Well, in De re publica Cicero wrote, “The worst rule of all would be government by clever poets.” I thought that was such a brilliant line! (Laughs) As a writer, I have to obviously go through a process of criticism, which can be painful. Often people don’t like your books — and they tell you. You’re judged by the public all the time, so in a sense that’s quite like politics. I don’t lose my job, though; I don’t lose my seat. But of course people stop buying my books and people stop being interested, so much like a politician, I’m dependent on public favor.

Many of your novels deal with political fiction, of course, but was it ever your wish to go into politics as a career?

No. I’ve really only ever wanted to be a writer.

You never even considered it?

Well, when I was a teenager I used to think about going into politics because I obviously liked it and I had beliefs and I enjoyed speaking and all that. But by the time I was 20 or 21, I knew that I wouldn’t do that. I’ve even been asked by The Labour Party and the Liberals in Britain in the past, but I’ve no desire to order people around and I don’t want to be ordered around by people. I don’t want to be responsible to anyone! Becoming a writer is all I could really do.

You once hinted that it’s impossible to not go slightly crazy if you’re in politics. Do you still believe that?

I think that a lot of people, if they stay at the top, almost invariably go crazy. The Americans are right: eight years is about all anyone can stand! After that, you know, there’s a very strong possibility you’ll be parting company with reality. (Laughs)

You touch on this in your writing as well. The difficulty of being moral while having power is often a theme in your novels.

The exercise of power inevitably involves compromise. It involves what some people would call hypocrisy or deceit. You can’t be a Boy Scout and rule a country, and I like that. That whole area of morality, practicality, and power is of endless interest to me.

I’m sure. You’ve explored this in almost every book you’ve written, whether it was based in Ancient Rome or World War II era Britain.

Well, it’s not really a matter of the period! It’s a matter of the story. I would set a story in any time, in any location, it’s just a matter of whether it’s of interest. That’s the way I work. I’m not comparing myself to him in terms of talent but I rather admire Stanley Kubrick, who would take his stories and set them in the Vietnam war, the First World War, the future. He’d do satire, he’d do Barry Lyndon… The period and everything, that’s not what’s important.

Have you always wanted to write historical fiction?

I came to novels almost by accident! I had an idea, a publisher said do it, I did it, and it was a completely unexpected success. I really had to give up my other job because it would have been crazy not to! It then took me three years to write a novel, then three years to write the novel after that, and then five years to the next.

Why did you need those years in between?

Writer’s block! I certainly had it on my second novel, Enigma. It was very painful and unpleasant. And I cured it by reading the letters of Raymond Chandler, who said at one point, “I cannot understand writers who complain about writing. Go and do something else! It’s the most fantastic thing to invent stories.” I read it and I thought, “He’s right! Why am I moaning and groaning and making a big thing of this? This is a pleasure.” The moment I did that, it was like I sort of relaxed into it

And that approach has lasted?

Oddly enough, yes. Now I’m much more eager to write. When I’m not writing a novel, I feel very bereft. And that’s a big change! I write more now than I did when I was a younger man and had more energy. I think in part it’s a function of growing old.

How so?

You feel no longer like the world is yours. Somehow you feel that another generation is taking it. And that’s fine. I sort of retreat into my own head a bit more. In there I’m not an old fool who has to have the zappers taken off of him and have the mobile phone explained to him and all that stuff. (Laughs)

To date your books have sold more than 12 million copies and you’ve been named columnist of the year. But could a successful, popular writer ever win the Nobel Prize?

No. If you’re popular, you’ve done a lot of the working out for people. And that means that you run the risk of appearing obvious. It’s quite hard to write popular fiction, but I can see that you cut out the middleman. It’s just you and the reader; there isn’t a priest between you to explain the text and tell people, “This is good for you.” The novelists I really like have never won the Nobel Prize. And a lot of completely awful, unreadable tosh wins the Nobel Prize! (Laughs)

I guess that’s not really the goal for you.

No. I am a populist, I believe in reaching an audience. The pretention that goes along with the literary novel, the deliberate obscurity — I can’t stand that. One writes for readers, not for prize committees or reviewers. I think that there’s also a deserved sense that if you’re popular then you’ve got your reward. The prizes are there to reward people and tell people about other novelists who aren’t getting the break, and I think that’s fair.

