Mikhail Nikolaevich Baryshnikov is considered among the greatest ballet dancers of our time, perfecting the art form insofar as any art form can be perfected. Although, as he’s quick to point out, perfectionism in itself is not what he strives for. “Perfection it’s a theory, you know, you cannot be a perfect human being, and you cannot be a perfect artist, you cannot be a perfect husband, you cannot be a perfect father,” he says. “All you have is that hope that, as you go through your daily routine, by the end of the day you will be a little better in all respects, and do something meaningful, rather than have a day which just passed by senselessly, you know, just like ‘poof’ disappearing in fog of life.”
Baryshnikov, affectionately called Misha by family and friends, clearly remembers the moment he fell in love with dance, the moment from which each day would be imbued with meaning. He was just five years old or thereabouts, living in the Soviet-occupied town of Riga, in present-day Latvia. His mother, Alexandra, a dressmaker obsessed with the arts, took him to see a ballet. “The curtain was up and people were dancing, and it was beautiful, light, and lovely music. And I was hooked. I asked her a few days later, ‘can she take me again to see some dance?’ And the journey began.”
When he was nine, he began his life as a performer. He was shorter than most male dancers, but his exceptional talent carried him all the way to the elite Kirov Ballet in Leningrad. His interest in avant garde choreography, however, was not encouraged within the traditional Soviet system. In 1974, he defected to Canada, eventually joining the New York City Ballet as a principal dancer. “New York is an extraordinary place, you know, in all respects. In the 70s and early 80s in New York, the city was more generous and more welcoming to young people. You could live in Manhattan, and you could afford to go to the theater, and Broadway, and ballet, and opera, and the philharmonic; and it’s almost impossible right now for young people from, you know, Beaumont, Texas, to come and spend, their summer in New York. Or, God forbid, a year, and try to find their luck, because it will cost you, if you’re not the kid of rich parents, and it’s impossible.”
Embraced by the West, Baryshnikov explored his talent for acting, earning an Oscar nomination in 1997 for his role in “The Turning Point”. Later, he starred with Gregory Hines in “White Nights” and Gene Hackman in “Company Business.” Fans of “Sex and the City” will remember him as Aleksandr Petrovsky, Carrie Bradshaw’s artist beau, in the final season of the hit show. As beloved as he is by Hollywood, decades since moving to the US, he is and truly remains a New Yorker at heart. Through his arts foundation, BAC, he’s doing his bit to help young artists who want to live and work in New York, despite the prohibitive nature of the cost of living now. “I want to help the emerging talent to find their place. I’m always like, ‘we are not producers, we are providers, trying to provide opportunity to any kind of creative people to help them to produce their work in the most pleasurable way, without any commercial pressure.’”
On par with his philanthropic work, he remains incessantly active as a stage performer. He recently he appeared in “Beckett Shorts,” a compilation of four short Samuel Beckett plays, and “In Paris,” based on a short story by writer Ivan Bunin. Later this year, he will perform opposite Willem Dafoe in an adaptation of “The Old Woman” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His creative restlessness is, he says, perhaps a result of the great freedom he enjoys as an artist. “I do rest sometimes, but it’s always a short rest, you know? I am blessed with the ability to do what I want to do in my life. I don’t restrict it myself with my financial goals. I don’t have to climb up, to prove to anybody, nothing like that. I can just be myself. Perhaps I’m afraid to get bored with myself.”
On Thursday, October 29th, Citizens of Humanity celebrated Issue No. 7 of Humanity Magazine along with Club Monaco on the anniversary of their 5th Ave Flagship in New York City. Everyone from Christy Turlington Burns, Taylor Schilling and Garance Dore gathered to watch Sean Lennon, who is featured in the issue of Humanity Magazine, perform with his band Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger. Friends Putnam & Putnam joined Citizens of Humanity and Club Monaco to celebrate along with the best of fashion, food, flowers, and coffee from the world’s top chefs, florists and mixologists.
Charlotte Kemp Muhl, Sean Lennon, Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger
Lee Clow is responsible for some legendary advertising campaigns—not just effective and popular ones, but ones that penetrated popular culture and changed the game: the Taco Bell Chihuahua, the Energizer Bunny and, along with Steve Hayden, the 1984 Apple commercial that launched the Macintosh computer and the hugely successful “Think Different” slogan. From his lifelong home of Los Angeles, the chairman and global director of media arts at TBWA shared his insights on the ad world then and now.
How did you get into advertising?
I grew up surfing and paying not too much attention in school, but I was always drawing in my notebooks and doodling and taking art classes. I figured that I better make this art thing into a career because I’m not interested in much else. I grew up in California, admired Walt Disney—I’m old, so I was here when Disneyland was built. He was my first kind of artist hero because he was an animator; he did this artful thing, and at the same time made it into a business, and with his passion and his focus, wanted to do great things. So I didn’t know if I wanted to be an animator—did I want to be an illustrator? Did I want to be a fine artist?
The thing that seemed missing in graphic design or just becoming an illustrator was the totality of having ideas and storytelling. As I studied in school it was right at the middle ’60s, when advertising was taking on a whole new status or stature. The intelligent advertising that was being done in New York by [Doyle Dane Bernbach]. The Volkswagen campaign—taking the ugly little car designed by Adolf Hitler and making it interesting, famous and popular. Somehow that really appealed to me. The idea of putting something out into the culture that the public responded to.
What was the first campaign you worked on?
I got my biggest and most important opportunity when I got hired at Chiat\Day, a young creative agency. The first really important assignment brand I worked on was Honda. The account got in trouble after we had it a couple years; they were growing and getting bigger and they kind of challenged the agency to add people and treat them with a little more respect. And we were kind of a cocky, arrogant group and maybe didn’t appreciate the potential and opportunity we had, and now all of a sudden they say, “We’re going to talk to another agency.” Unfortunately we lost the account. So it was kind of frustrating, but that was the big opportunity I had with a big brand, and I also learned some lessons about managing and dealing with the client and understanding the reality of being an applied artist.
Has your approach toward the client changed over the years?
Having an idea is one thing. Showing it is probably just as important, and so I think I always had the passion and the artistic design skills. The storytelling sense came along, and I don’t think that’s changed a lot at all, because I just got more and more passionate and intense—almost in a perfectionist zone. I try to make my work smart, special and relevant.
But learning how to convince clients, convince people on how good and how special an idea is and guarding it is kind of what your life is in terms of all of the pitfalls, all of the ways an idea can be lost. I think being an advocate for my work is the reason why I’m still around when there are a lot of young, talented people I came up with that are long since out of the business. I’m still there because I can nurture young people to develop great ideas and I can help them sell them. I can help them see the light of day, even though it’s getting harder and harder in this kind of new media world we live in with all the constituents you need to deal with.
Traditionally, it seemed like advertising was always about a specific product, but you kind of shifted it to make it about the brand. How did that idea come to you?
The advertising I like to do is to find the brand story and figure out how to tell [it]. You go back to Volkswagen: Here’s a car designed by Adolf Hitler in World War II, and the challenge was to sell it in a country where we were buying cars 30 feet long with giant fins on them and there’s this dopey little car. That was exciting to see that potential, not just to do the individual ads for a brand like Volkswagen but to give it a story that became infectious—that driving a VW became almost a status symbol of a kind of young, free-thinking, spirited people.
Finding a voice as a tone for a brand is the art of what I do. I want to consider myself now as a media artist, not an advertising person, because advertising is kind of defined these days and has a negative stigma attached to it. But to be a media artist is to take a brand and find its voice and tell its story and make it interesting and likeable. I think brands are very much like a person. If you can create a personality for a brand that deals with it like a person and not just a one-dimensional entity—sometimes you’re funny, sometimes you’re smart, sometimes you’re thoughtful. Selling who they are and not just what they make is the exciting dimension of doing what I do, I think.
How was the 1984 Apple campaign created?
Well, of course the most important, being-in-the-right-time aspect of my career was meeting Steve Jobs when he was 25 years old and decides that he’s going to change the world with this thing called a personal computer, which nobody knew what it was, why they needed one, how it fits into their life.
So Macintosh, although we were working on Apple products for a while, was trying to come up with a voice for technology nobody knew they needed or knew why. Steve had this computer that was going to change everything, and he wanted advertising that was as big and important and smart as his product was.
The headline [of a newspaper ad] was “Why 1984 won’t be like 1984,” and it was offering the generic [thought] that says someday everybody is going to have technology—it’s just not going to be for the big companies having this giant computer in their basement. “Someday everyone is going to have a computer” was the spirit of that ad, but it never ran as a newspaper ad.
