A few days after receiving the Art Directors Guild award for his work on “The Martian,” production designer Arthur Max ruminated on the seven nominations and two wins he had received from the guild over the course of his 13-film career (his first award, in 2001, was for “Gladiator,” which, like “The Martian,” was directed by Ridley Scott, with whom Max works frequently).
“Seven nominations and two wins isn’t bad,” Max said. Then with a laugh, he added, “Being nominated is nice; winning is better.” Next up: the Academy Awards. If Max, 69, picks up the statuette, it will be his first win after three nominations.
“The Martian” tells the story of astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon), a member of a scientific team conducting research on the red planet. A sudden, powerful windstorm forces the group to abandon its mission, return to the spaceship and blast back into the relative safety of space. Watney, lying unconscious on the ground after being struck by debris, is presumed dead and left behind. But he is still very much alive and must use his skill, ingenuity and wit to establish contact with NASA — and then to survive until the agency can figure out a way to rescue him.
Principal photography began in November 2014 at Korda Studios, just outside Budapest. All six soundstages were devoted to the movie. “We had 70 sets and had to revamp each one several times to accommodate all the different scenes,” Max said. “Some sets were put on wheels or modularized in sections so they could be dismantled and wheeled off as other sets were coming in. It was pretty jammed up.”
Korda houses the world’s largest soundstage, and that’s where the Mars surface was re-created, using thousands of tons of trucked-in sand, dirt and rocks. “Shooting on a stage gives you control over the weather and the lighting,” Max said. “That was essential for the sandstorm sequence.”
All outdoor dialogue scenes involving the Ares III crew were shot on the set. However, when Watney is alone, scouring the planet for usable technical equipment and driving the rover in search of a launch site for his revamped space capsule in the latter part of the film, the filmmakers shot in an actual desert: the Wadi Rum Desert of Jordan. Fans of “Lawrence of Arabia” will remember Omar Sharif referring to this brutal stretch of land as “the sun’s anvil.”
Max’s research took him to the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. “Manned space missions are the province of the Johnson Space Center, while JPL develops and builds unmanned probes,” he said. Although production designers aren’t expected to be experts in a given field when they are hired, Max’s academic background in science and architecture certainly gave him a leg up on “The Martian.”
Arthur Max
As a boy, he wanted to be an artist, but his parents didn’t consider it “a real career.” The irony was that Max’s father made his living as a bookie, gambling away most of his own earnings and then running through all the money his son received for his bar mitzvah — money intended to pay for college. Luckily, young Arthur’s proficiency in science and math landed him a full scholarship to study science at New York University.
Max had an unconventional childhood, to say the least. A natural-born raconteur, he picked up the story from there. “I was raised by my maternal grandmother in Harlem until I was 6 years old, because my parents [who lived elsewhere in the city] were out having a good time every night, going to nightclubs and racetracks. My mother’s job as a bookkeeper kept the family afloat. My father [went through periods of] doing well, and, during one such period, we moved to the suburbs. My classmates would bully and beat me. I wasn’t the only Jew, but I was the only Jew who talked back,” he said.
“My parents weren’t the least bit religious, but my paternal grandfather, who was born in Minsk, was Orthodox. I was the eldest grandchild, and my parents offered me up, so to speak, sending me to an Orthodox yeshiva. I got thrown out after a year for punching the rabbi’s son in the face, but I was allowed to continue with Hebrew school.
“My bar mitzvah was a lavish affair: 200 guests, ice-sculptured swans, a 10-piece band. My father’s friends looked like extras out of ‘The Godfather,’ while my mother’s side all worked in the garment district and came dressed to the nines. Every half-hour, my father would drag me into the restroom to empty my pockets of checks and cash. I never saw any of it again.”
Max worked several part-time jobs while attending NYU, including assisting commercial photographers and artists. “I ran some stage plans up to a place in Vermont that was hosting some big music festival — and ended up getting a job on the lighting crew at Woodstock! That led to a job as a lighting designer at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East. I was accepted into a graduate program in architecture at Cooper Union, but decided to stick with the music world.”
He met Pink Floyd before the band made a name for itself, then he moved to England to serve as lighting director for one of the band’s concerts. “It ended up being ‘Dark Side of the Moon,’ ” Max said, laughing, and he remained with Pink Floyd for four years before heading back to college — this time in England — where he earned a degree in art and another in architecture.
After working as an assistant to several prominent British production designers, he began working on commercials. That’s how he met Ridley Scott and, later in the United States, director David Fincher.
Max segued into film with Fincher’s “Se7en,” receiving his first production designer credit. He also worked with Fincher on “Panic Room.” His other 11 movie credits have all been Ridley Scott films, including “Black Hawk Down,” “American Gangster,” “Robin Hood” and “Exodus: Gods and Kings.”
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