Since the Nobel Prize seems out of the picture, what else are you hoping to achieve in your career?

I have an audience, people know my books, people come up and they’ve got my books going all the way back to Fatherland. It’s very touching to see that. Without being pious about it, that is the reward. I’ve been very lucky — I took the risk to do the things that interested me, so I could have no possible complaints. There’s nothing else I could ask for, really, and if I drop dead tomorrow, I would have had a terrific time.

I never think of things like that, but I guess maybe you do. But why should I worry? The fashion police are not going to come and put me in jail! I love bright colors, but I never did anything that I did to be a rebel… I just did it because I thought it was fun and it was good for me. And as long as I didn’t offend my mother or my husband, what anybody else thinks is their problem, not mine!

Have you always had a passion for color?

I’m not a pastel person! Pastels make me nervous. I could never be like my mother because she never had a hair out of place! She got up in the morning and she looked like she just stepped out of a Chicago Coin band box. She was perfect all the time. And I’m not like that. Everybody would turn around to look at her but in a completely different way to me. My mother was much more disciplined in that fashion than I am. I just go with the flow!

You seem to need a certain amount of spontaneity in your life.

Oh, absolutely! My God, I couldn’t live in a rigid world… If I knew what I was going to do every day, I would go nuts! Every day is different. I’m not a planner. You either do the right thing or the wrong thing, but you do it. I’m experimental, I’m curious, and I try things. And if I like it, I do it again!

So getting dressed never feels like work to you?

Oh, my God, no, if it felt like work, I wouldn’t do it! If it felt like work, I wouldn’t get dressed up! People think maybe I just live to get dressed, which is ridiculous. I normally wear some old jeans and a sweater or something like that where I feel comfortable.

I have trouble picturing you in an old sweater and a pair of jeans.

You do?

I’ve never seen photos of you looking anything but fabulous. 

Well, most people don’t want to see you looking grungy… I never look grungy, I always look clean! (Laughs) But even when I’m all dressed up, I like to be comfortable. If I’m not comfortable, I don’t want to wear it. I don’t pay attention to trends or anything. I was never one to hobble around in shoes because they were fashionable.

Is that a problem in fashion these days? People wear things that are uncomfortable just because it’s in style?

Oh no. I think contemporary clothing is too comfortable! People take advantage and begin to look sloppy, nobody pays attention to what’s appropriate anymore. Appropriate seems to be a dirty word. Sweatpants are fine in their place but you don’t go to the theater in sweatpants. I think it’s disrespectful to the artists on stage! The theater is a kind of worshipping place. You go to worship good craftsmanship, good art, good food… If you go to a temple of cuisine, you should dress appropriately. If you come in looking like a pig with flip-flops and a dirty sweatshirt, I think it’s an affront!

What do you think is to blame for this decline?

It’s a whole breaking down of society, I’m sure you’ve noticed. The way people behave? The way they talk, the way they dress, the way they look? Everything! The dumbing down of society. Years ago you couldn’t enter a fine restaurant if you didn’t have a jacket! They’d have jackets on the door that they’d put on you. Everybody dressed up when they went to a restaurant. I like when I go to a restaurant and I look over at the next table and the people look attractive; it helps my digestion. When I see a beast with an open shirt and hairy chest hanging out it takes away my appetite! I think it’s just a lack of respect.

Respect for the people around you?

Lack of respect for yourself! I think if you go out, you don’t have to dress up all the time. I surely am not an advocate of that. But you have to look clean and neat and, you know, not look offensive. I think some of these people that waddle around Fifth Avenue in the summer, some of these ladies that have a butt from here to Poughkeepsie that wear tights or jeans that are so, so tight… It seems to me the more unattractive some of these people are, and the fatter they are, the less clothes they wear.

Do you miss the fashion scene of old New York?

I wouldn’t go into mourning over it, but there used to be an enormous fashion scene, and I don’t think there’s much of one anymore. If you walked down Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue in the fifties and sixties, everybody looked so wonderful. Now, if you’re clean and well-dressed you look like a freak. It was another world.

How so?

First of all, the clothes were clothes. They were properly made with beautiful fabrics. There were wonderful designers that knew how to cut and sew and drape. Back then in New York, we had some of the best designers going.

Do you remember things changing, for example, when America entered World War II?

