By Matt Hurwitz, June 10, 2006
When Architect Frank Gehry asked his friend, Sydney Pollack, to create a documentary about his work, the director balked. "I didn't know anything about architecture, and I didn't know anything about doing a documentary," says the Academy Award-winning director. But one look at Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao museum in Spain's Basque Country changed his mind.
Pollack's film, Sketches of Frank Gehry (Sony Pictures Classics), captures not just the architect's spectacular and unusual structures-such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle and Gehry's own house in Santa Monica-but the mind behind such buildings. "When I saw the museum, it stunned me," says Pollack. "I wasn't prepared to be as knocked out as I was. And I was terribly curious about where it came from in a man. Where did the idea come from? How did it get born? What was the genesis of it?"
Pollack and Gehry had known each other socially for years, meeting on and off at various events. "We started talking about the fact that we both work in fields that place really strong commercial demands on you, and that you have to find some way to still feel that you are able to express yourself despite the fact that you are really at the mercy of mass tastes. So there's definitely a good comparison that can be made between film and architecture, just in terms of the combination of craft and skill and artistic needs."
Pollack, an avid pilot, had flown to Spain in 1997 for a film premiere and decided to drop in on the Bilbao opening, which happened to be occurring at the same time. "I took a lot of pictures and started asking questions," Pollack says, "but I kept debarring [from a documentary project] on the basis of the fact that I didn't know anything about architecture or documentaries. But Frank had the feeling that that was a good thing. He didn't want a slick, scholastic, classical documentary."
Being new to documentaries meant forgoing the usual planning and scheduling for a narrative feature. "I realized I wasn't going to be able to plan it. I was just going to think of it in terms of collecting a lot of clay, then getting in an editing room later and sculpting it."
Portrait of the Artist
Pollack drew up a list of potential interviewees, including Gehry acquaintances such as fellow architectural master Philip Johnson, Dennis Hopper, Michael Eisner-and even Gehry's therapist ("That was Frank's idea," notes Pollack). But the most important, of course, was Gehry himself.
Over a five-year period, between various projects of his own, Pollack met with the architect, interviewing-and filming-Gehry at his office and home (mostly the latter). "I saw early on that I wasn't going to get candor from him with a crew and film cameras, so I started photographing the interviews myself." Pollack utilized Canon's GL1 3-CCD Mini DV camcorder (PAL version), primarily because of its unobtrusive size and image quality. "I decided to stick with this sort of home movie-type thing for the interviews because that was the way I could be without a crew and without lights. It could be just the two of us."
Once the interviews began, however, Pollack realized he would need some assistance. Pollack asked his producer, Ultan Guilfoyle-a veteran of architecture documentaries (1071 Fifth Avenue: Frank Lloyd Wright & The Guggenheim Museum) who also happened to run the film department at the Guggenheim-to operate a second camera. "Sydney was shooting Frank, and I was shooting Sydney shooting both of them," Guilfoyle says. "I'd follow Sydney's eyes to watch for his direction, when he might motion me to cover something specific in the scene."
Pollack effectively captures Gehry and his staff, following the architect through his thought process for developing a new design. "I was desperate to somehow capture his process. How does this start? How do you come up with a design like this?" The interviews also capture personal discussions on such topics as Gehry's childhood and awareness of anti-Semitism (prompting his name change from Goldberg to Gehry), his divorce from his first wife and his own feelings about his work, all of which Pollack achieves through the obvious closeness of their friendship.
"I couldn't help but ask him his feelings about things based on my own. 'Are you afraid? Do you ever wonder where that came from?'" One poignant moment occurs when Pollack shares thoughts from earlier in his career, noting his fear that he was pretending to be a director until he realized he truly had become one
. Gehry reveals that he had had a similar feeling about himself. "That's a big part of any creative process," says Pollack. "You're always scared because you're revealing something that's going to be judged by masses of people, and you're always a little bit self-conscious."
Capturing the Art
In between filming interviews, Pollack, Guilfoyle (working second unit) and a film crew would occasionally jaunt off to various locations around the globe to photograph Gehry's work. Even though Philip Johnson, in one interview, warns Pollack that attempting to capture buildings such as Gehry's in two dimensions was a futile effort, Pollack succeeds nonetheless. The crew shot using Super 16 cameras at 24fps. "I wandered all around those buildings and tried to find the best possible views," recalls Pollack. "I had good cameramen to work with who were sensitive to the light and what we were able to do with it."
Once Pollack had gathered his footage, he turned to Editor Karen Schmeer, A.C.E., who had previously cut Errol Morris's Oscar-winning documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. "Karen was used to taking a mass of footage and conceptualizing it," says the director. "She was an enormous help in figuring out what to do with all of the material."
Pollack's own concept was to organize the footage into one-act plays. "I always wanted to call it Sketches because of the sketches Frank does when he begins a design."
Schmeer viewed the dozens of hours of footage Pollack had gathered. "I just started going through it chronologically," she says. "I went back and forth, watching interviews, watching Sydney with the different characters, looking at some of the vŽritŽ material. Just to see how Frank works. I didn't know Frank Gehry's work aside from the very famous buildings, so it was good to see him in this very casual atmosphere." Pollack and Schmeer then grouped the dialogue content together and constructed architectural montages between them.
It was important to Schmeer to include footage of Pollack interacting with Gehry, though Pollack had wanted to avoid using those exchanges. "When you're directing a movie about somebody else and you're sticking yourself in it, it feels like you're showing off. It's not a good feeling." Schmeer found the exchanges between the two friends intriguing, as did Gehry. "Karen kept putting those pieces in and I kept making her take them out," notes Pollack. "But then Frank said, 'This should be a dialogue between us.' That gave me a hook to use to piece it together and make it a dialogue."
Challenging, it turns out, was combining the 25fps interlaced PAL DVCAM interview footage with the 24fps Super 16 architecture material. Under the direction of Post Supervisor Patrick Lindenmeyer of Andromeda Films, the Super 16 footage was first telecined to D5-HD and then downconverted to PAL to match the DVCAM footage resolution. The project was then edited by Schmeer as a PAL project on Avid. Once edited, the project was conformed on Avid Nitris at 25fps and output as 24fps 1080i.
Dropping the frame rate affected the audio in the DVCAM interview footage, so pitch correction was applied by Tom Efinger at Dig It Audio in New York. The project was mastered at Big Sky Editorial, also in New York.
A color-corrected master was then sent to EFILM in Los Angeles for film-out. "We actually needed to create custom lookup tables for the project because of the different types of source material," notes EFILM executive producer David Hays. "There are certain parts of the architecture that are so critical in how they look."
EFILM did the film-out to Kodak Vision 5242 negative intermediate stock with an Estar base, taking advantage of the film stock's durability. "Rather than making a negative, an interpositive and an internegative, we struck prints from the Estar Vision negative itself. By doing so, we avoided the generational loss that might have negated the effects of our custom lookup tables. This way, every print that goes into the theater will be a show print."
Sketches is an honest conversation between two close friends framed by the beautiful architecture of its subject. "I trusted my instinct, moment to moment, on my questions with Frank," says Pollack of his interviewee for his first documentary. "I don't know whether that's the right way to do it with everyone, but I think it worked well with Frank.
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