Moulding Clay

Middlesbroughborn Jim Clay has come a long way from building model theatres as a ten-year-old, Steve Pratt discovers.

WHEN he received a phone call asking: "Would you be interested in working with Woody Allen?", Jim Clay thought it was a wind-up. His scepticism was understandable.

Why would an American director who'd spent his film-making life in his beloved New York want to employ a British production designer? The answer, as Middlesbrough-born Clay discovered, was that Allen was planning to make his first film outside the US. In London, to be precise.

"I was told I had to phone Woody in Manhattan at 12 o'clock on a Sunday lunchtime. They said 'he's not that accessible and may not talk to you at all'.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. I dialled the New York number and Woody Allen answered the phone himself."

The conversation must have gone well as Clay worked on Allen's comedy-drama Match Point after introducing the Oscar-winning writer and director to the capital. "He came over and we had seven weeks driving around London looking at locations and he was totally accessible the whole time, although he didn't talk to a lot of people, mostly myself and the director of photography."

The idea of someone from Teesside introducing an award-winning American film-maker to the sights of London has a certain bizarre ring to it. For Clay, creating the unusual is all part of the job. He's the man who put Hugh Grant into No 10 for Love Actually.

He built two theatres along with the streets of 17th century London for Stage Beauty. He recreated 19th century Russia for Onegin, then built a Greek island village -which he witnessed reduced to rubble by bombs and an earthquake in Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

Nothing can been as odd as his first BBC job - designing for a radio programme, Any Questions, where his work was seen by the studio audience.

Since winning best design Baftas for two Dennis Potter TV series, The Singing Detective and Christabel, the former architect has created grand designs for the big screen. A production designer is, he says, "the person who works closely with the director to determine the visual world that is the movie". He's the first of the visual team on board a project, and his role isn't purely creative as he puts the construction and prop teams together. His department employs as many as 150 people, depending on whether the movie budget is in the hundreds of thousands or millions.

"I'd like to think I have a nice portfolio of period and contemporary work. If I get categorised at all, it's for creative realism rather than the fantasy world, which I've never got into."

Design was always an interest for the former Acklam Hall Grammar School pupil who designed houses for his parents from the age of ten. "I remember building a model theatre which I dragged along with me on holiday to Scarborough. I was obsessed by it."

Being taken to see a school production of The Gondoliers was a big influence. "The magic was there and I knew what I wanted to do, " he says.

His desire to design led him to join an architects' firm in his home town as a junior trainee. But he was always looking for a way out and seeing a BBC advertisement for designers provided him with an exit in 1970.

"They trained me, gave me my university education. The great thing about the BBC in those days was they had a big art department of 90 people and gave you a good training, " he says.

HE worked his way up through education programmes and Top Of The Pops - he remembers a young Elton John being among the performers - into drama. Producer Ken Trodd gave him his big break on The Singing Detective. "I'd done a couple of dramas and Ken was always a renegade producer who'd take risks and give people a chance, so I owe everything after that to Ken, " he says.

With a double Bafta win, Clay left to become a freelance film production designer. His first movies, Queen Of Hearts and Aunt Julia & The Scriptwriter, were for Singing Detective director Jon Amiel. The latter took him to the US, as did the Sigourney Weaver/Holly Hunter serial killer movie Copycat. He was "vaguely tempted" to stay but the lure of family, friends and London proved stronger.

His might find himself working in contemporary London or recreating a Greek island village during the Second World War. He's worked with Hugh Grant twice. As he was playing the British Prime Minister in Richard Curtis's comedy Love Actually, Clay had to build Downing Street in the studio.

"Richard Curtis and I had a day at No 10 when Gordon Brown showed us around. I couldn't take photographs, so I had to memorise the layout, come out, get in the car and sketch it out, " he says. The interior of No 10, along with the famous exterior, was built in the studios.

Grant took a greater-than-usual interest in the making of another comedy, About A Boy. "That was great to do because we all believed in the script. It was a fun script and everyone felt all along it was the right vehicle for Hugh Grant. He was very involved because he was nervous as it was a departure for him, a more serious role, " he says.

"Some actors do want a say in things. John Hurt, on Captain Corelli's Mandolin, was always in the art department wanting to know what things were going to be like." That film had a considerably bigger budget than Martha Fiennes' romantic drama Onegin, set in 19th century Russia. With a modest £10m budget, Clay built one big composite set that "we turned around for different things".

A frozen river for a skating scene was built at Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire, using trickery to create perspective. To give the impression of depth against the flat painted backdrop of St Petersburg, the smallest actors were positioned nearest the camera. It certainly fooled the Russians whom, he reports, thought the film crew had filmed secretly on the river.

The only time he's really hassled for a job was on Neil Jordan's gender bender drama The Crying Game. "I wanted to work with him so I went to Dublin and knocked on his door with my portfolio.

He gave me a job, " he says.

The key to doing his job successfully is having a rapport with the director, he feels. "If you don't have that, it's pointless doing it." He particularly enjoyed working with John Madden, on Captain Corelli's Mandolin, and Richard Eyre, on Stage Beauty, as they are "both so visually aware and involved me at every level from day one".

Allen was impressed enough to offer him two more films since Match Point. Scheduling prevented Clay accepting either. He's been in Rome and Tuscany working on The Decameron: Angels & Virgins (now retitled Guilty Pleasures) with Hayden Christensen, alias Luke Skywalker in recent Star Wars movies. Working for veteran producer Dino de Laurentiis proved memorable, not least because the 83-year-old was on location every morning at 6am.

Clay has just finished The Children Of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who made Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban. The film, set 30 years in the future, involved building apartment blocks that had to be bombed.

His childhood model theatre was replaced by the real thing between leaving the BBC and going into movies. He worked as stage manager and designer at Middlesbrough Little Theatre, before designing several London West End shows, including the doomed musical Barnardo and Man And Superman with Peter O'Toole.

"You do theatre for love and passion, you can't make a living out of it, " he says. "There's very much more opportunity for designers in film. Cinema is about manipulating space and light. Whether it's a Venetian apartment or a basement flat in London, you're essentially using the same tools."

Sometimes all the hard work doesn't pay off. He was particularly disappointed that Captain Corelli's Mandolin received such a poor reception. "I was disappointed because we were a strong team making it with love and blood. When it's destroyed that way, there's a real element of sadness that it could be written off that early."