Oh, of course they changed. Fashion was not on the forefront. The emphasis was not on making beautiful clothes. Factories changed, they made army clothes and stuff like that, people were in a somber mood. There wasn’t any fashion! Everything was simplified.

Because fabric was rationed during the war?

Right, it wasn’t until after the war that Dior came with the New Look. He made clothes with voluminous skirts because finally we had a surplus of fabric again. That’s what’s interesting if you really want to study fashion, it’s a photograph of daily life. The political climate, the economic climate, the social behavior—it’s all reflected in fashion.

What does today’s fashion say about our daily lives?

I think most people don’t know who they really are. They feel secure if they look like other people or if it’s the look that everybody says is in… People agonize about the way they look! It’s unbelievable! They don’t know what to wear or how to do it, and they’re very unhappy. But you can’t learn style. Style, I think, is in your DNA. You can learn how to be more fashionable, you can learn how to be better dressed, but I don’t think you can learn style. I think that’s something inherent. You have to know who you are first and then proceed from there—and that’s a lot of work! Most people don’t want to do it. And if they don’t want to do it, and they feel stressed by doing it, I always say it’s better to be happy than well-dressed.

I think every film in a way is an extension of yourself. No matter what. Every film that I have done is an extension of myself. Sometimes I feel that the films start blending with reality. Suddenly there’s a weird blurred line that disappears and what’s going on thematically in the film starts surrounding your life in a very real way. That has happened to me many times.

With which films specifically?

This time, with The Revenant, the physicality of the theme really became part of our daily life. The water was extremely cold; one day we were in 40 degrees below zero. The physical reality of the characters appeared in our life and blended with our own physical experience.

Why were you so committed to shooting it under such conditions?

I was really happy to get out into the wild and to get back to the tradition and the origins of cinema where things happen and we’re shooting in real places. Where we haven’t invented a way to do an artificial world around us by building sets or digitally inventing them. Suddenly the reality and the complexity of the real natural elements and the real light… It’s clear for me that no matter how good a computer or set designer is, it will never match that.

Why not?

Not only because of its complexity and beauty, but because the state of mind that it gives those doing the film. It has repercussions in the whole system, you know? I really love the experience in that sense. The odyssey of making the film became the film itself. We became the trappers, you know? It was great and it was a vast emotional experience and physical experience.

That reminds me of Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, where he believed the harsh conditions shooting in the Peruvian rainforest would seep through into the film.

Yeah. Herzog’s Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo were an influence to me. Or Akira Kurosawa did a film called Dersu Uzala, or even Apocalypse Now. Those films where it’s man against nature and there are those landscapes that, in a way, dictate the emotional state of the character. I really love those films. 

But shooting like that can take its toll as well. During the production of Aguirre, Herzog and Klaus Kinski almost ended up killing each other as a result of the stress.

Yes, once you are there, you realize it will be ten times more difficult! The film is a result of a naïve decision that I made. I made that decision because I was absolutely blind. You really give up any chance of being comfortable and fight every day. That’s the mode. It was like rock climbing: once you are climbing a wall without a rope and you are in the middle, any mistake and you know that you fall and you will die. That’s how the sensation of this film was every day.

That sounds horrible.

It’s a little bit scary how crazy I am! It could have been terrible. Everything could have gone wrong very easily… There were so many challenges every day. You become a creature of your own work. Sometimes you are God and sometimes you are a creature. And here you are just a creature surviving your own creation. And the stakes financially, the things that can go wrong in such an ambitious project, the standards were set so high, that we were trapped. I was trapped in my own rules. I couldn’t go back; I hit a wall. And if I didn’t finish, or didn’t finish the way I wanted to, then it would be a complete disaster. It’s like a marathon—there is no way you can stop; you have to finish. You feel that you are fainting, but you have to finish!

Your career must be hard on your marriage.

I hope I’m not divorced very soon! (Laughs) It was tough. It was tough. Filmmaking demands a lot, it takes a lot of shit from you. And you are away from all the people that need you, and that’s one of the toughest parts. 

And you were already working on The Revenant when you won the Oscar for Birdman last year. Wouldn’t you say it’s time for a break?

I’ve run two marathons so I need to stop. To be honest, I haven’t had even the time to understand what happened with Birdman! It’s a very weird situation and I think I will have to rest for a couple of months and then to understand what happened in my life in the last two and a half years. Normally I take two or three years between every film so the only thing that I can really think about is to rest for the next three years. I really need it.

