertising U.S. Steel eventually caught the attention of John Dykstra, a special-effects wizard for "Star Wars" who introduced Mead to the movie business.

Mead traces his imagination to things he sees "in his dreams." Illustrated books, such as "Oblagon: Concepts of Syd Mead," show helmeted creatures watching over a mega-city far below. Armored trucks clump across a moonscape on robotic legs, moving like steel elephants. Fantasy weapons are sketched with stunning precision. The scale is inevitably larger-than-life, the light eerie, the silence deafening.

The scenes are bizarre, but the inspiration is rooted in real-world research into how things work.

"The premise is more based on science than on fiction," Mead says. "You can't imagine something you can't imagine."

Mead points out the familiar touchstones -- vehicles, clothing, houses -- that pull viewers into strange lands. He tweaks the recognizable objects into futuristic forms. Cars become flying "spinners" inspired by Harrier jets. People wear pressure suits that resemble lobster shells. Monumental structures take their cue from ancient Greece and Rome.

"It's accurate, but completely improbable," he says. "The reality is that we are wondering whether we can get man to Mars."

Mead worries that his most memorable work has become a cliche, and winces as he says " 'Blade Runner'-esque."

For that film's futuristic city, Mead started with a Manhattan streetscape, then enlarged the scale by 300 percent. With buildings rising to 3,000 feet, he redesigned the bases as pyramids, and he layered architectural styles to achieve a "retro deco" look. Unlike such early 20th-century films as "Metropolis" (1927), which portrayed the city of the future as clean and smoothly functional, Mead made "Blade Runner" eclectic, chaotic and highly technical "in an almost punitive way."

Mead says he doesn't subscribe to "Blade Runner's" bleak view.

"I helped Ridley do a professionally dreary film," says Mead, referring to director Ridley Scott. "That is no reflection on my own vision."

He flips quickly to an illustration in "Oblagon," which shows a flourishing hydroponic garden and a utopian city in full sun. That's his way of saying the future might yet bring "Elysian gardens, at least in pockets," if we get our act together.

While waiting for the future to catch up with his visions, Mead keeps busy on Planet Earth. He has designed super-yachts, nightclub interiors, theme parks, hotels, video games and snowboard graphics. He calls an $87 million flying palace for the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia "the single most challenging and satisfying design project I've ever done."

His Apple laptop contains tantalizing works-in-progress: A next-generation luxury car in bronzed glass has a periscope for forward vision. A state-of-the-art tower scrolls skyward from a flying saucer-like base -- a work for a client in the Middle East.

Mead is also thinking about anti-gravity private conveyances, but they -- like his steel "jump vehicles" from the 1960s -- seem way ahead of the times.

Mead often is asked why the future he paints, and which sci-fi films extol, has not come true. He believes it has, in a fashion.

"We have the iPod, cellphones, BlackBerrys and tons of stuff orbiting the Earth," he says. It's just that "the future did not come true across the board."

....................

Or, as William Gibson remarked, "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed."

More?

See Wikipedia's Syd Mead page and/or visit his website.

And if you're in L.A. this coming weekend and want to meet the master himself, who'll be in attendance at the documentary film's premiere, it's screening at 12:30 p.m. at the Fairfax 3 Theater (7907 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles; 323-655-4010).

Ticket information here.