I was sitting with an art director and another director-turned-writer and we remembered that headline and that just started images in our head—the Orwell of 1984, the Big Brother that kind of controlled everyone’s lives versus the liberator Apple who’s going to take on Big Brother and democratize this thing called technology and give it to everyone. So it just painted this story in our minds, started small and it got bigger and bigger, and we found Ridley Scott, who had done Blade Runner, to give it a stature and style that was not typical of advertising at that moment. And we built it and grew it and it got bigger. [This all] with the promise that Apple was going to change the way the world works, and we called it the democratization of technology. So we have this amazing commercial and were going to run it on the Super Bowl and the board of directors of Apple got cold feet and almost didn’t run it all.
Why did they get cold feet?
Oh, because they were scared of it—it didn’t show the product, it didn’t demonstrate how it worked, although there was a whole ad campaign that went with this commercial, and IBM was coming into the business and threatening them. But luckily we had Steve Jobs, who was one of the bravest businesspeople I’ve ever known, who basically finally drew the lines: “We’re going today.” And it ran and it became pretty famous, and it did put the stake in the ground.
Where do you go for inspiration?
I built a house right on the ocean 20 some years ago here in Palos Verdes, so when you get up in the morning with a cup of coffee and nobody is up yet and you watch the sunrise and look over the ocean—it’s a pretty good place to have a clear head and kind of focus back in on the problem you are trying to solve, what idea you’re searching for. A lot of creative people in particular want to work at night. I’m actually the reverse.
It’s been called “the best vintage store in the world,” but owner Hitoshi Uchida opened his Tokyo-based shop J’Antiques in 2005 without thinking much about its future. “I happened to find a property for sale in my neighborhood,” he says. “So I started my store without preparing much.” located near the Nakameguro neighborhood, J’Antiques’ shelves and aisles are packed with classic men’s and women’s wear (focusing on authentic American work wear from the 1920s and beyond) as well as bric-a-brac like vintage buttons, antique keys, and WWII-era military gear. His pieces are humble yet beautifully crafted; relics from the days when the U.S. was really celebrated for creating carefully crafted clothing that was built to last.
Becoming a master at sourcing and selling artifacts like these was a natural extension of Uchida’s personal passion for unique style. “I was looking for clothing that was different from other people’s,” he explains, “That’s what first led me to vintage.” Growing up in Gunma, a mountainous area north of Tokyo, Uchida considered becoming an architect. But his love for fashion and its history drew him to career clothing. Once he’d secured the location for his shop, the name for J’Antiques was a natural fit. “It’s a combination of ‘junk’ and ‘antique,’” Uchida explains. “I think somebody’s ‘junk’ can be another’s ‘antique’ and vice versa, depending on people’s choices and taste.” He makes regular buying trips to the U.S. to seek out choice pieces from flee markets and vintage shops across the country — and still gets excited about working with one-of-a-kind garments. “I love that I can be involved with the whole process: getting a vintage item, cleaning it, displaying it at the store, and selling it to a customer, who truly loves it”.
Uchida’s got a particular passion for vintage denim, and still fondly remembers his first pair of Lee 101z’s. “I especially like pieces that look like they were used as work clothes,” he says. He’s not a snob about the historical provenance of every item in the shop, though—J’Antiques offers some new pieces, but only those that have certain timelessness. “I always try to find new items which have a potential to become vintage,” he explains. Still, the pleasure of working with vintage clothing, says Uchida, is the eternal element of surprise. “I get to see something that I have never seen. Each item is unique, even the ones that look similar.”
MAKING BOLD STATEMENTS REQUIRES BOLD FILMMAKING AND AN OPTIMISTIC VISION.
Citizens of Humanity nurtures documentary short filmmakers to inspire global awareness and influence a course of action. Christy Turlington Burns and Roger Ross Williams both share this passion and bring the human experience closer to all of us in their new documentary shorts, no matter how much distance lies between. Model and advocate Turlington Burns has gone behind the camera to shed light on maternal health issues in the developing world as well in the United States. Her organization, Every Mother Counts, ran a 200-mile relay race to create awareness for mothers’ preventive health and wellness. Her short film, Every Mile, Every Mother, documents the experience and parallels the endurance of the runners to the women who have limited access to health care resources in rural areas of the world. Ross Williams is a seasoned documentary filmmaker whose experiences shooting heartfelt stories in Africa about the human experience have led him to create Tutu: The Essence of Being Human, a short film that examines the strength the Tutu family shares in its mission to fight racism and advocate peace through humanity.
These two talented storytellers sat down together and discussed the challenges and blessings they encountered to bring light to stories set far from America that affect us all.
Christy Turlington Burns: I was curious when you said you almost chose [Malawi’s] President Banda for your film, how did you ultimately make the decision to go with Desmond Tutu?
Roger Ross Williams: Jared Freedman [of Citizens of Humanity] had already been talking to Tutu. They came to me with the project. But I had in my last film, God Loves Uganda, focused on faith leader Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, so there was that connection to the idea. When Jared saw that part of the film, he was like, “I really want that, what you captured from Bishop Senyonjo, to translate that to Tutu.” Tutu is very different, though, because he is such a public figure and press surrounds him all the time. He can’t walk out of the store without paparazzi around him. So it was very different, where as Bishop Christopher, he’s a private citizen. It was interesting with the Tutu media frenzy around him, which was a challenge in the film.
C: How big of a crew did you have?
R: I just had a South African production company. I had a South African producer, sort of a production coordinator, my DP from New York, and local sound. Just a small documentary crew. How about you? How did you decide to do yours?
C: Well, I have only made one other film. I made a documentary called No Woman, No Cry a couple years ago. It came out in 2010. . . . We filmed in Tanzania, Guatemala, Bangladesh and here in the U.S. looking at maternal health, the challenges and also the solutions in those countries. It’s funny, because I’ve wanted to make a documentary film for a long time, but it was only when I had a complication with my own delivery of my first child, I was like, this is the subject that I want to explore and I want to understand more what’s happening globally. Which women have access, which women don’t. It kind of grabbed me as a subject matter and then got me to take the risk to go into unfamiliar territory and take that journey.
R: I think documentaries have to be personal. You have to be passionate about it. It’s such a commitment; it’s such a long-term commitment too. That’s really what sparked me and sparked a lot of people when they make theirs, especially their first film.
C: Yeah, my husband is a filmmaker and he’s made probably four movies since I made my one documentary, so I got the sense of like, oh my god. It’s really like a child in the sense that it took me this long to be like, OK, I think I can actually start to make something else again.
R: Tell me about the film. Let’s talk about Every Mother Counts. How did you start that organization?
C: It started with the experience. I had this complication with my first child, who’s 10 now. I started to hemorrhage after I delivered her. I was in a birthing center here in New York City. I had a midwife, I had a doula, I was in the right place at the right time and they knew what was happening and they managed it the best they could. But in the weeks afterward, when I was trying to understand, how did that happen out of nowhere—like, why? Why me?—was when I came across the global figures of maternal mortality. I learned that my complication is often a cause of death for girls and women in a number of countries. Ninety-nine percent of them are in developing countries, but they happen here in the U.S. too. We have two deaths per day, and half of those are preventable as well. Once I learned the information, I had to know more about why. This isn’t one of those issues where we don’t know how to save the lives of women. It’s a matter of whose life has equal value or doesn’t. That part of it got me to want to do more. My mom’s from El Salvador and I’ve traveled a lot besides that, but I grew up going to her country, which also has a lot of issues around maternal health.
R: I’ve spent a lot of time in El Salvador.
C: I grew up going there quite a lot, but I went after I had my first child. I went back with CARE, one of the humanitarian organizations, while pregnant, with my mom, to El Salvador. That’s where I had the experience of traveling to a remote village and thinking if I’d had that complication here I probably wouldn’t have made it. Then going back and having my son and no complications and then really deciding then that this was an issue that, first of all, nobody knew it was an issue. I mean literally, I was shocked to find out women were dying. But I started to educate myself. I started traveling a bit with CARE and then also with ONE, just looking at maternal health in a number of countries. I then applied to Columbia University to get my master’s in public health.
The film actually just became a way that I thought. I was writing a column when I first started traveling with CARE for Marie Claire magazine, and I thought it was great to bring some of these stories of women that I’m meeting to life and closer to other women who otherwise wouldn’t get to travel. Then I thought those are great and useful, but film is such an incredible medium to really transport people and to really get someone to put their feet in the shoes of another human being.
The film became very clear. I just saw it. In Peru, I was coming back from a really remote area and thinking, this is my documentary film. I’m going to get out there, I’m going to look at this and examine this as an issue and hope that people want to see this. We were able to get a lot of people to learn about the issue from the film. It really has turned into an organization once I finished the movie. The film feels really good, and I think it’s going to make an impact. But then what? What are you telling the audience to do when people feel, like, how can I help?