Does it take a mogul like Arnon Milchan—who financed Birdman and The Revenant and has previously backed films like Once Upon a Time in America and Brazil—to make these kinds of ambitious films possible?

 Absolutely. You need a guy with that passion, with certain taste, who is an art lover, and crazy—in a good way— all at the same time in order to make a film like this happen.

Does everybody else worry too much about money? 

That’s why these films are not happening anymore, because most of the people involved now are financiers that their only reason to be there is profit. And when everything is driven by profit, then films become a commodity or a comfortable product that doesn’t bother anybody and gets the most audience possible. So that’s a dangerous state that we are in now. It’s only profit. I’m not naïve to think that it was different before. It’s always been like that, but now it is much more than ever.

In hindsight, would you choose to do a film like The Revenant the same way again? 

I don’t regret having done it at all. I think everything that I went through was worth it. I am very proud. But I would not do it again. (Laughs) It was extremely difficult. Extremely, extremely demanding. It became an act of survival, honestly. As a filmmaker, I was in moments that were very difficult and challenging…

How do you find hope in those moments?

Sometimes when you lose faith and you understand that something will never be possible the way that you dreamed, but you keep trying, suddenly one thing flips and everything re-accommodates. And suddenly what was not working totally flows. When you are in a very, very tough moment of a day and a lot of frustration because nothing is happening right—but you don’t give up—and suddenly that happens! That’s almost a transcendental thing.

The hope of connecting with another person through language. It’s nice at readings when someone comes up afterward to talk about a poem. That’s my favorite moment as a writer. I like giving readings, I like letters from readers, I like to share poems with friends. That kind of intimate connection, face to face, is one of the great pleasures. Poetry allows a sort of central-line access to inner life… You enter the interior world of another person.

That curiosity seems to exist in all of us innately.

It’s a primal pleasure! A favorite teacher of mine used to say that we crave the strangeness of others. The drive to connect with other people through language is strong. Life is lonely; poetry—because of the intimate kind of connection it allows—provides some respite.

Do you often feel lonely in life?

The few years I lived in Los Angeles were lonely. It was so beautiful there, but so isolating also—the car culture, the dead quiet on neighborhood streets in the middle of the afternoon. And I could never live up to the perfect weather. I’m more at ease in New York on a gray day in a crush of people. The frenetic pace here suits me.

Well now you are married with kids and you direct the Creative Writing Program at NYU. How do you find time to write poetry with your schedule?

I try to save at least an hour a day for poems, first thing in the morning before the day takes over. It’s nice to write then surrounded by music and good books, and with a cup of strong coffee close at hand. As the day goes on it gets harder and harder to pay attention to anything. I have to consciously put down the phone, or leave it in another room. I try to power down at night so I can be present for the people who matter most to me.

Much your work takes place in the everyday. Artist Sarah Morris says that reality is so interesting and strange that she doesn’t feel the need to create fictional films. Do you feel the same way?

I’m not interested in chasing adventure for the sake of art. So much happens on the inside—in the mind—that even the most ordinary days often feel mysterious, wild, exhilarating. When a poem works, the familiar is made strange again, and life is revealed in all of its inarticulable weirdness. My most recent book considers the pleasures and complexities of domestic life in hope of heightening the immense strangeness of these experiences.

Which experiences do you mean exactly?

Marriage, motherhood; subjects that might seem familiar. Pregnancy, for example—it’s sentimentalized everywhere, but the moment the baby comes out of your body is utterly bizarre, pure science fiction. You know the baby is in there but you don’t really know until the surreal moment of birth.

What was your first thought after the birth of your kids?

I’ve always been surprised by how the essence of a person is visible in the very first glimpse; from the first moment a baby opens its eyes on this earth you can see who they are, as strange as that sounds.

When writing autobiographically about your children or your sex life, do you ever have to overcome your fear of being embarrassed?

When I’m writing I’m just alone in my room. It doesn’t occur to me anyone will ever read what I’m writing, so I don’t feel inhibited or embarrassed.

What about when you read your work in front of an audience?

