Notebooks for Project 5
From an interview with Sidney Pollack and Frank Gehry, Telegraph, 22 June 2007
Benjamin Secher: Did making Sketches of Frank Gehry teach you anything about
architecture?SP: All I know is that Frank may have a harder job than me, but I have a worse job.
Because, while he really has three dimensions to create three dimensions, as a filmmaker, I
have only two dimensions to represent three dimensions, and so everything I do has to be
a trick and a lie.I can’t generate emotion without a lens and an f-stop, and the actors have to be wearing
the right clothes, and the room has to have exactly the right coloured wall. But, when it
works, it’s magic.FG: The hardest thing is translating the feelings from the original idea, through the
thousands of people involved, to the final thing.Successfully holding on to the initial emotion – not letting it become sterile over the
three-, four-, five-year process of getting a building made – is the key to the game.BS: The quick preliminary sketches we see you make in the movie must help with that.
There seems something old-fashioned about them. Do you ever feel you’ll give up the
pen, and design directly on computer instead?FG: Never. I’m a dinosaur. When I look at a computerised image, all the emotion is lost.
Although in the studio we’ve got all the most sophisticated software and all that crap, the
longest I’ve spent on developing an idea on screen is 3.5 minutes. I can’t stand it.