R: Exactly. So that’s how you developed the organization? Because that’s really the big thing right now in documentary film is outreach and engagement around the film. Now it’s a whole industry. So now your budget for the film, actually your outreach and engagement budget, equals the budget of the film almost. And we develop pretty extensive campaigns. Now you have your film producer and we have our outreach and engagement producer.
C: Yes. Initially, we thought of it as a campaign, and I had it very much tied to the Millennium Development Goals. It came out in 2010 and I thought, OK, for the next five years I’ll use the film and my platform as best I can to get this to be a mainstream issue. But of course, after about a year or so, I thought, OK, that’s helpful, but a lot of organizations asked, “Can I screen your film? Can I raise money off of your film?” I thought, OK, yeah, that’s sort of satisfying, but not really that meaningful in the end. Not for me and also not for the audience that I’m touching. I think the audience was sort of like individuals like me who, whether they had a complication or not, they’d come through the experience. And just simply having come through the experience they felt connected and wanted to have that tangible connection with another woman and another mother. We really wanted everyone to come be that.
R: How did you decide to use the race as sort of the structure of this film that you did?
C: A couple years ago in New York City, we were invited to join the New York City Marathon as an organization. There was a dad in my kids’ school, “Oh you have a nonprofit? Would you like 10 spots for the marathon?” And I think he thought we might turn around and sell them or give them away in some kind of contest or something and I thought I know at least a handful of runners who would run this. And I kind of always had in the back of my mind maybe one day I’d run a marathon. So we responded and said, “Yeah we’ll take the 10 and we’re going to run it.” We were only three people at that time as a staff. So the three of us are definitely in, and then our next level of friends in our circle who are runners and could handle it, no problem. We started training and as soon as I started training—I wasn’t really a runner but had run up to four or five miles before, running and trying to increase my mileage a little bit. And I thought as all that time was going by, like, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” But it also to me became really clear that one of the biggest barriers for women to access care is distance. I thought a lot of people raise money and awareness in marathon running. But for us specifically in our issue and how many women live in rural areas and can’t get to health care when they need it, especially in emergency situations, like that will be the way we communicate around this. Five kilometers being the minimum distance women have to walk to seek care; 35 kilometers is nothing, but it’s average probably for emergency transport. Just to get people again to put themselves in the seat of another human being.
So we ran it the first time. We ended up making it a team of 50 the next year because it was resonating with people, the idea that distance is a barrier. “Oh, wow, I can make that connection— women should have a ride or be able to have access.” So we got this opportunity to then run this 200-mile relay race. As soon as I learned about it, I thought what a cool idea. But it also takes that running metaphor that much further, because 200 miles is a very long way. Running as a team and thinking about how you really have to share this experience when one person is sort of losing energy, losing steam, you can switch them up and give us the support that we need to keep going. . . . I wanted to make a film of it but I wouldn’t have necessarily thought of making a film like this or finishing it this quickly. I would’ve thought, maybe we’ll shoot it and we’ll see what will happen down the line, but I didn’t have any real reason for it. When we started talking to Jared at COH, I said, “Well, we have this thing coming up that I want to film anyways.” He was like, “That sounds great, and that sounds interesting. Let’s do it.”
R: It’s great because you have a structure. You have a beginning and you have an end.
C: Exactly. And we want to inspire people to get involved. I hope that is ultimately what it does.
R: Yes, it’s very inspiring.
C: Had you done a short before?
R: I did a 30-minute short, called Music By Prudence, which won the Oscar in 2010. But I started it actually making a feature. I shot a feature and then I took it to HBO and I showed it to Sheila Nevins of HBO Documentary. Ten minutes and she’s like, “This is an Oscar short. It’s going to win the Academy Award.” She’s like, “Cut your feature and then you’ll see that I’m right.” They let me just spend six months cutting my feature, and I sat and watched my film and I was like, she’s right. I could do so much more. We could possibly win an Oscar, and then we did, which does so much unbelievably for the issue, which was about disability in Africa.
C: That’s incredible. The moral of the story—you finished it full length and then you reapproached it? That must be so hard.
R: It was painful because you’re just cutting out this and that, and you’re so married to this material. It’s like cutting your heart out.
C: Do you always work with the same editor?
R: No. Actually the last film, God Loves Uganda, is a different editor, an amazing editor, actually—one of the best in the business, Richard Hankin. I work with the same DP. Editors I sort of tailor it to the project. Some editors have strengths in one area and not in another. But God Loves Uganda is my first feature. This Tutu short my partner edited. . . . The great thing about making films is you get to meet people like Tutu, who is a hero of mine and a hero to many. Being around him was extraordinary. He’s such a down-to-earth guy considering everything he’s gone through and the history and the amount of people around him. He’s very moved when he talked about his life; it’s just amazing.
C: Yes, I loved that. There’s that old expression of behind every great man, behind every human, there is another who is making it possible for them to do great things. They, too, have made such a commitment to the world and there are a lot of sacrifices that they have to make. To see the impact not only on the world but also on his family—he has a very big family and a close family, but that’s just such an incredible thing to be able to get insight on.
R: He’s out being a person of the world and his wife is actually there in South Africa fighting that battle. What’s amazing about her is that she’s sort of different because it was his 80th birthday last year and he had his big party in the cathedral with Bono and Clinton and everyone, all his friends, and Richard Branson. She is a person who likes to be in the township with the people. She wanted to have her 80th birthday in this one-room church. All of the dignitaries have to come and cram into this one-room church because this is where she wanted to be. On the day of her birthday, she built a playground for the kids in this township who didn’t have a playground and she wanted to dedicate the playground and be with the kids on that day. She doesn’t want media attention; she doesn’t like the cameras. She’s just amazing—he actually teared up talking about her because she’s his rock. She’s the rock for all his family. He has three daughters and all of them do the work, they all do the work of Tutu, they all work in women’s rights and they’re all ministers and they all are inspired when they talk about their mother. Their mother was the real rock and, as he said, she is much more radical than he is.
C: I think it’s more common than has been told or shared over history. I think about Bob Marley’s wife, and one of his daughters wrote a song for our city and she also tells that story . . . he was off doing what he had to do, but she was really the rock and she was the one who’s still there, keeping the name alive.
R: Motherhood. There’s a theme. Strong, the woman behind the man, and it’s really behind motherhood for her. She raised pretty extraordinary daughters. Without Tutu—he wasn’t there much. I look at even Winnie and Nelson Mandela. She became very radical because she was in the streets fighting and he was away in prison. The women are the real sort of backbone of the clan and probably the world. Definitely in Africa.
Courtney Love has a reputation that often precedes her. However, through her private and public ups and downs she has proven herself to be not only an honest talent but a truly committed artist. As she put it in conversation with friend Jemima Kirke, “I have a lot of regrets, of course I do…but I did it my way.”
JEMIMA KIRKE: Hi Courtney!
COURTNEY LOVE: Hi Jemima, how are you doing?
JK: I don’t know—I’ve just been yelling at contractors for a little bit. I’m trying to destress right now by talking to you.
CL: Are you doing your apartment?
JK: I’m doing the bottom floor of the house and turning it into a playroom. But anyway, you know how contractors are—so full of shit. Anyhow, where are you?
CL: I’m in Los Angeles.
JK: Do you like it there? How long have you been there? Seems you’ve been in L.A. for so long now.
CL: Like a year and a half almost. It’s ironic: I don’t love it at all. I lived here for 20something years of my life, in New York for about eight and then in London for maybe four. Then Oregon, Portland and Seattle for maybe three or five years. But L.A., I used to love it, and then I just don’t like it anymore. After living in New York for so long, I don’t like it, but I’m getting a lot of acting jobs here. So by being here I’m getting jobs. I just got this film, so I’ll be fine.
JK: What’s the film?
CL: They are doing the offer today. It’s called The Long Home, with James Franco, and I’m sure there’s not going to be any problems with the offer or anything. It’s like a Southern Gothic, moonshiney film. I’m his wife. It’s a good role. I’m happy about it.
JK: Is it sexy? Do you make out with him?
CL: No, not in this draft. The original draft, William Gay wrote when he was alive. There’s going to be some revisions, but I’m basically a hooker who is his wife. He’s a moonshiner and I run, like, his brothel, so the first time you see me, I’m doing something sexual with a sailor. It’s pretty dark—William Gay was like O’Connor or Faulkner or something like that, like he was in that group of Southern Gothic writers.
JK: Do you find that acting with someone like James Franco who is super talented makes a difference?
CL: Absolutely. I’m really emphatic and unfortunately reactive, so I can’t really hold my own. If somebody sucks, I’ll probably suck, and if somebody’s really good, then I’ll come up to their level.
JK: I saw you in Empire. Courtney, you were so fucking good! I was blown away!
CL: Oh, thank you!
