Q: When did you first meet Frank Gehry?

A: I met Frank in the early ’80s at a party. Frank was a part of a group affiliated with the therapist who’s in the documentary, Dr. Milton Wexler. The group consisted of very high achievers who were all artistic in some way. Some of them were directors, some of them were doctors, painters. I was not in the group but I did go to the parties sometimes and I met Frank that way. I think we hit it off because we were both big complainers. We complained about the difficulties of working in an arena where you were so dependent upon the approval of so many other people on whether or not you were successful. It wasn’t a question of how you felt about what you did, it was a question of how the world felt about what you did. And that that was tough. You know, we were feeling sorry for ourselves.

Q: How did this film come about?

A: Over the years I would bump into Frank or spend time with Frank and we would talk. We got to be better friends. And then I saw the museum in Bilbao on opening day and it rocked me. I was not prepared to have a physical object have that kind of emotional effect on me. In my past experience I hadn’t been that moved by architecture. It was a shock, even knowing Frank. Because as much as I liked him and as much as I thought of his work I hadn’t seen anything like that building before. I didn’t know where it came from in him, how it got born. So I got terribly curious about how it had come about.

Between 1997 and 2000, when I started working on the film, people were beginning to come to him to make documentaries. And he kept saying no, he was uncomfortable. Frank is a kind of shy guy, I think. The discussion came up about whether or not I’d ever made a documentary. To be honest, I don’t even know whether it was Frank that suggested it. Maybe it was somebody else. And I kept saying, “You’ve got to be crazy. I don’t know anything about architecture or anything about documentaries.” And Frank felt that that was a plus.

Q: Tell us about the actual production.

A: I had a real and burning curiosity to find out something for myself. It wasn’t a job. I had no deadline. I had no schedule. I had no form that I had to behave within. Frank was busier than I was so we just knew we were going to do this in our spare time, basically. The film got made over a period of five years – but at about one weekend or, at the most, two weekends a year. And on the year that I made THE INTERPRETER, I didn’t do anything on the film. It was a slow process. There were only two times that I worked over a large block of time. Once when I took a crew to Europe for two weeks to do all of the interviews in Europe and all of Frank’s European architecture. And then again when we started editing. But otherwise I would, let’s say, go and do Julian Schnabel in the morning and then spend the afternoon with Frank. And that’d be a Saturday. And then six months later I’d come back and do some more with Frank. Then six months later I would go and do a bit of the Disney building while it was going up.

Q: What makes Frank Gehry an American Master?

A: Innovation for one and an intensity with which he’s piqued the admiration and interest of the world. Certainly, you have to look at the fact that the world has become fascinated with Frank. He is a rock star all of a sudden.

Q: In the film you and Gehry compare filmmaking with architecture. What similarities or differences in the two arts struck you the most?

A: They’re both mosaic arts in that they’re comprised of many, many, many other art forms all put together like a big puzzle. When they’re successful, they have a pleasurable dreamlike element – the shape of a piece of sculpture, of a building, the way light hits it, the dream of a movie, the idea of a movie. But in order to achieve either you have to break it down into technical components, which are sort of mosaic in nature. In order to build the building you have to understand all kinds of physics. You have to figure out how to get people in and out of the building, how to get sewers in and where to put the loading docks, etc. If I want to make people moved or cry in a film, I figure out what the room looks like, what the people are wearing, what time of day it is, what the light is, how to photograph it, where to put the camera. It involves optics and costume design and set design and architecture.

Q: How did you manage to make static buildings not only watchable but beautiful? And what turned out to be your biggest challenge in filming something that doesn’t move?

A: If people find it beautiful to watch, and I’m not saying it’s true, but if it is true it could only be because that’s what I desperately wanted to do. I don’t know technically how I did that, other than to say that for all of the years that I’ve been doing this job a big component of it is visual. It’s impossible for me to go into a room or look at a location without a part of my brain photographing it – picking the best angle or looking at the way the light hits. I was trying to duplicate the emotional experience I had when I saw Bilbao. I was intensely moved by the beauty of it and the longing in it. There was something in it that was touching. It was a cathedral in some way.

The problem with filming something is that we struggle desperately to make three dimensions out of two dimensions. It can’t be done. In the beginning of this film I say I don’t know how to get this into two dimensions and Philip Johnson shakes his head and says, “It’s hopeless. You might as well give it up and become an architect.” It is kind of hopeless in a way because architecture is peripheral. What makes architecture extraordinary is that you’re looking at the building but your peripheral vision is also seeing how it fits within a space. And it’s seeing more than one part of the building at one time. You have no peripheral vision in photography and so we substitute a poor substitute, which is movement, to encompass it all, either tilting up and down or panning left and right, or a combination of the two. You try to get as much in as a tapestry. You concentrate on scale and shape and light.

