INTERVIEWS
"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Acting Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs · Curator of Music and Performing Arts
National Museum of African American History and Culture · Smithsonian Institution
This museum, this institution has a long history and actually, the idea of a museum goes back to maybe 100 years ago when Civil War veterans wanted a monument recognizing the service and the sacrifice of African Americans during the war effort. It wasn't until the mid-late 80s when congressman John Lewis with some other colleagues started to bring forth the idea that the Smithsonian needed to have a presence to recognize the significance and contributions of African Americans to the history of this country.
Musician and Songwriter
There is a metaphor to every single word that we say, we're just not aware. But if we were aware, then it would become very interesting. And that's the quest for me to be constantly more and more aware because it's so beautiful. It's a quest for beauty as well.
Cinematographer
As a cinematographer what you're trying to do is portray the story in the proper way. Of course, there is going to be an aesthetic that you place based on your own taste and what you believe in, maybe some of the things you're attracted to, inspired by, but ultimately everything, all the decisions are made with the narrative in mind. And that entails doing deep dives into research with photographs and art and music and things that you see in life and things that you remember from your past that sort of inform the things that you choose to do.
Author, Screenwriter and Producer
So the great thing about being a writer is you can take the pain of your life and make something out of it. And you can mix it up with the happier parts and make something even better out of it. I mean, it's kind of all these things end up being gifts when you're older.
Writer
As seductive as the virtual world can be – where there are fewer boundaries, where you can be anything, and you can be anyone – there's something very important about the tactile world and being grounded in the tactile world. And so far humanity has not lost sight of that collectively. And I do not think that we will.
Writer · Producer · Director
Sex and the City, Modern Family, Everybody Loves Raymond, Otherhood
It was a long journey because I think I've been writing television now twenty-five years. I never really had the directing bug. I always loved writing and I like being behind the scenes and, in television, writers have so much control anyway to rise up the ranks and run the show and hire the directors, so I mostly had just great collaborations with directors.
Pilobolus Dance Company
I guess the part that's our thing is the method or process that Renée Jaworski was describing. The constraint, the framework that we try to put on what we're doing includes that, for this time, let's not map everything out first and try and realize the vision that one person has but to put people together, as Renée was saying, and have something else emerge that's a product of everybody that's involved. Penn Jillette, who we were honored to work with, the way he put it is, "You're not a collective, you're not looking the same, talking the same, you don't use the same terms for movement. All the dancers look different, and they think differently as well. –MATT KENT
Director · Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center
Jackson Pollock said it himself. “It's energy and motion made visible.” So these are things that come spontaneously from his own feelings, but they're based on, first of all, observation, the natural world around him, all the forces of nature that were so influential. And then, processing that and figuring out how to create a visual language that expresses those feelings. And some of those feelings can be very complicated.
The technique, the means of expression is dictated by what those feelings are. It's not the other way around. People think – Oh, he used the liquid material and then he sort of danced around and that kind of gave him ideas. – No.
Actor and Director
When I read Mamet, to me, it was almost like–Yeah! I get it. This is a language I understand. It felt very comfortable to me. And I know he has told me that he has written characters with my voice in his mind as he wrote them, and so, again how lucky for me that that's the case. I feel very lucky that it's worked out that way that he's the writer that I ended up hooking up with.
Writer · Graphic Novelist · Producer
The idea that anything could be a door, the idea that the back of the wardrobe could open up unto a world in which it was winter and there were other worlds inches away from us, became just part of the way that I saw the world, that was how I assumed the way the world worked, when I was a kid that was the way that I saw.
Academy Award-winning Documentary Filmmaker
I think it's interesting because I feel like in scripted films people are trying to infuse a spontaneity and a reality and a being in the moment into something that's very artificial. And I feel a lot of what we do as documentarians is try and impose a structure or a form on something that is utterly real and alive and in the moment and uncategorizable in many ways. So, we're kind of the opposite, coming from opposite ends of the same goal, which is to kind of create something that is or feels authentic to a certain truth, an emotional truth, or a literal truth.
Cinematographer
If I had to choose one movie I always say Terrence Mallick's Badlands. If I have to ever choose one it's that one. It's just such an amazing film. Great music and great acting. Just sort of stood back, relaxed cinematography by Tak Fujimoto. That era of John Cassavetes movies. Oh, my god, Gloria, Woman Under the Influence. Just outstanding and daring and free. In the film world, I’m probably more influenced by that than I even realize. I always appreciated the magic of cinema, even before I was involved.
President of the Acropolis Museum
I think that contact with ancient civilizations is very important because we get to have in our life a third dimension. If we live only in the present, we don't understand what happened many thousand years ago. We don't realize what the development of humanity really is.
Novelist and Essayist
The reason I think you should read in these other disciplines is because it will help you in your own work. Now I really mean that. I think what has happened with the fragmentation of disciplines is that when problems arise. ...the people working in the discipline are unable to see avenues out of the problem that they would easily see if they had worked through problems in other disciplines.
Associate Curator
Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian
The connections between American Indians and the United States are profound and deep. And it's not simply an issue of us being victims and the U.S. being the oppressor. It's much more complicated than that.
Actress, Choreographer, Artistic Director - Neo-Political Cowgirls
I care very deeply about the arts, theater arts. So I had a choice to make, either leave entirely or be the change, as they say. So I started Neo-Political Cowgirls to embrace women in their story, in our story.
Director of FIAC · Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain
If you create the conditions in which people feel comfortable interacting with art, there are some really beautiful things that can emerge from that encounter. Things that I think are life changing.
Playwright & President of the Dramatists Guild of America
I think we have to look to find the voices of women and marginalized people because sometimes it's the most disenfranchised people in the culture that are the most articulate about it and most aware of the innate injustice in certain social systems. So I think we really have examine our canon and broaden and deepen it to include more voices.
Actor and Theater Director
I really know theater because that's where I started. I went at it in a very haphazard way. It was not orderly at all. I didn't go to a proper school or anything like that. I did a little bit of studying here or there...Jeff Corey (and at one class in New York) someone said something that helped me a great deal. And then I just learned by doing it.
Novelist
It's interesting to me that the West has been shaped by two works of fiction, The Iliad and The Odyssey and the Gospels, which are prehistoric artistic works. The West has two feet. They're both fictional feet, and after that we started being rational and reasonable.