JK: It’s just your singing—you singing was my favorite part. It was your voice, it was your style, it was the way you sang painfully, you know, so that was awesome. When you got sent that role, did you immediately want to do that?
CL: Yeah! I didn’t get sent that role, though.
JK: Did you pursue them?
CL: I didn’t pursue—more like stalk. I wrote Lee Daniels and said: “Hi, I’m a big fan. Love, Courtney Love,” and like two minutes later my phone rings and it was Lee Daniels and he said: “I’m doing this little show; no one knows if it’s going to be a hit or not, but will you take a part on it?” and I said: “Absolutely, what’s the part?” and it was supposed to be R&B, and I can’t sing R&B. It’s kind of a really funny story: Initially, he wanted me to sing this Patti LaBelle song that not even Patti LaBelle can sing anymore, with such crazy high Mariah notes, right, and there were like four or five Fox executives on the phone and I sang it to Lee and Lee said, “That’s great,” but I sang it to these Fox executives. It’s called “Messing with My Mind.” It’s not a hit, it’s like a deep cut, and they were cringing, like, “Oh my god, you can’t sing that.” I was so bad at it. So then they sent me down to Timbaland to Hit Factory and we came to the compromise that I would sing “Take Me to the River.” So I came down to Hit Factory in Miami and the first night Timbaland was all, “What is the deal with this girl who can’t hit notes?” and he’s very musically intelligent, but I was like, well, “You know, think Patti Smith, think Bob Dylan,” and he said, “OK, I get it, I get it,” but it was really funny for the first two hours. He was like, “Well, can you hit this note?” and I’m like, “No, I’ve never hit that note.”
JK: But I think it’s great that you took it on knowing you probably couldn’t deliver on it and you made it you. I think a good actor is not somebody who can do anything they’re asked to do, but someone who can take it and make it doable for them.
CL: Yeah, it did definitely change the character to a rock singer more like Joplin or Stevie Nicks more than a Mariah singer.
JK: But you killed it. The episode wouldn’t have been as good or you wouldn’t have been able to do it as well. When I see a scene that has crying, or if a scene opens with crying, I’m like, “I don’t know how to cry on command. I need some dialogue—can we put some dialogue in here to help me get there?”
CL: I hate doing it. Look, in my whole career I’ve only pulled off crying on cue one time, and that was in Man on the Moon with Jim Carrey. And he has cancer in the movie. All day long I was walking around with all these triggers, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, and then it’s time to cue the scene and I’m all worked up! In the scene in Empire where I’m crying because she’s taking my drugs from me, I had to mist my eyes, but then I did start to really cry. I’m taking acting classes and that’s where the stamina is, and my acting coach is excellent and I go to class a lot and the more I get on stage and do deeper stuff, the more I really want to do a play. I just read for this play; it takes months and months to set these things up. I don’t want to say what it is, but it’s a good one. It’s a play about what happens to rockers—this role is about me. It’s a play of what happens to rockers who don’t make it, so what happens to say, someone in Helium 10 years from now, you know? Helium was an indie band that I took on tour back when you were a fetus. Like what happens to those bands, or Super Furry Animals or whatever, that didn’t make it. So it’s meta, in the sense that there’s lines like: “I don’t get nervous, I’ve opened for Thurston Moore,” you know? She gets a Matador deal and betrays her son over it. It’s a meta play. It’s not me, but it’s in my wheelhouse, so it’s really, really interesting and I really want to do it.
JK: It’s that angle that they always keep chasing it, chasing the dream, or maybe just chasing and trying to keep making music.
CL: That’s exactly what this is, and it’s a really good play. I hope it gets done. It’s by a writer named Sam Marks.
JK: Do you like doing plays more or making music?
CL: I haven’t done plays in New York proper, ever, so I don’t know. I did this musical and that required some acting as well. I have fidgeting issues, I have hand issues, I have issues with my physicality, like keeping a posture straight and all this stuff that I have to think about when I’m on film or TV.
JK: It’s strange because you’ve been on stage in your life more than you’ve been in front of a camera. I know it’s different because that’s singing, but it’s still performing.
CL: It is, it’s performance, but being a different person and having a fourth wall and not being able to hand out flowers to people in the front row or hold their hands or break the fourth wall, that’s a skill in itself.
JK: When you say being a different person, do you mean being a different person from who you are?
CL: Yeah, to be this character is really challenging and something I really want to do. I mean, I’ve done enough films to know how to save up my energy for the take and then give it on the take and do that, but I was never trained before in the ’90s when I was doing films, and so now I’ve decided to really go for being trained, you know, take on Shakespeare, take on things that are really difficult and challenging for me.
JK: Do you find that now that you’re being trained you’re learning so much more than you wish you knew?
CL: Oh god, yeah, from posture to breathing to fidgeting. I saw a play called Marjorie Prime at the Taper and they’re robots basically, and it stars Lois Smith, who’s a stage actress who’s been around forever, and she stops still—everyone in that play stops still. And it was really an epiphany, because, you know, there is no onstage fidgeting. You know, with Kansas City Choir Boy I also had to learn how to interpret someone else’s music and interpret someone else’s direction onstage in a live and intimate space. In rock ’n’ roll it’s really about being as vulnerable as possible and giving them what they want. But onstage it’s about pausing, about internal life, it’s about internal triggers—that’s one of the reasons I’m really challenged to do a play. I’m super excited to be doing a movie; I just got offered another indie movie too and I’m really, really excited to be doing these films. And I think I’m coming back to Empire. I think so. So that would be really amazing, especially now that it’s a hit. The wardrobe department will be really on fire. I can’t wait for that. They spent a fortune on everything and the wardrobe department kind of suffered, so it was every man for himself, because no one knew it was a hit yet. When Naomi Campbell came on she hired a stylist. I called Marchesa and got a gown; they were really kind about it, but people didn’t want to take a chance on an unknown show yet, and then it blew up.
JK: That’s always fun! I love going to fittings before we shoot. It’s one of my favorite things.
CL: Do you find that what you wear for your character on Girls is inspired a lot from what you’re wearing personally? Because I certainly do. What I’m wearing really informs, you know what I’m talking about?
JK: Absolutely. A good stylist knows that and is not going to push you to wear something that you’re not comfortable with. Period pieces are a whole other thing. But yes, it’s collaboration. I’ve learned so much from the stylists; it’s truly not about just dressing in what looks good or fits right or is cute or whatever. It’s how does this outfit that she’s wearing today show where she is right now in her life? Subtle things, like putting matching
colors with some of the characters just to show and bring the connection, and like replacing something that one character used to wear and now I’m wearing it, it’s really cool. And how about the other one you did, the motorcycle one, what’s it called? The Hells Angels one, but it’s not Hells Angels?
CL: Oh, Sons of Anarchy.
JK: I didn’t get to watch that.
CL: It wasn’t a lot. It was my start into this chapter of my life. Again, I got in touch with the producer, Kurt Sutter, and I was like, “Can I be on your show?” He gave me the part of a kindergarten teacher and it was really like dowdy dresses and espadrilles. It was really great. I wasn’t like chomping on the scenery—it wasn’t like with Empire, where I got some big stuff. I was there as a supporting costar and that’s what I did. But I was still crazy nervous about it because it’s been 10 years; I hadn’t acted professionally in 10 years at that point, and Kurt really did me a solid by letting me have that part because, you know, it sort of showed the community and I am proving it slowly that I show up, that I show up early, that I’m on time, that they can dress me in anything. I don’t really care, I’m not picky—if it’s right for the character, it’s fine, you know? And I really want the community to know that.
JK: What community?
CL: What?
JK:The audience? When you say “the community”?
CL: The film community—like the Screen Actors Guild and the Producers Guild and the Directors Guild.
JK: Yeah, OK.
CL: So that’s why I live in L.A., because most of the community is here. A lot of the theater community is in New York. There are some serious great actresses, like Julianne Moore, who live in New York as well. Hopefully I can get to the level where I can move back.
JK: I understand why you live in L.A. I think it’s quite humbling; I think it shows you really want this. Sometimes you need to move for a while and someone like Julianne Moore doesn’t need to move to L.A. and I think that’s cool that you’re starting at the place where you feel you should be.
CL: Also, I’m really near my daughter, a few blocks down. Not that I see her every day, but we do spend the night like once a week or something.
JK: Do you feel like people have a preconceived notion of you that affects how they are seeing you or whether they hire you?
CL: Not really right now. It’s coming undone—it’s definitely going away.
JK: I think it’s your own doing, by the way.
CL: No, it’s Lee Daniels’ and Kurt Sutter’s doing, by giving me these roles. It’s showing the community that I can.
JK: But you were professional. If you weren’t professional on set or if you didn’t do your job right, then people wouldn’t hire you. They gave you these jobs to give you the opportunity, but you stepped up.