Then it’s kind of a shock to find myself behind a microphone, yes. I often wonder what compels me to do this! A therapist once reassured me that the world needs writers to say the things we all feel but are ashamed to say. Ultimately, though, art and life are different things. When working on a poem my primary concern is just to try to write a good poem, to find a language that is energetic and alive and adequate to experience.

It’s better to write without fear anyway.

Life is confounding and who knows what’s around the next corner. But in many ways uncertainty can be exhilarating—there’s a lot of freedom in it. It would be a shame to waste our snippet of time on this planet being afraid.

Do you think the best poems should capture that kind of freedom?

Elizabeth Bishop famously said that a poem should enact the mind in motion rather than the mind at rest. We’re swept up in the stream of experience and our lives go by, but a poem can be a container for a moment or mood so that it can be caught or kept, at least on the page. My favorite poems capture the movements of the mind—its uncanny leaps and associations.

Would you agree with Rilke when he says, “If one feels one could live without writing, then one shouldn’t write at all?”

I wouldn’t tell anyone not to write. It’s probably true, though, that if writing isn’t really important to you, you likely won’t work hard enough to make anything of interest to readers.

So writing poetry has never felt like work to you?

Writing is play; revising a poem can feel like work. And I revise a lot, actually. It would be hard to say how many iterations a poem goes through before it seems finished, but typically many more than five or ten or even twenty. It’s not easy but it is satisfying. I feel fortunate to spend my days this way, reading and writing. Reading is always a key part of writing for me.

Because it exposes you to other people’s work?

Reading widely and deeply is probably the most important thing one can do to become a better writer. We talk about that a lot at NYU where our graduate students are studying great poems and novels as a way to learn how to write their own. And of course that kind of necessary learning never ends for a writer, even long after graduation.

It would be a great answer if I said I reflect a lot, but that is not true. I act on intuition. I just let my intuition go in situations of fear. I live from my heart. I am not a cerebral person. I will never be. I am 55 years old. I will continue doing things the way I have done them my whole life. And it gave me mostly a great time. I like life very much. Picture me 15 years old on a cliff: I see people jumping. I am terrified, but I see more people jumping and I see a friend of mine also jump—so I jump.

Would you still behave the same way today?

Still the same way. I started skiing when I was 40 years old. I am competing now. I am not proud of this, what I did this Christmas, because they disqualified me from competing, but I have been skiing very heavy and very fast. I heard about Michael Schumacher, the accident, but I kept going.

Hopefully that won’t catch up with you any time soon…

On the other hand there is a natural process in life, which means that if you live naturally you will accept those limitations more and more. I write more than I used to, I read more, I compose music. I feel like I am growing naturally so far. I started producing. I find enormous satisfaction in seeing people that I believe in, that have talent, and providing them with the tools they need in order to blossom, to flourish, to do what they want to do. Your mind starts changing. I have seen people that are sick, that always want to be 20 years old. Wrong. That is a call for suffering, because nature is a dictatorship. Nature is not democratic, nature makes you get old. It makes you a man or a woman and that’s it.

But does that mean that you just accept what is given to you?

With what is objective and certain, yes. It doesn’t mean I am not dreaming. I am dreaming. But I am dreaming according to the rules of the game. I believe in the freedom that you have to make choices in a free society. Of course, there are people that don’t have that and I don’t think we are ruled by the people that we voted for. We are ruled by markets and corporations and lobbies, but we do have choices—the choice to do drugs, the choice to jump out of a building, the choice to study hard, to obtain an objective. I have control over my skills. An accident can happen, but I don’t like to jump with a parachute, because it’s something I cannot control. I just pull on it and I don’t know whether it’s folded right. But not everything is black and white and I don’t like to be a fundamentalist of anything.

Are you still ambitious?

When I was younger I used to have more anxiousness to obtain things. But there are moments in which you obtain those things and then you relax. There is something interesting when you observe other actors, other people in positions of public recognition, you realize it’s way smarter and better for your life if you are not number one or number two or number three. It’s better if you are in a place where you can live with a certain comfort, without being pursued, and at the same time you are doing work that you want to do. You have to be very egotistical and ambitious to try to keep that position number one. Because it’s not worth it.

How did you learn to not take yourself too seriously?

You laugh at everything. Humor is very important. For instance I cannot be with people who don’t have humor. Humor is equal to irony and irony in the end is equal to intelligence. Laughing is very important for me. And it starts with laughing at myself. Putting the important things first. And the important thing is yourself and the people that surround you, your family, and what it’s exactly what I want to do.