Q: Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?

A: If I had known this was going to be blown up to 35 millimeter and be shown on film screens I probably would’ve struggled to shoot in high definition. I shot with a very good camera, a wonderful little camera, but it’s not meant to be a professional camera. I wanted Frank to be completely relaxed and I didn’t want to go in there with a crew. I wanted to be as alone as I possibly could with him.

Q: How is documentary filmmaking different from feature filmmaking and would you do it again?

A: They’re both hard. I couldn’t make the comparison. The only thing I could say is that there was something liberating about doing this, about having fewer distractions, being able to work lean and free in a certain kind of way and follow an impulse. You can’t make a documentary happen the way you want because you don’t have any idea what you’re going to do. You go where the conversation goes, you go where the free associations go. And you really don’t know what you have until you edit. Would I do it again? Yes, of course. I would do it again providing I could find the same degree of curiosity and the need to know or want to know that I had with Frank.

Q: How do you respond to some critics of the film who say that it’s not objective enough, that it’s a valentine to a good friend?

A: Well, it is in a way. I wasn’t attempting to be critical. I wasn’t making the film as a job. I was being completely selfish. I have only one reason to make this film – because there’s a bunch of stuff I want to know about Frank. That’s what I went after. I didn’t see myself as a filmmaker. I didn’t see myself as a documentarian and I didn’t see myself as obliged to be either objective or subjective. I just felt that I wanted to give the audience a piece of Frank Gehry’s mind. I wanted to find out in my head what his process was like. Along the way I decided that I’d better include some people who didn’t like him. The only person I could find who would go on record was Hal Foster. We did use all those headlines, which were very derogatory. There’s a montage in which you see “ugly,” “grotesque,” “horrible.” There were other people who are not fans of Frank who I invited to be in the film but they declined. I happen to like Frank’s work. And I happen to love Bilbao. That was very clear. As for the rest, I was trying to get people to answer what it was about Frank that they either liked or disliked. And what it was that made Frank Frank.

Q: During the course of the filming what did you uncover about your friend that you didn’t know – and what did you learn about yourself?

A: Everybody asks me that and I don’t have an answer for them. I discovered a lot, but I don’t know how to describe it. I had no idea what he did all day. I mean, he sits there and he looks at those models and he plays with things. He tries to think and then goes home and thinks. I feel like I do that too. I don’t have a model necessarily but I have toy soldiers in my head that are people.

What did I learn about myself? I learned that I could behave in a very dorky way sometimes. I didn’t expect to be in the film at all. I was very naive about documentaries and I didn’t realize that you can take a single point of view and just cut out the bad stuff and jump cut the film. I was proceeding the way I would in a feature film. The only way I could control it is to have another angle to cut to – that way I could drop material out or invert it or manipulate it. So I asked my producer Ultan Guilfoyle to always cover another angle on Frank. But Ultan kept shooting the two of us. When our very, very talented editor came in she started putting that footage in, all of it, and it became the two of us. I kept resisting that because I thought, you can’t do this, this is the height of narcissism. You can’t tell the story of a guy that you’re saying is an American Master and artist and then throw yourself in the middle of it. And Frank kept saying, “What I love about this is that we’re in it together, it’s a conversation – I’m not just being interviewed.” That turned out to be something that critics really responded to because it was a conversation between two old friends. That resonated.

Q: Is there a dream project you’ve yet to tackle?

A: Everybody wants to make a film that they think of as a perfect film. I certainly don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anywhere near what I would hope to accomplish. I still look forward to taking a whack at it again.

September 18, 2006

Frank Gehry loves to sketch. It is the beginning of his architectural process. From Gehry’s sketches flow the models, one after another, each a refinement, that will eventually become finished buildings unlike any others in the architectural world.

It is this sketch quality, what he calls the “tentativeness, the messiness,” that Gehry clings to as a way of guarding against formula or repetition. And it is this sketch quality that Sydney Pollack was so keen to explore in the film SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY, seen on AMERICAN MASTERS.