CL: I’m not hearing any blowback at all. I mean, even when I stepped out from doing films and had a dark period, I never did anything dark on a set, so I never made enemies on a set. I never was a bad girl on a set; I always considered films a really sacred space, so when I had my problems, I had them very much away from the film community. Look, there’s so many people in the program, in recovery. I’ve talked to Kurt Sutter and Lee Daniels and they know where I’m at. My agents are really nurturing and great. I didn’t have an agent for 10 years, so I’m devoted to my agents and I’m devoted to my publicist. They’re fantastic. I have a really good team around me.
JK: On a side note, are you really 50?
CL: Yes, I’m 50. I turned 50 in July. But I’m not going out and getting a facelift.
JK: How do you feel about it? I’ve heard from a few actresses that it’s hard to get good roles as you get older.
CL: Well, you can get a little disillusioned.
JK: Do you ever regret not taking advantage of things more when you were younger?
CL: Regrets, I have a few, but in the end, as Frank Sinatra sings, “I did it my way.”
JK: You know those people who say they don’t have any regrets? I hate that so much.
CL: I have a few regrets, for sure.
JK: It’s so inhuman and so immoral to say, “I have no regrets.”
CL: Je ne regrette rien. I have a lot of regrets, of course I do. I should have taken that part; I should have maybe married that one, I don’t know, but I didn’t. So I am what I am and I’m pretty condent that I can break in. I think what I have to offer on film and on television is honest and I’m more disciplined than I was ever before.
JK: I 100 percent agree, and I think that your discipline is going to take you far, because there’s a lot of people who can be emotional and vulnerable.
CL: You know, part of me wants to do what Lena [Dunham] did in the sense of coming up with my own idea and my own show. I’m not as prolific a writer as her; I need a cowriter, because I can’t just do it myself. I just can’t.
JK: Everyone needs a cowriter.
CL: Yeah, so I found this girl Kit and this girl Dierdre. And basically started. I don’t have the pitch done yet, but these girls understand it.
JK: Lena targeted a niche, a very specific niche that if you tried to say what it was before she wrote it not a lot of people could relate. It’s a very specific type of person, type of crowd. Everyone’s on the feminist train right now, which I’m thrilled about, but right now it needs to be about older women.
CL: It’s about what happens after 40 with men, with money and with life and real estate.
JK: My mother is the perfect character study for this right now. I mean really—her life has completely changed. Bigger changes happened now than in her 20s.
CL: Definitely.
JK: She’s having more fun right now than I am. I can’t imagine what she’s learning about herself.
CL: I’m sure she’s having a blast. Your mom is a big influence on me, aesthetically and all sorts of ways. I love your mom. I got fascinated with all these characters around her, from the psychic to your sisters to your neighbors.
JK: It’s very hard to describe to people sometimes the way I grew up, because it wasn’t like my parents were irresponsible. They weren’t necessarily reckless, but they were bringing all types of energy into the house, all kinds of people. There were never doctors or lawyers but there were all kinds of others. I feel like the criteria for who she would let in the house was always just like, “Do they have kids? Can they play with my kids? Are they interesting to me?” She loved bringing people in the house from all walks of life. Interesting, that’s for sure. So you’re doing a tour with Lana Del Rey, right?
CL: I’m doing a tour with Lana Del Rey. She’s young enough to be my daughter—it’s kind of weird.
JK: Did you choose that? Did you choose Lana Del Rey?
CL: It just happened, Jemima. I was like, “Lana, come to London to the British Fashion Awards with me,” and she was like, “OK. If I do that, then you have to do a little bit of my tour,” and I was like, “OK, I’ll do a little bit of your tour,” and that led to me writing two songs and I’m dropping a single. One’s called “Died Blonde” and the other one’s called “Miss Narcissist,” and “Miss Narcissist” is like the catchiest song of my career so far.
JK: Really?
CL: Yeah, it’s super good. I heard it yesterday. It’s not mastered yet, but I’ve heard it mixed and it’s really good and modern sounding but still grungy and rock. I don’t think it’s going to end up on Billboard or on radio, but there’s enough outlets for alternative radio that it will end up there. By the way, if you’re in L.A. and you listen to KROQ, they don’t play a lot of chicks. They play me a little, they play Paramore a little, they play No Doubt a little, and that’s sort of it. I’m the last chick on alternative radio that they’ll play, and it’s really kind of stupid. It’s so hard for rock ’n’ roll right now—it’s so hard. I have someone really close to me who is in a rock band and they’re excellent, they’re the best rock band I’ve heard in years, and they signed an old school deal with Interscope but it’s really a struggle and it’s a struggle just to be middle class. I’m not talking big houses and art collections. I’m talking about just getting by.
JK: I mean I don’t know anything about the struggles in the music industry, but I can only imagine that you have to do a fuckload of touring.
CL: That’s what you gotta do, go on tour. So this is a little bit of touring, but I want to go back to acting immediately after it. In fact, I have to weave the touring days in and out of my Franco movie.
JK: Did I read something about you and Miley Cyrus? What are you doing with Miley Cyrus?
CL: Yeah, Twitter is an amazing thing, because people follow each other and they can make friends, and so Miley Cyrus asked me to like come and have a drink with her at the Chateau, so I went and had coffee with her. I ended up taking her over to Brett Ratner’s, who’s basically my best friend in town.
JK: But why did you bring Miley Cyrus to him?
CL: Actually, Miley, when she had Hannah Montana, had already done a video with Brett, and Brett’s house is like the equivalent of your mom’s in a way in L.A. It’s like a salon—you go over to Brett’s house, you never know who you’re going to meet. Michel Gondry could be there or like porn stars from the Valley. It’s really fun. You never know who’s going to be at Brett’s house—it’s awesome.
JK: Are you doing any music with Miley Cyrus?
CL: No, I have not made any music with Miley Cyrus. I don’t know that that would be a good match, but she’s really put together and smart. I liked her a lot.
JK: I want to ask you, this is something that I think we can relate on, you on a much stronger level, by the way, but do you find it frustrating that you have to so strongly prove yourself when you want to be called an actor?
CL: Absolutely.
JK: My nightmare is to be “that girl from Girls.” I always feel like if you make a lot of money doing something or if you’re doing something for a long time, then that’s what you are to people.
CL: Yeah, like a rock star, like a provocative rock star that sings about gnarly stuff. Which, by the way, these songs don’t do anything to dispel that; they’re both really kind of filthy. But that’s kind of what I do—I do sort of work in torture, filth, angst and torment. I don’t do straight love songs. I can’t. It’s not in me. So when it comes to music, it is what it is. I remember seeing a Marianne Faithfull quote about why she didn’t do anything like
Broken English after Broken English back in 1978, and she said: “I didn’t want to be the rage girl,” but it’s still what she’s known for, that comeback and that rage.
JK: We have to be so calculated with our moves, you know, and that really stops what you actually want to do. I hate this expression, but at the end of the day, if you take yourself seriously at whatever you’re doing, then people will take you seriously.
CL: It’s what you said earlier—it’s about discipline. Discipline is going to see me through, so I think as long as I show up and I’m disciplined, but I still have to prove myself … I got asked to speak at TED—they want me to speak on “reputation.”
JK: Oh, you should do it!
CL: I’m thinking, rather than speak on it, why don’t I just prove it? You know what I mean? Rather than discuss it out loud in front of the world, why don’t I just prove it and then maybe speak on it after I’ve proven it? Take a bad reputation and turn it into a good one, take all those things that were hideous and turn poison into medicine. So that’s my answer to that, my love.
JK: I have a million more questions, but we can save that for some other time.
CL: All right, darling. I can’t wait to see you.
JK: Me too. Thanks, Courtney.
Coat – Vintage | Necklace – Pamela Love | Shirt – Dries Van Noten | Bra – La Perla | Tights – Capezio | Shoes – Christian Louboutin
The week before a big sale, Brett Gorvy has a ritual. “I get up very early in the morning, before the day begins,” says the Chair of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Department at Christie’s, the auction house that has been in business since 1766. He heads straight to Christie’s New York City headquarters on Avenue of the Americas and goes to the salesroom as soon as he arrives. There, the art soon to be auctioned has been installed in an exhibition that probably won’t stay up for more than a week. “I spend time enjoying it, all the work.”
Gorvy, who has made Art Review’s annual Power 100 list for the past decade, has been the sole head of the department since 2011, a year before Post-War and Contemporary surpassed Impressionism as the auction house’s most lucrative category. Before that, he headed up the department collaboratively with chic, photogenic Amy Cappellazzo, known for saying quippy things like “so much for the weak dollar” after a significant sale. She moved on to development before leaving the auction house to pursue other projects in 2013. When Gorvy officially took the helm, Steven Murphy, Christie’s CEO, cited his “museum-quality presentation of the sale previews” as evidence of his aptitude for his job.