Your father was a policeman. Did he support you becoming an actor?

My father was probably the person who helped the most to be an actor. When I went to Madrid and I didn’t have any money, he continually sent me—not much, because he didn’t make much money—but he always sent me a little bit so I could eat and live in a pension. And he saw it. Before he died, he saw me in Hollywood, he saw me on Broadway, and it was very nice to see my father, a very old man, sitting there and smiling. It was a very satisfying thing that he saw his son having success on Broadway. It was very beautiful. When my father came to the theater, it was like there was nobody else there. There were 2,500 people in the theater, but I did the performance just for my father.

Do you think your humble roots have made you a better actor?

I don’t come from a poor, poor family—I never missed my food and my clothing when I was a kid—but we were not rich at all. I have members of my family who worked in the fields as peasants, so I know what it’s to work with your hands every day. I am closer to that reality than if I would have been born in a different type of reality. That made me understand the characters that I am now trying to perform. If I had been born to a rich family, there would be more distance in the comprehension of somebody else’s reality.

Apparently you wanted to become a football player until you broke your foot at the age of 14 and it was only after that that you pursued acting seriously. Do you believe in fate?

No, I don’t. I don’t believe in fate, not at all. Fate can be transformed by you.

Your career seems to validate that judging by how you made your way into Hollywood without even being able to speak English very well.

That probably is part of my Andalusian culture, reflected by all the artists, Picasso, Federico García Lorca. For Andalusians, the fact that the only certainty in life is death is very present. Everything else is relative. So since I was very little I knew that very clearly: There is only one life. What are you going to do? I wanted to know, so I was very curious my entire life. I wanted to travel to different places. I have the feeling that I will die old—if I stop smoking maybe—and I think I will still be a kid. It’s very rare that something kills my curiosity. So that curiosity is the engine that makes me move through life without fear.

What do you think happens after we die?

I have no idea. But I have the feeling it’s not going to be oblivion and nothingness. There is something there. There is a mystery out there beyond death, covered by the arrogance of our intellectuality sometimes. I do believe there is something that we don’t understand. I live very comfortably in the mystery.

Neon socks! I was probably eight or nine, and I’d seen them in a shop in Carlisle in the UK where I grew up and I had to have them in all the colors. I remember my grandmother giving me money for them and I ran to the store to get them! (Laughs) I still love neon! You can’t help but be influenced by the things you grew up with.

The past seems to play an important role in your work as a fashion designer.

Even now, I’m looking back as much as I’m looking at today. I think actually what I’m fascinated by is the pop culture and cool culture and youth culture that was developing during my youth. I connect to those things very quickly. “Cool” is a word that I’ve always been obsessed with, especially in my work.

How do you define cool?

What’s interesting is that it’s so open to interpretation and it can mean something different to so many people. Even different countries have different interpretations of it. You know, in France it’s chic… In America it’s cool. The established codes are always changing and shifting, so if you look at images of people all around the world today, they’re wearing sneakers and jeans and sweatshirts and t-shirts and backpacks. These are functional pieces. They were created as work wear.

American work wear, mostly.

Exactly and now they go with everything. There’s something so fundamentally different about American style that I think has really been embraced. Blue collar and sportswear in fashion is not a typical reference for us in the UK and Europe, but it’s very typical in America. I like that a lot of these references are kind of anti-fashion, quite at the opposite end of traditional fashion references. Luxury doesn’t mean what it used to. Nowadays luxury can even mean a sneaker or a sweatshirt.

Was the concept of American cool something that appealed to you about taking over a brand like Coach?

Definitely. That idea of American cool became the idea essentially. I’m influenced a lot by my perception of America when I was growing up. It’s still very exotic to me. I’ve spent most of my career in Europe: Paris, Milan, London, even Madrid… So, that was actually a big part of what made taking over at Coach so appealing — how different a New York-based American heritage brand really is from the UK and European labels I was used to.

Is it true that since relocating to New York, you’ve explored America extensively by train in order to get to know the country first hand?

Yes and it’s one of the things people are really shocked by! Americans are always like, “How? Why? Where?” I’ve done a train trip in America for the last seven summer vacations: New York to Chicago, Chicago to Seattle, Seattle to LA, to Memphis, to Charleston… I love the train, the movement of it. It’s relaxing, you never feel rushed. I never get bored on the train either, I love looking out the side and watching things pass by. I’m kind of obsessed with it!

