When I was first hired as the production designer on the sequel to Back to the Future, the story was told to me by the director, Bob Zemeckis, and Bob Gale, the co-writer and producer, as one movie. There was so much happening in that one movie, and we traveled to so many time periods, that I felt like my brain was being pleasantly fried. With Bob, my visual explorations usually started with “the portals” I tried to discover within the imagery of the story he was trying to tell. In each one of the movies I’ve designed with him, there’s been an entrance from one reality into another, wherein lay the adventure, the fantasy, the drama and the soul of the tale.
While making these two movies back to back I frequently referred back to my first years in college at the University of California at Berkeley that led to my dropping out of school, and then traveling around the world at the age of 20. This was where my notion of “turning on, tuning in and tripping out” came from. I felt like I was literally “turning on” to a new level of exploration, which was the time travel of Back to the Future. And getting paid for it. Then, as I “tuned in” to it, and got familiar with going in and out of different Time periods, that allowed me to “trip out.” And it really helped me to invoke the various places that I'd been when I twice traveled around the world in 1970 and 1978.
I went far and wide in those times: First to Europe and East Africa, where I had experiences with Maasai warriors, and then also to India in the Himalayan Mountains. And then to Burma, and Thailand, which was so close to the War in Vietnam. All of my experiences as a traveler were part of something that I ultimately was drawing upon when I designed the various sets, including the alternate version of Hill Valley back in 1985, which I modelled after my experiences in Bangkok, Thailand, where it seemed like the culture was just being corrupted by the nearby war. When Bob submitted the budget to the head of Universal Studios, he was told that they could not approve a budget of $70 million, which was twice as much as the original film cost to make. “Then how about two movies for $90 million?” Bob said. Bob was always looking to turn obstacles into what he called “insurmountable opportunities.” Who wouldn’t want to go back to the future and the past with a guy like that?