So Gorvy has organized, and thus seen, quite a few of these salesroom shows over the years, many featuring staggeringly valuable artwork by icons: Warhol’s silkscreen, “Statue of Liberty,” in 2012, or Lucian Freud’s “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,” a gritty painting of a fleshy, nude woman on a couch that sold for $33.6 million in 2008, when Gorvy and Cappellazzo still worked as a team. Sometimes, though, it can be hard to feel excitement when you’ve been immersed in the logistics of transporting work, inspecting it, installing it and assembling catalogues. You could feasibly enter a salesroom that includes, say, Jackson Pollock’s “Number 19,” a painting that spent 10 years out of public view before selling at Christie’s in May 2013, and feel little to no awe. But Gorvy felt awe one morning last autumn when he arrived to spend time with the art set to sell on November 12, 2013.
“I’d never seen a room wall-to-wall look as good,” he recalls. “It’s rare that it happens that way—by the time you get to the sale, it’s inevitable that you have these ups and downs. What defined it for me was that ultimately every movement was represented—the ’80s, the ’90s.” He saw Christopher Wool’s “Apocalypse Now,” a black-on-white text piece that announced in all caps, “SELL EVERYTHING, SELL THE HOUSE, SELL THE CAR, SELL THE KIDS.” He saw a Jackson Pollock painting and the perfectly polished, shining orange, towering balloon dog by Jeff Koons. Then there was Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” a loose trio of portraits of Freud, also a painter and grandson of the original psychoanalyst. Each six and half feet tall, the three paintings have a yellow-orange and pea-green background, and a strange, fragmented frame near the center. Inside of that frame, on a wooden chair, sits a man—Freud—with one leg crossed over the other. His face, all bulges of gray and pink, is distorted like faces always are in Bacon’s work. “MoMA doesn’t have a Bacon of this caliber,” says Gorvy. He remembers thinking, “I’ve got a sale the people should see. Auction history will be made.”
Gorvy had already intended to send out a standard email later that day, pitching the show and sale to colleagues. “I decided I’m just going to dictate,” he recalls, and tried to convey his enthusiasm spontaneously while an assistant transcribed. The resulting memo would be picked apart on New York Magazine’s Vulture blog and posted in full on the art news source GalleristNY. (“Folks, there is effusiveness, and then there is Brett Gorvy,” read the Gallerist intro.) In subsequent weeks, its tone would also be mimicked by other auction houses.
“I am rendered rather speechless by the works,” the memo began. It continued: “In my heart, I believe the results this week will be extraordinary.” They were. The Francis Bacon triptych sold for $142.4 million, making it the most expensive painting ever sold at auction, outstripping Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” sold by Sotheby’s for $120 million in 2012. “A historic moment,” the auctioneer actually said while bidding was still under way the night of the auction. People cheered when it sold. Jeff Koons’ “Balloon Dog” also set the record for an artwork by a living artist—noteworthy, but also no longer unexpected, seeing as Christie’s has set records in Post-War and Contemporary sales each year since 2010.
“We have barely had five days to enjoy this kind of caliber and beauty,” Gorvy’s memo also said. “Each season I wonder if we can do this again.” And then they do.
Gorvy speaks on the record about sales results, market trends and specific artworks frequently. It’s rarer for him to talk about his personal tastes or routine, though he and his wife, art dealer Amy Gold, did give Architectural Digest a tour of their apartment late in 2013, showing off an art collection that includes rare photographs documenting work by visceral feminist artist Ana Mendieta and a drawing by 1960s jack-of-all-trades Bruce Conner. Gorvy’s relative quietness regarding anything other than work may have to do with a natural desire for privacy but probably more with sheer busyness. He is in airports constantly, out of the country as often as in.
Born in South Africa to British parents, he spent the first part of his childhood in Johannesburg, then moved to London in the mid-1970s, when his father, financier Manfred Gorvy, relocated for work. Manfred would soon found the highly successful real estate and development company Hanover Acceptances Limited, and he and his wife, Lydia, collected art, so Gorvy and his three siblings grew up around it.
As a student, Gorvy studied art history and began a career as an art journalist in London in the late 1980s. He was still happy reporting on the art world when a friend of his, who worked at Christie’s longtime competitor, Sotheby’s, offered him a job. He turned it down. But in 1994, that same friend had accepted a new position at Christie’s. “He offered me the job again,” says Gorvy, who accepted this time, ready for a change. “I’ve been rather lucky,” he adds.
Before he began at Christie’s, even though he knew art well, actual, iconic paintings and sculptures seemed distant to him, certainly not like things you could get close enough to touch. This quickly changed. He remembers an early experience he had at the auction house. “I went into a warehouse and, on the table, there was a small copper Modigliani out of its frame,” he says.
He picked up the piece by the Italian painter, a prolific, stylish Bohemian who once criticized Picasso for being “uncouth.” “I felt the weight of the copper in my hand. You’re so close to the art—you’re seeing it naked.”
When Gorvy first started at Christie’s in 1994, the art market, like many markets, had been struggling. Art sales had boomed in the 1980s. Interest in young talent had grown as new money proliferated on Wall Street and the Japanese yen gained strength. Investors started to see art as a speculative asset, something you could buy for relatively little and then ideally resell for much more. Young graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat became an overnight sensation, posing for the Newsweek feature “New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist” in 1985, at just 25 years old. Basquiat would tragically be dead of an overdose before prices plummeted in 1990, as the early ’90s economic recession began three years after the jarring 1987 stock market crash. Work by artists like Eric Fischl and Julian Schnabel, newly and excessively popular in the 1980s, and even work by Warhol would fail to find buyers. Gradually, though, over the next decade the market would build itself up to record sales levels, becoming more global and withstanding the dot-com crash. “I grew up basically as the market changed,” Gorvy says.
In 2003, the year he and Cappellazzo first made it onto the Power 100 list, they sold a Basquiat painting for more than $600,000, nearly $150,000 above the estimate but far less than what a painting like that would go for today—Christie’s sold Basquiat’s “Dustheads” for $48.8 million in the summer of 2013. After 2008, during the recession, the market dropped around 30 percent, but then Cappellazzo and Gorvy had auction sales up by over 100 percent by the autumn of 2010. Dubai and Hong Kong were growing markets. Now, it’s commonplace to see headlines like the one Art in America published in 2012: “Biggest Contemporary Art Auction at Christie’s New York, Again.” That time, the sale featured Basquiat, abstract expressionist Franz Kline and everpresent contemporary powerhouse Jeff Koons.
One explanation for this seemingly continuous growth is the new international vastness of the market. “You feel the Russians, you feel the Middle East,” says Gorvy, who values “being able to reach out and have that global connection.” But he dismisses the idea that breathtakingly big sales at Christie’s represent a mismatch between the money and the actual cultural value of the art. Collectors aren’t buying with their ears, based on what they’ve heard is hot, at least not the collectors who matter. “Every market has its great period,” he says. “In reality it’s not about the record making. It’s more about a passionate pursuit.”
Before a sale, when collectors can’t decide whether they want to buy, he tells them to imagine themselves waking up the next morning and not having that work of art. Would they kick themselves? “My wife and I collect,” he explains. “I know what it feels like. Most people want to own art because they want to live with it.” And these are smart people, Gorvy has said when interviewed elsewhere; they made their money doing something they’re good at and know what they like.
Throughout the years, Gorvy has held conversations in salesrooms with art historians, like the 2008 interview he conducted with Dr. David Anfam about abstract expressionism, or commissioned respected writers for catalogue essays, like novelist Jonathan Lethem, who recently wrote about Warhol. But the intellectual part is never the most important. “My job really is to make sure every work looks its best. It’s all an instinctive thing that hits you in the gut,” he says of collecting. It’s a revelation, to encounter new works, even by artists who have already made it into history. “You think you know an artist and then you see a new painting. You come face to face with an amazing object.”
“It doesn’t feel like work. You get on the plane—meet with someone who lives with art.” He’s in an airport as he says this, about to fly to Europe to meet with a collector who’s been living with paintings Christie’s briefly had under its roof. This part of the job never fails to excite him. “You’re humbled, frankly, by the art.”
It was the snip heard around Japan. When champion sumo wrestler Chiyonofuji Mitsugu cut off his traditional topknot to signify his retirement from the ring in 1991, the whole country was mesmerized by the televised ceremony. For his eldest daughter, Yu Akimoto, it was a moment she’ll never forget. “When you cut your hair back to normal length, we had a lot of snow that day,” Yu tells her father in an interview. Just 8 years old at the time, Yu skipped school for the special occasion. “After you got your hair cut short, I was asked in a television interview, ‘How do you like your papa’s new haircut?’ ” Yu adds. “And I remember that I was very embarrassed. And I said, ‘It looks great,’ and that was broadcast by the show. The next day I went to school and I was teased about saying my dad looks good. I said to them, ‘What is wrong with that?’ I was mad.”
