Production Designer: Arthur Max

leading from

Prometheus' Production Crew

Arthur Max as he was at the making of Prometheus

a) In an interview with Silas Lesnick for an interview with Craveonline, we first had some words about Prometheus from Arthur Max, talking about his work as production designer on Ridley Scott's Robin Hood in an interview published September 21st 2010. 

 

He is already by then found having assembled a small art department for the Prometheus movie, and was working on designs for the movie at Pinewood Studio, doodling spaceships. 

 

He revealed in the interview something about the creative process for his work on the movie since it was a sequel that went back in the past of the universe of Alien, so the original movie require deconstruction looking for the origins of all the ideas and where they came from. 

 

It almost required working in the manner of an archeologist. 

 

He approached the design for the sets of the alien environments in Prometheus grounding much of the ideas in what can be found on planet Earth which had made him very useful for Ridley's films ever since his work as production designer since Gladiator. 

 

Now Arthur was to do his first science fiction film and one might wonder what he was going to make from that.

Arthur Max the lighting designer for Pink Floyd

b) References to Pink Floyd would soon appear to be abundant. Ridley Scott liked to imagine the orrery scene being a lighting set for Pink Floyd. 

 

One might wonder how he could be so forthcoming with such a statement, but the truth was that Arthur Max used to be the lighting designer for Pink Floyd during the 1970s for their tours.  

 

See: See:The Dark Side Of The Moon

c) Also it could be noticed that various aspects of some of creatures from Prometheus bore traits of Ralph Steadman's work and namely his work for Pink Floyd's movie The Wall. 

 

One might wonder if that was part of Arthur's influence, since they didn't have Giger aboard as part of the design team. 

 

See: The Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman influence?

d) Ridley Scott and Arthur Max met during the making of a 1986 futurist Coca Cola commercial featuring Max Headroom, and so it came that even without knowing this, visual references that seemed to very much point to Max Headroom were being noticed whether they were there on purpose or not. 

 

The idea the ampule room dominated by a huge head also being called the Headroom, and separate from that, someone was able to point out the similarity between David the Android and Max Headroom. 

 

See: Max Headroom as a running theme?

1. Arthur Max:Well it's not really a sequel. It's a prequel. So we can deconstruct the original. That's an interesting challenge to anticipate. Where it all came from. It's origins. It's almost like archeology. You're designing in reverse time."(Craveonline 21st September 2010)