The Creative Process
/JULIE ANDREWS · PAUL SCHRADER · JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY · ETGAR KERET · JOY GORMAN WETTELS · CHAYSE IRVIN · MANUEL BILLETER
Share their Stories
NEIL PATRICK HARRIS
/Actor · Comedian · Filmmaker · Magician · Singer · Writer
And I remember I was just the whitest kid ever from small-town New Mexico in this big city of Los Angeles…I'm sitting there watching this play about a lower middle-class African-American man in Pittsburgh and his family. And I just remember being so moved, moved to tears at 13, 14 years old…And it was so moving. And I did think even back then, I recognized the impact that the theater can have on someone that isn't even anything like what they're like.
APRIL GORNIK
/Artist · Environmentalist
Co-founder of The Church · Arts & Creativity Center
Co-director of Sag Harbor Cinema Board
I've chosen my work because I've loved the outside world. I love the things outside of myself. I love what isn't immediate to me. And I love projecting onto that as a way of kind of trying to reach the distance between my inner self and the vastness. To try to do that in a way that makes other people feel inspired by it, not be chided for not taking care of it. It's not something that I intend to be a message per se. I'd rather people look at the natural world and see the heartbreaking beauty of it and sense its fragility and its impermanence and their own impermanence and fragility and then have a response to that rather than say, you know, you have to act, you have to do something. I would hope that would inspire action rather than to cudgel them with a directive.
PAUL AUSTER
/Writer · Filmmaker 1947-2024
What happens is a space is created. And maybe it’s the only space of its kind in the world in which two absolute strangers can meet each other on terms of absolute intimacy. I think this is what is at the heart of the experience and why once you become a reader that you want to repeat that experience, that very deep total communication with that invisible stranger who has written the book that you’re holding in your hands. And that’s why I think, in spite of everything, novels are not going to stop being written, no matter what the circumstances. We need stories. We’re all human beings, and it’s stories from the moment we’re able to talk.
LAURENT LE BON
/Fmr. President Musée Picasso
President Centre Pompidou
Picasso is a symbol of the creative process.
Always in metamorphosis. Always in transformation. Sometimes when you become wealthy and famous, you stop having the energy of the creative process, but if you see the whole span of his career, you have 50,000 works of art in all mediums. So the main mission of the museum is to display like a kaleidoscope, and we have always a new angle, a new direction.
DAVID HOLLANDER
/Showrunner · Writer · Director
They are very different skill sets and very different ways of approaching storytelling. Writing is very private. I find writing to be very difficult. I have an idea. I have a feeling, and then I write into it. That part of the process is the most painful and the most demanding. Directing is easier. It’s a very different skill set. It’s applying a story to the technique of how you film it, how it’s going to work. That part is so simple. The writing is brutally hard. There’s an architecture to every season that you write in television. I have to see the whole story. This big twelve-hour story. There’s a lot of math in that. There’s a lot of Where am I going? and How is it going to feel? Because at the end of the day, all I’m doing is trying to make people feel something.