Until this moment, Chiyonofuji hadn’t encountered a pair of scissors in more than 21 years. Born Mitsugu Akimoto on the island of Hokkaido, the young sumo began wearing a topknot at age 15, which marked the beginning of his professional career. Standing 6 feet tall and weighing only 270 pounds (in a ring that often saw competitors 500 pounds or heavier), Chiyonofuji (nick- named “The Wolf” for his intimidating stare) became known for agility in the ring, and the swift moves with which he felled his larger, overbearing opponents.
By the time he decided to retire at the ripe age of 35 (most wrestlers at his level leave the sport by age 30), Chiyonofuji had not only ascended through the ranks to win 1,045 matches and earned the elite status of Yokozuna or “grand champion” but had also won a place in the heart of his nation. Upon retirement, Chiyonofuji took on a new name, Kokonoe Mitsugu, and the role of stablemaster for the Kokonoe Stable (one of the 54 communes where wrestlers live and train, including Chiyonofuji himself). “I liked the training,” Chiyonofuji tells Yu, reflecting on his days in the ring. “There are few people who like training, I think. But most likely, by training I was able to get something back. If you do not get tired doing something, you don’t win.”
“What is the difference in the training between your current disciples and when you were younger?” Yu asks. “It is much less now,” he responds. “There are many wrestlers who have injuries. To develop a build that is not easily injured, you have to do a lot, I think.”
“When [you were] competing, I was small, and I don’t remember everything,” Yu continues. “Mama said it was not a horrible thing to lose, but [you] said you hated to lose,” adds his daughter, who was named after the Japanese character “yu,” which means friendly, and the Japanese word for winner, “yu-sho.”
It’s a work ethic that was passed down to both of the champion sumo wrestler’s daughters, who have forged their own paths in their respective fields. Today, Kozue is a rising star in Japan’s acting and modeling world, while Yu is one of the country’s fashion icons and an accomplished DJ. “Nobody was able to succeed you in the business, since I am a daughter,” muses Yu. “What do you think about that?” “That doesn’t matter at all,” replies her father. “Becoming a wrestler is not easy. But looking at it myself, if I had a son who wanted to do it, that would have been OK. But this is the life I love.”
My dad was 19 and my mom was 17 when I was born. My mom left Corona del Mar High School because she was pregnant and went to a continuation school. She started at Cal State Fullerton when I was three weeks old. She ended up studying education and becoming a sixth-grade teacher. Four years later, they got married.
My dad didn’t go to college; he took some classes, but all I know is that everything he learned was because he went out, grinded, bought computer programs and was self-taught. My dad wasn’t given an easy positionwhere you have all the resources you want and have a wealthy family. His mom was 13 when she had her first child, and she tried her best. My dad had to hustle to get his. He did a lot of moving during his childhood, from Chicago to San Francisco to Oakland to Piedmont, then to the Philippines, and eventually ending up in Orange County—all that before he was 11 years old. He did a lot of jumping around. I think having a child put a fire under his ass. Maybe college was too slow for him.
I have a vivid memory of our house in Costa Mesa, where my parents moved after they got married, walking through the backyard to the garage, where his creative kingdom was. Everything started in the garage. He had his friends over: TYKE AWR was sitting there—he’d just got done doing multiple canvases—and my dad was working on the computer. It was cool. I remember my dad got jeans, and he and his friends were in the backyard drawing on them with paint pens and then going to sell them at boutiques around L.A. and Orange County. From a young age I felt the energy of his creative work.
Growing up in Costa Mesa was fun. With the parents I have, things like skateboarding and creative thinking were pushed. Surfing was also pushed, but I didn’t get into it. I’m a skater, to be real with you. There were always a lot of people around our house, because my parents were still young. The vibe growing up with them was trippy—their friends were artists, fighters, designers, skaters, musicians and surfers; everyone was always at our house for UFC Fight Nights. My best memories of my dad and me are of us playing video games and him taking me skating, walking me to school and picking me up after—small quality time. That mattered most to me. Before he started RVCA and it kicked into full gear, he was around a lot.
I had rules, like “Don’t hurt someone unless they hurt you first,” and “Don’t instigate shit.” I feel like my parents tried their best to put rules on me, but me and my dad have more of a friend relationship. It wasn’t always like that; I had to earn it by being more accountable. That meant having integrity, being honest with my parents—through all the bullshit and the good stuff. My mom was my force field a lot. She was always really overly nice about disciplining me. My dad and I are more like brothers—we grew up together. He was older when he had my other siblings (ages 11 and13). It’s so cool to watch my dad bond with them. It’s like from an uncle’s perspective—they even call me Uncle. When my dad’s at dinner with the family, he’s always taking pictures, and then he uploads them onto hard drives. He just naturally documents. He always says he wishes he had more pictures of himself when he was growing up to show us.
We were in Italy recently, and we saw a bunch of people wearing RVCA and it was like,“Whoa.” I’m just proud of him. When I see stuff like that, I’m stoked on my dad, because he grinded and came through. His ultimate goal was to provide for his family and be a good man. That was something he verbalized a lot. Besides doing a good job with his interests and fashion and art, family is put before everything. My dad has sacrificed physical health for his family. He would do 48-hour shifts. The business went from a garage to a warehouse to an even bigger and better warehouse. He would be designing, talking to artists, curating stuff. He did a bunch of projects. He likes to do a lot of projects that aren’t involved with clothing, too. He’s always bringing up the people around him.
Do I feel like there’s a lot to live up to? Absolutely. My dad has been invited to the White House by the Obama administration as an example of a successful small business owner. That’s pretty special. I don’t know how the fuck I’m about to do that. Really, I don’t. The pressure is on.
Sometimes I think my dad is unlucky to be so warmhearted. I don’t think some people realize how much he does for others outside his family. He helps a lot of people, friends and strangers, straight up. He’s a people person. I don’t think my dad will ever forget where he came from, or the people who have been with him on the mission.
This interview took six months to do. It was done in two different countries, over two different time zones, scheduled and rescheduled numerous times through various assistants. It had to be worked around tour dates, Grammy rehearsals and Oscar press. It’s without a shadow of a doubt that I can declare Hans Zimmer the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. And I should know, because I’m his daughter.
If you’ve been to the movies at all in the past 20 years you’ll have heard a Zimmer score—they’re hard to miss. After doing some light Googling I’ve found that my father has worked on close to 200 movies since the mid ’80s—everything from The Lion King to The Dark Knight. Action, drama, romance, comedy, animated, good, bad, big, small, he’s done them all. And I’m fairly certain he’ll keep doing them all until he drops dead at the keyboard.
He is not your average father—or your average composer. And he’s definitely not your conventional human being. His work, his music, is what gets him out of bed and down the stairs every morning and keeps him in a studio until the early hours of the following morning. What he does is who he is, and I’m immensely proud of him.
My dad is my favorite person to have a long chat with about life and work and everything in between. The following conversation is just one of our many… except this time it’s on the record.
ZOE ZIMMER: OK, this thing is recording now, so let’s both try to keep the swearing and bad jokes to a minimum, yeah?
HANS ZIMMER: That’s asking a lot…
ZZ: No shit. OK, but really, let’s talk about some stuff. Let’s start easy: Where do you consider home?
HZ:Nowhere.
ZZ: Jesus, really? I guess that wasn’t starting easy after all.
HZ: Yeah, seriously. It’s something that really bothers me. I don’t know… I think language is partly home.
ZZ: Does it bother you that none of your kids speak German?
HZ: No, but it bothers me that none of my kids have the same accent as me. Anyway, I think if I had to go and declare a place “home,” it would be England, but I don’t think the English would ever see me as one of their own. Home… I don’t know, I’m a traveler, I suppose. I’m a gypsy in a funny sort of way. It’s wherever the project is, y’know? It’s wherever there are musicians I want to play with. Look, at the end of the day, I’m an entertainer, the way musicians always have been, and we just go from place to place wherever people want to hear our music.
ZZ: Well, for a long time you were definitely based in L.A.
HZ: Well, “based” is different from “home.” I suppose my studio is home. I mean, my room is more a home than a studio.
ZZ: That studio’s kind of been everyone’s home at one time or another. I know it has been for me. I mean, I basically grew up in the back of a recording studio.
HZ: Right, exactly and you didn’t turn out so bad! The thing about the studio is that it’s an interesting place full of interesting people, and that should always make you feel at home. It’s full of possibilities, and there’s a creative dynamic that goes on there. There’s kind of a weird sense of community, but it’s not a community in the normal sense of the word. I mean, everyone’s ego is pretty big.
ZZ: Really big.