Beginning with Gehry’s own original sketches for each major project, Pollack’s film explores Gehry’s process of turning these evanescent, abstract drawings into tangible, three-dimensional form: finished buildings of titanium and glass, concrete and steel, wood and stone. Working closely with his colleagues, Gehry takes his sketch ideas and, as quickly as possible, makes them three-dimensional, the better to see how his buildings work, how they fit with their neighbors, how they function in the most essential way. Model after model is scanned into a sophisticated computer and rendered into working drawings.

Speaking of these models and the plans in the film, Gehry says, “We constantly go back and forth between the models and the drawings, because (pointing to the drawings) if this doesn’t work, that doesn’t work!”

Frank Gehry is that rare kind of architect who has garnered both critical acclaim and popular fame. Not since Frank Lloyd Wright has an architect been such a household name. Gehry’s designs dramatically blur the line between art and architecture, yet the strong appeal of his sculptural designs does not obscure the role of function. He follows a painstaking process of subtle vision and revision both in his sketches and in his model shop.

It is a common misconception that Gehry’s buildings are constructed as mere containers, built for the sake of their form. In truth, the buildings are built from the inside out. Wooden block massing studies are constructed and reconstructed in step with Gehry’s own evolving sketches. Gestural models of cardboard, wood, and cloth act as intermediaries, keeping Gehry conscious of the three-dimensional implications. The process, as Gehry admits in the film, forces him to “work in two or three scales at once.” This forces him to forget about the model as an “object of desire” and instead to concentrate on how the building works.

Based in Santa Monica, Gehry works with a formidable team of architects and model makers to bring his sketches to life. The resulting structures are imbued with the dynamic energy of Gehry’s original sketches and with the improbable nature of his study models. The interiors are both grand and unpredictable at once. This process is perhaps best illustrated by his two seminal works: the 1978 renovation of his own house, what has since come to be known as the Gehry Residence, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, opened in October 2003.

The work he did on his own house brought him recognition throughout the wide architectural community, if not any public acclaim. In the film, Gehry remembers his original approach to what would, in a way, define him as an architect: “Berta found the house. It was comfy and had a little garden and we could afford it. When I bought it, I realized I had to do something to it before we moved in. I loved the idea of leaving the house intact and not messing with it. I came up with the idea of building the new house around it.”

It is a classic piece of Gehry understatement, and of Gehry humor. He didn’t mess with the old house. Instead, he reworked the architecture in the most radical way, leaving the original house almost intact so that it became a house within a house, where one wall of his new kitchen is the clapboard wall of the original house, complete with windows, moldings, and wood details. In the film, the camera moves from the living room (the old house) to the kitchen (the new house), dramatically revealing the bravura of Gehry’s inside-out gesture.

Gehry’s house was a way of bringing together his love of art and his growing confidence as an architect. His love of Picasso and of cubism is expressed in the shapes of the windows and chain-link fences that surround the house. As he says in the film, “We were told there were ghosts in the house. I decided the ghosts were ghosts of cubism.”

Gehry and his wife, Berta, raised a family in this house, where they still live, a thirty-year testament to the fact that, for all the artistic flourishes of his ideas, Gehry’s architecture works, in the most practical and fundamental way.

When the Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in 2003, it was quickly recognized as perhaps his greatest work-and again, for reasons, first and foremost, of functionality. The acoustics of the hall were widely praised, not least by the musicians in the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Salonen worked closely with Gehry on the design of the hall, and he describes Gehry’s approach in the film: “No matter how great the design is, if it doesn’t sound great, it’s going to be a failure. Frank was very clear about this from the beginning. He said, ‘This is a hall for the orchestra, and this is a building for music. And that has to be the first priority, and everything else is of lesser importance.’ And I thought this was quite a statement from an architect.”

In the three years since its opening, the Walt Disney Concert Hall has become one of the great performance venues in the world, and not just for its acoustics. It has become a symbol of downtown Los Angeles as a center of culture.

Comparisons between the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall are inevitable. They were designed more or less at the same time, although the Guggenheim opened some six years earlier than the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in 1997. The comparisons go beyond the obvious flamboyance of the shapes and the functionality of the spaces. SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY shows Gehry’s concern for the people who live and work in his buildings, and how his buildings function as spaces for people: how they embrace and envelop the people in and around them, and how that embrace is returned.

This is a unique quality of Gehry’s works, and just one reason his fame is so widespread and universal. People feel welcome in his buildings; they feel, as artist Julian Schnabel says in the film, encouraged. Sydney Pollack’s shots of visitors ambling in and around the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall are reminders of how connected people feel to Gehry’s architecture. This, for an architect, is the most welcome validation of all.