Object of the week: David Lean’s unmade Nostromo – the production designs
Following A Passage to India, David Lean took a public vote for which big novel to adapt next. Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo proved a popular suggestion, but sadly Lean died before cameras rolled. These designs give a clue to how it would have looked.
The creative relationship between director David Lean and production designer John Box had deep roots. Box had taken on the design mantle for Lawrence of Arabia (1962) when the original designer had to pull out. Lean’s mode of runaway production demanded the creation of fully realised dramatic spaces in which the action could unfold, and Box rose triumphantly to the challenge, recreating Aqaba in Almeira for Lawrence of Arabia, and Moscow in Madrid for Lean’s next super-production, Doctor Zhivago (1965). Box received Academy Awards for his work on both films.
Box’s non-Lean work around the same time was equally distinguished, and included the persuasive presentation of Snowdonia as China for The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), the simulation of Tudor England in Shepperton for A Man for All Seasons (1966), and recreations of modern Cuba and Victorian London respectively for the Carol Reed productions Our Man in Havana (1959) and Oliver! (1968).
After a productive 1970s for Box, and a fallow period for Lean after Ryan’s Daughter (1970), their creative collaboration was revived with great success in A Passage to India (1984), which won both men Oscar nominations. It made sense to maintain the alliance into Lean’s next planned film, which was to be a screen adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1904 novel Nostromo.
The choice of this project had a rather unusual genesis: ahead of a 1985 guest talk by Lean at the Cambridge Film Society, a survey had been distributed among the members to suggest which novel would be the ideal source for his next film. When Conrad’s Nostromo happened to receive a high proportion of the votes, it prompted Lean to give it serious consideration, and despite struggling with Conrad’s dense prose, he came to the conclusion that this pessimistic story of extractivist exploitation in South America should indeed be the next entry in his illustrious filmography.
What happened next is a complex story of the vagaries of film development and finance, interlocked with the problems attendant on having an ageing director at the helm, such as huge insurance premiums. Nonetheless, Serge Silberman, who produced Akira Kurosawa’s late-career masterpiece Ran (1985), had taken on the project and by 1989 there were encouraging signs that production might be able, finally, to go ahead.
Box’s production design sketches and models came from that moment of possibility. Just as he had for earlier Lean productions, Box envisaged and created models for an incredible expansive outdoor set to bring to life one of the story’s key settings: the seaboard town of Sulaco in Conrad’s imagined South American country, Costaguana.
Box’s richly detailed design sketches (copies of which are held by the BFI National Archive) suggest the atmospheric possibilities for this tale of corruption and obsession centred on the desire for silver, from the erotic imagery of bare-breasted dancers in the firelight, to the abandoned San Tomé mine with its machinery fused shut by encroaching jungle vegetation, to the almost abstract shot of silver ingot intended to provide a focal point for the film’s opening sequence.
Sadly, fragments like these are all we have. Lean died in April 1991, not having been able to realise his aspiration of bringing Nostromo to the screen. But Box’s designs offer compelling traces of what might have been.
Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.