HZ: And everyone’s a little bit odd…
ZZ: Really odd. But really great.
HZ: And I think the only thing that we all really have in common is not so much even the music, it’s really just that none of us would be able to get a job anywhere else.
ZZ: Right, you’re really all just a big band of outcasts who got lucky.
HZ: Precisely.
ZZ: And there are a lot of outcasts right now—I mean, the studio is just getting bigger and bigger. It might be your home, but it’s also the size of a small village. Do you think it’s just going to keep growing? Do you want it to keep growing?
HZ: No, I think we have enough buildings now, don’t you?
ZZ: I think if there were anymore buildings you would have to start handing out Segways or small ponies for people to get around.
HZ: Definitely small ponies. But you know, I like people moving in and out of there. I like the atmosphere changing and people progressing. What I love is when people get their own careers together, and then they leave and they do their own versions of it, y’know?Like Harry [Gregson-Williams, Shrek] and John [Powell, How to Train Your Dragon] and people like that. And I like new people coming in; I think it’s interesting. I think it’s interesting that I created this little magnet that draws people in from all over the world, and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s always interesting.
ZZ: Does it piss you off when people question the way the studio works? In terms of having people write for you—you know, when it’s made out to be Hans Zimmer’s Musical Sweatshop?
HZ: Well,they can’t have it both ways. Because on the one hand I get knocked for “sounding the same,” which of course doesn’t actually make any sense—look at the films I did with Ridley [Scott], and that’s just one filmmaker: Thelma & Louise doesn’t sound anything like Gladiator, which doesn’t sound anything like Black Hawk Down, which doesn’t sound anything like Hannibal, which doesn’t sound anything like Black Rain, which doesn’t sound anything like Matchstick Men…
ZZ: I really liked Matchstick Men.
HZ: So did I, but I think we were the only ones. So anyway, on the one hand there’s obviously a very strong imprint in the architecture of the studio, and on the other hand… I mean, you already know all of this. I write these pieces and they’re very complete, everything’s done on them—the orchestration, everything. But like everybody, I need assistants. I’m the architect, but I need a couple of bricklayers, y’know? Do you think Michelangelo painted every square inch of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Probably not—it would have killed him if he had to do it all by himself!
ZZ: Fair enough. So do you think people who make those assumptions are just uninformed about the system? Because assisting and writing additional music is basically how you get your foot in the door, right?
HZ: Well, yes and no. It didn’t really used to be like that. When I got to Hollywood it was slightly different. The studios had orchestrators and arrangers on staff, and they never really got credit for anything. They were just “Backroom Boys.” So now I really do fight for credits for people, even really small credits. It’s important to me that people get to participate, and that they get credit and that they are visible, so I really do fight fort hem. They might not be the architects, but it’s still their time that they give me, that they give to these projects.
ZZ: Interstellar was all you though, wasn’t it?
HZ: All me. Interstellar nobody got to write a single note on other than me. And although a lot of musicians played on it, one of the things we tried to preserve was the singularity of my touch and my vision, and literally me playing every note. I mean, on all of these scores I have at one time or another played every single note. But unfortunately the story of me just sitting there by myself and writing is far less exciting and scandalous than the idea of assistants and ghostwriters.
ZZ: Talking about all this always makes me wish I played an instrument. I thought that the other day when I saw Whiplash. I mean, you really hogged all the musical talent in the family. Do you ever wish any of us, your kids, were more musical?
HZ: No. I love that you are all musical imbeciles.
ZZ: Whoa whoa whoa. Hey now…
HZ: No, what I mean is, I think it’s really hard tofollowinthe footsteps of anybody. And I think it’s really important that you go and make your own path. What I say to all of you is “follow your dream,” but at the same time I’m saying “don’t be stupid.” There are all these people who think following a dream means that you have to be some big star or something. All I’m saying is if you want to become a great plumber, or a great chef, or a great whatever, then do it. Just be a great you, and don’t take no for an answer.
ZZ: I know. You’ve always said that. You’ve always been very supportive of whatever I’ve wanted to do. And yeah, of course it can be daunting being related to someone who’s not only successful, but so successful in such a creative industry. Growing up with that made me feel like it wasn’t about finding a job, it was about finding a passion.
HZ: I know, but I try to be a shining example to you—to all of my kids—that the impossible is possible. Having a passion for something is a tricky thing. There are many ways of going about that passion—you can make it your job or you can make it your hobby, and both are equally valid. You got one life, it ain’t that long, so you may as well…
ZZ: Make it count? Have a good time? Don’t fuck it up?
HZ: Yeah, but more than a good time. Get real pleasure out of it, not just fun. Feel it all, have conflict, have difficulties, suffer for it a little bit, y’know?
ZZ: God, that’s so German of you.
HZ: Yes! But you need it. When your mum and I were first together the electricity used to always get turned off because I wouldn’t pay the bill, and it’s really hard to be an electronic musician with no electricity! But yeah, I know a lot of really talented musicians who will never really make it, because people realized they were talented early on so there wasn’t enough opposition. And you need that, you need friction, you need struggle. Life needs to scare you sometimes; you have to respect it and be in awe of it. So yeah, be a little scared, let it freak you out. I don’t know, maybe you shouldn’t be listening to my advice.
ZZ: No, I always like your advice. Even if I don’t always listen to it. In fact, one of my favorite bits of advice from you was: “Remember, nothing’s less attractive to a man than a weeping woman.”
HZ: [Laughs.] It’s true! It’s true! That’s some great fatherly advice! I try to be useful, y’know? We have good chats, right?When we’re together, I try to give everything there is, I try to come up with ideas…
ZZ: You are useful. I always say that I’d rather have you be the father you are now, rather than the father you weren’t when I was growing up, y’know? You were terrible at playing Barbies, but if I’m having trouble with work? Breakup with a boyfriend? Need to know where to buy the best macaroons? You’re the first person I call.
HZ: Oh, man. The Barbies…
ZZ: I know, you still have Barbie PTSD. Sorry. Let’s talk about something less traumatic. Do you get bored? I sometimes worry you get bored of writing for (insert name of generic comic book movie sequel/prequel).
HZ: Bored? No, not bored. You know, all those big movies still bring me something, they still bring a challenge. Whether it’s Spider-Man or Superman or whatever, I strive to do something different everytime. And I get to work with new people, new musicians who have a fresh take on it all, even if it is a sequel. And I try to do new things too, like the shows last year. [Zimmer played two live shows in London at the Eventim Apollo in October 2014.] That was new, it was exciting, and terrifying—I mean, you know how petrified I get about going on stage.
ZZ: Yeah, but only a few of us know. You always pull it off. And you always have a great time in the end, right? If you don’t then you fake it really well. You looked like you were having the time of your life at the Grammys with Pharrell…
HZ: I do have a good time, despite the fear. After the first show in London, which was terrifying, I thought maybe the stage fright would get better on the next night. I thought maybe I would learn something, but of course it wasn’t better. And I realized that it’s not about it “getting better,” that’s just how I’m built, y’know? I get freaked out. So just do it. Do it despite everything else, because if I don’t do it I think it would be something I would regret.
ZZ: So what do you wanna do now?
HZ: I sometimes wish I could just watch an awful lot of television in bed and not engage in the next battle, y’know? But I can’t, you know I can’t. I think part of what happens is—I don’t think there’s any middle ground. I think you’re either very successful or you’re not successful at all. I think if you’re in that middle ground then the magnetic pull is always to the bottom. I think being a guitarist playing songs in a subway station and doing a hundred-million-dollar movie are equally great. But the slithering around in the middle is not so great. And the middle ground is really where the sharks swim. They don’t swim at the top or the bottom—all the uninspiring people you don’t want to hang out with are in the middle ground.
ZZ: Do you remember telling me what the Four Stages of a Career were? “1. Who is Hans Zimmer? 2. Get me Hans Zimmer. 3. Get me someone who sounds like Hans Zimmer. 4. Who is Hans Zimmer?”
HZ: [Laughs—a lot.] Right!
ZZ: Do you worry about what stage you’re in?
HZ: Nah, not really. I’m not done, y’know? I still have more to say.
ZZ: Well, yeah, you’re not really the type to retire and move to Florida.
HZ: No way. Musicians don’t think about retirement. My hero is [the late British comic magician] Tommy Cooper, for all sorts of reasons. For his humor, for his crazy fez, for his courage for going out on the stage and failing. His jokes going wrong, his magic tricks going wrong, and mainly for having a laugh at himself. Even his death, people weren’t sure it was real for a while. And he died doing what he loved, he died in the place that he loved… standing on a stage.
ZZ: Don’t get any ideas…
HZ: That’s just it—I’m going to be here until the ideas run out.
ZZ: Glad to hear it, Daddy. Now let’s go get some dinner.
