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The Telegraph (25/Aug/2010) - Obituary: Robert Boyle

(c) The Telegraph (25/Aug/2010)

Robert Boyle

Robert Boyle, who died on August 1 aged 100, was a production designer with a Hollywood career that spanned the entire Talkies era; during that time he crafted some of film’s greatest scenes, including the moment in North by Northwest when Cary Grant is assailed by a crop duster.

He started off as a set designer. But by the time he struck up what became a 20-year partnership with Alfred Hitchcock, Boyle had become a master at defining what was, and was not, possible to capture on celluloid.

Little was beyond him. When Hitchcock wanted to film Grant at Mount Rushmore for North by Northwest (1959), the director was determined to shoot the scene on location. Denied permission to do so, he turned to Boyle, who abseiled down the monument, photographing it in detail. Those photographs, greatly enlarged, provided the background against which the actors were filmed. For close-ups Boyle had crafted suitably realistic representations of the famous stone heads, but only “just enough to put the actors on so we could get down shots, up shots, side shots, whatever we needed”.

The creation of the scene became the central part of an Oscar-nominated documentary about Boyle, The Man on Lincoln's Nose (2000). Daniel Raim, who directed the documentary, noted that Boyle’s efforts created credible effects long before computer wizardry. “This is pre-digital filmmaking,” he said. “Bob’s genius was his ability to create believable sets and special effects that still hold up today.”

Never was Boyle’s capacity to do so more tested than on the set of The Birds (1963). “Hitch asked me whether it would be technically possible to make the film,” Boyle recalled much later. “I read the short story and it didn’t give me too many clues except that there were going to be birds all over the place, doing whatever they had to do to destroy the human race. It seemed rather chancy.”

Boyle came up with an overall design which he based on Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, with its “sense of bleakness and madness”. Then he started to audition the avian stars themselves. “We needed to find out which birds we could use best, and finally settled on two types: sea gulls, which were very greedy beasts that would always fly toward the camera if there was a piece of meat, and crows, which had a strange sort of intelligence.”

After a year of creating effects and using fish to entice seagulls to perform, Boyle created “just what Hitchcock wanted”. It had been a gruelling experience. “Hitchcock would push the technical aspect of any shot to any length if it satisfied that gut feeling of whatever he’s trying to do – suspense, terror, whatever. He bonded reality to his purpose to get the real truth.”

But though Boyle’s professional relationship with Hitchcock was productive, it was not particularly friendly. “It was a meeting of equals: the director who knew exactly what he wanted, and the art director who knew how to get it done,” Boyle said.

With Norman Jewison, with whom Boyle also worked over several films, the bond was much warmer. “Hitchcock wasn’t fun always, but Norman was always fun. He enjoyed life,” said Boyle, who worked with the director on The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966); The Thomas Crown Affair (1968); Gaily, Gaily (1969); and Fiddler on the Roof (1971).

Jewison was keen to film the first of these collaborations, about a Soviet crew who run aground on America’s east coast, on a real submarine. When efforts to procure one failed, he turned to Boyle. “I said: 'Bob, I don’t know what we’re going to do’,” Jewison recalled. “He said: 'We can build one’. And he literally built a submarine out of styrofoam and fibreglass, an actual submarine with two 90-horsepower engines underneath. When it was finished, it really looked splendid. He was just so ingenious as a production designer. I felt he was really in a class by himself.”

Robert Francis Boyle was born in Los Angeles on October 10 1909. His hopes of becoming an architect were scuppered by the Depression and he began acting, but it was the sets that most interested him. He was hired at Paramount by the art director Hans Dreier, his job being defined vaguely as “responsibility for the space in which a film takes place”.

His first feature was The Plainsman (1936), starring Gary Cooper and directed by Cecil B DeMille. He worked on another DeMille picture before transferring to Universal, where he ended up on The Wolf Man (1941) – often considered a classic horror film. The following year he teamed up with Hitchcock for the first time, on Saboteur, creating a reproduction of the Statue of Liberty for a climactic fight scene. During the war he worked as a combat photographer.

Boyle eventually ended up working on 100 films, including John Wayne’s last feature, The Shootist (1976). Though he never won any of the four Academy Awards for which he was nominated, Boyle was given an honorary award in 2008. Colleagues said it was typical of the man that, though unwell and aged 99, he propelled himself out of a wheelchair to walk onstage alongside the actress Nicole Kidman to collect the Oscar.

Robert Boyle, who until recently continued to teach students at the American Film Institute, married Bess Taffel. She died in 2000 and he is survived by two daughters.

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