Is this something you’ve done all your life?

I used to travel from Madrid to Paris on the overnight train. There’s also a sleeper in the UK which I’ve taken a few times, from Scotland to England. But America is one of those places where you can go on vast journeys and discover it all. People forget that a country is more than just its cities; it has towns and villages and landscapes… That’s what appeals to me. There’s something about the further you travel, the better it seems. I always think that. I usually travel to start a new season because I think it clears your head.

When you took over Coach, for example, what was the starting point?

You try to go in with a clear idea and a clear story already. At Coach the strongest idea was essentially about embracing the values of the brand wholeheartedly and turning that into fashion and then making those things feel current. I wanted it to feel very much about today, and for the next generation. It was an obsession when I joined Coach for it to feel completely contemporary. Those were the real fundamentals of it. I was determined not to rehash heritage.

But you have to maintain the brand’s DNA somehow, don’t you?

Right. What I love is that it’s about understanding what makes a brand different. I do really love brands and all their quirks and what makes them different. That’s what the heritage gives me. It’s a touchstone, asking, “Why is it different? Why do people care about the brand?” I mean the fact that it’s still here means there’s something about the brand that people like. “Have we lost that connection? Do we need to refresh it?” The heritage is a touchstone much more than any physical real things though.

You seem to embrace change.

That’s why I like fashion: because it is about change. But for me, the rate of change depends on how long it takes for that idea to get out there and be understood. At that point, do you have to then change it again and do something different because you’ve got to keep evolving? At what point do you feel you’ve achieved it and you can move on? I think you usually have to start thinking, “So what’s next?”

Your changes at Coach has been very well received, and you’ve famously revived other tired heritage brands like Mulberry and Loewe. Do you work well under that pressure?

It must be something I’m drawn to. I don’t think I’ve necessarily gone in like, “Oh I’m the person who can turn this around!” But I do like to go in where there’s a really big appetite for change. I enjoy a big shift. Of course, sometimes it’s like, “God, this is much harder than I thought it would be!” Or, “It’s taking longer than I thought it would.” But that’s the reality of it.

How do you know when you’ve found an idea that works?

I think something stirs and you start fighting for the idea. You go with your gut instincts where you’re like, “I think there’s something there!” Like when I’m sketching and I do hundreds of versions of a bag and all of a sudden, I spot something. But ultimately, it of course comes to the customer to decide if it works or not. Whether a certain bag is a phenomenon or not comes down to the design of the bag and the response it gets.

Is fashion ultimately about emotion?

People get emotional about fashion! I’ve had people say to me, “I couldn’t pay my rent, but I had to have the bag,” you know? That’s ultimately the power of those pieces is when people get emotional about them. My head is definitely in that place. It’s all about emotion.

Objectivity in the art world doesn’t exist. However intellectual or scholarly or academic you may be, there’s no way to look at art objectively. The essence of looking at art is the emotion.

To what extent can the personality of an artist influence your evaluation of their work?

Sometimes meeting the artist or knowing the artist confuses your relationship with the art. Sometimes the artist is so charismatic, so powerful, or so enchanting that you get taken by the man and his message more than the work. Or sometimes the artist is so reserved and wants to protect himself from the world and it makes looking at the art more difficult. So when I’m thinking about an artist or project, I try to really look at the work for a long time—weeks, sometimes months, sometimes years—before I decide to approach the artist. I want to be sure of what I think about the art before meeting the person.

You’ve said that living with art is like oxygen in your lungs. How often do you rearrange the art in your apartment? 

I change it once a year. There are works that I cannot change because they have found their place and if I move them it creates internal turmoil. I have a string of bulbs by Félix Gonzalez-Torres; I cannot move it. But I do feel that when you move art, you look at it differently. So a collection is something that constantly evolves because they’re in dialogue with each other. I have this beautiful wall in front of my desk and I constantly change what’s there. And not just for commercial purposes, but also to really get to know that work, to think about it. You see it differently.

Living with an art piece is very personal. Do you collect art more with your heart or with your brain?

