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８７年当時、ミード師匠のスタジオはノースハリウッドのガードナーストリート１７１６にありました。
まだ高二だった筆者が師匠に初めて会ったのはホームステイでの夏。
当時の感動は今でも克明に覚えていますが、今回はその４ヶ月後に行われたインタビューを
発掘しここで再録。文字数制限を超えたため、しかたなく２分割しています。
The Japanese zeal for scientific process appeals to Mead, who regards the Sixties hippies as the last flicker of techno-paranoia.
"The whole techno-chic appreciation of machine intricacy is certainly Japanese ― they just love that approach. Their mind–set is different, culturally. They can literally pretend not to be next to someone on a crowded subway. Europeans and Americans and people with that same cultural base don't like that degree of proximity – your 'bubble' is that much larger. It's to their benefit that the Japanese allow that because there is this intense pressure in their lives to tolerate things in their work and living conditions which we wouldn't put up with. It's to their benefit right now economically but it's changing ― the world is beginning to flatten out in terms of cultural exchange."
It was cultural exchange that first bought Mead to Tokyo. His work in other films (Aliens, Tron, 2010) had caught the eye of Japanese entrepreneurs who commissioned him to design the other-worldly interior of the Alpha-Turia nightclub. Club patrons can phone home from a moon-module phone box and dance below a shuttle-cockpit DJ booth.
"The idea was to create a science-fiction set where the cast changed every night. It had to have cost millions and millions of dollars to build |n Tokyo, with their land prices. So this disco is a space liner, the front end of a luxury intergalactic space-liner. We have the observation lounge where you can see duplicates of all the instrumentation – an intense, information-exchange lobby, if you will. And we have the disco floor which is to the delight of all the passengers; the place where they can look out the front of the spaceship. The owners took bits and pieces of what I had shown them in sketches and then had a production company translate these vocabularies of ideas into finished wall surfaces and fixtures."
Mead says he had a great time designing the club and dancing in it afterwards; like most of his work it was a combination of dreams and day-to-day employment. More practical patrons have made an effort to keep their commissions on par with Mead's imagination but their requests, in general, are odd.
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