No name is more synonymous with the look of the Bond films than Ken Adam. The production designer started making his signature futuristic sets with the very first Bond film, Dr. No. Fans can also see his handiwork in The Spy Who Loved Me — where he conceived the huge Liparus set — and You Only Live Twice. In that film, Adam built Blofeld’s spectacular volcano headquarters for Bond’s climactic battle against the SPECTRE organization. Ian Fleming’s novel originally had Blofeld stationed at a castle on the Japanese coastline. But since there were no castles along the water in Japan (typhoons!), producers changed his headquarters to the inside of an extinct volcano, which was constructed on an outdoor lot at Pinewood Studios for a cool $1 million — more than the entire production budget of Dr. No.
Adam was behind the inside of Drax’s orbiting space station for Moonraker, as well — a three-story set requiring the work of 220 technicians using 100 tons of metal, two tons of nails and 10,000 feet of wood.