Alex McDowell is one of Hollywoods most acclaimed production designers.

Heres what he had to say…

Lets start with perhaps an obvious question.

Looking back atMinority Reportnow, what are your thoughts on the project?

Theres a few things, really.

It was a very important film for me because it really changed the way we worked.

An accidental collision of time and technology and opportunity.

Plus Spielberg was directing it, which empowered us.

As a film the thing thats gratifying is that its not dating.

Well, thats a really good point.

Most of the future we were imagining 10 years ago, very little has changed from how it was.

The cell phone is going to change every year, and the refrigerator may change every five years.

But the technology that we pay a lot of attention to are really the small components of our lives.

One thing you seem to have got scarily accurate is the way advertising is weaved into the world around.

Is that something that you foresaw coming, or just a good, estimated guess?

Well, you know it was actually a direct result of our process.

And what that meant for us that we did a whole other kind of research.

More than a guess.

A well informed decision based on research that just having Spielberg at the helm gave us access to.

Its as if the movie world very much existed for just this one film.

Well, I think it fit.

So, it was like a corporate headquarters.

Like if you go into the Microsoft campus.

It isnt worn, a lot of money is being spent on keeping it a very clean environment.

But what Id say we did is that we extrapolated out to real locations all of the time.

We knew where Pre-Crime was, in a real place in real Washington DC.

And we found architecture that supported the idea that Pre-Crime was largely underground.

We found that holistic or synchronistic idea in the exterior architecture.

Even the way that Arlington Cemetery is laid out fits the graphic that we were using.

The water presumably then informed the colour scheme you used…

In a very simplistic way, Pre-Crime is a series of cool blue tones and transparency.

Transparency is the other political statement in a way.

Were saying Pre-Crime has nothing to hide, its transparent in every way.

The spiral ramp has the minimum of vertical walls.

Its quite complex architecturally to hide all of the vertical structure in the set.

So that youve got the sense that the whole thing is transparent.

Spielberg is known for loving physical sets.

[Laughs] Yeah, thats true!

He had developed an interesting approach to his own personal immersion in the sets onSaving Private Ryan.

He wanted to feel as if he was experiencing it for the first time.

And the Pre-Crime set was the most expensive set in the film, very structurally complex.

He had just finishedA.I.where he had walked into a set for the first time and not liked it.

Hed changed it, theyd started again, we shoot again in two weeks.

Its an interesting pressure.

We have some safeties.

Its the containment chambers, the prison, and the sheer sense of scale of it.

Can you talk us through it?

And beneath those headstones were all of these people in storage.

We went to giant underground locations.

We looked around a lot for somewhere that could contain that.

It didnt go through set design at all.

And really just looked at the rhythm of motion that would give us.

But it gave this really interesting pattern and rhythm to the shot.

And the arm was just a big dolly track that they swung out on.

It was all a green screen set.

It was completely designed, CG and real together, in an animation environment to begin.

I read your diaries of putting together the set forThe Terminal.

The upside is that I think the audience has a far more visceral and immersive connection to the space.

I think it went a long way to breaking the science fiction convention.

PostBlade Runnerits a brave company that allows its name to be used in such a movie.

You dealt with some product placement in the film, most notoriously Lexus.

It gives you back a value.

Although its potentially compromising, the Lexus situation actually was great.

We pitched a design of a car.

They really loved it, and gave us absolutely free reign.

There was no this is the way our cars need to look.

Then there were the police backpacks too…

Most of that design work was done with 3D design and animation.

And in most of Stevens films theres a great attention paid to those.

But I think we did our testing in 3D, if I remember rightly.

The factory sets had a lot of robotics and, again, heavy machinery operating everything.

The huge advantage we had on the film was that we had a lot of prep time.

As opposed to the regular deadline that might have been four or five months before shooting.

We were more like 15 months of prep before we started shooting in two sections.

It really allowed us to test the believability of the props and the sets.

Alex McDowell, thank you very much.

Minority Report is out on Blu-ray from Monday 17th May from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.