Both. It’s the same at the gallery. I will never buy something that I don’t believe in. If I put money into something it has to be something I wholeheartedly believe in. And therefore, it’s a combination of the emotion, the brain, the dialogue, the market. You can’t separate so much. It’s like if you fall in love with someone, is it just the heart or the brain?

Would it be possible to do your job without really having a passion for art?

I could not. The day I do it for the money, then I will retire and do something else for the money. I’m sure I can trade other things; I’m sure I’m a good business person. The day I fall out of love, I need to stop.

Is it even possible to be a good art dealer and not have a passion for it? 

I want to believe it’s not possible, but unfortunately I think it is. I’ve seen successful art dealers that are not passionate. But also, being a dealer — buying a picture and trading it and making money — is only a very small aspect of what I do. What I really do is put together exhibitions and publish books. In two years, we’ve published 11 books and each of them has a piece of our heart and my team’s heart in it. So to me, the art dealer side is the business side, but it is only one of the many sides of being a gallerist, which is more what I am.

So you would make a strong distinction between a gallerist and an art dealer.

There are new advisors every day. Do you think all these art advisors have passion? You can be an art dealer without passion. But can you be a gallerist without passion? No, because half of your projects are not out of reason, they’re out of love. We have Robert Motherwell show right now and most paintings belong to museums or collectors — there are only two works for sale in the exhibition — but I felt it was essential to revisit this Spanish energy right now, because it is so relevant in what’s going on sociologically in the world right now. So it was not a reasonable act.

Even though you aren’t an artist per se, your job is very creative.

In our way, we are creative people, too. When you put together exhibitions, when you do books, even when you look at art, all your creativity comes into play. I’m nourished by creativity and creative people. When you spend time with artists, whether they’re a sculptor, painter, poet, or dancer, you are in touch with a creative energy and we — agents, dealers, advisors, gallerists — are fueled by and filled with that creative energy. When I am surrounded by creativity, it triggers my creative mind and my creative juice. You can’t deplete yourself. You need to constantly refill. The art dealer side is just one side. You can’t just be an art dealer. Maybe, but only for a while.

Then it just becomes a job. But you’ve lived your whole life surrounded by art. You’ve famously not missed an Art Basel since you were three.

I’ve missed one! For my exams. But yes, my parents were collectors, my mother loved art like oxygen. She would take us to museums and art fairs. But my father wanted me to be a banker! So you know, I tried very hard! I wanted to be an actor, I wanted to be a clown, I wanted to be an artist, and I combined all this, I suppose, in being a gallerist. (Laughs)

How has Art Basel changed over the years?

There were much fewer galleries and you didn’t have the same galleries representing the same artists and having five spaces in five different cities. So the people coming from Rome looked very different than the people coming from Tokyo. Now they all look the same. There were times where you would see one Warhol in ten different booths, one Jeff Koons in five booths, one Louise Bourgeois in six… (Sighs) There’s a sort of homogeneity at a time where there’s the most creativity and craziness. Everything’s possible and we’ve actually reached a sort of homogeneity.

What kind of an effect do you think that has on the market?

That’s a question I literally don’t know, because I ask myself this question over and over again. The market has gotten bigger and bigger and I thought it would get saturated and say, “Stop, too many options! Stop, too much art!” But then I see 1,500 objects sell in four days and I’m amazed! On one side it worries me because I think, “Where is all this art going?” On the other side it amazes me. What was a group of maybe 100,000 people is today millions of people. My rule is to only do booths and art fairs if I can bring a real quality, so my business by definition will never be an uber-international dealers like the five or six that you and I know, because that’s not what I believe in. I couldn’t put passion in seven spaces. I couldn’t put passion in a hundred boxes.

At a certain point you just don’t have enough time to do it all.

As I tell my children, my heart is unlimited in the amount of love, but it is limited in the passion and commitment. There’s never been a booth that I haven’t checked before we open. There’s never been an exhibition that I haven’t worked on the installation. There’s never been a catalog where I haven’t checked every page. There are limits. And also I think at one point if you don’t become aware of these limits, then you just run to get bigger, bigger, bigger… And I think that’s to the detriment of your soul. I don’t want to do that.

How do you feel about the influx of money from emerging economies like Russia, the Middle East, or China? Are there more people buying art purely as an investment these days?

I don’t believe that all these people only buy art as an investment. Of course if you’re going to spend 10, 20, 30, 100 million dollars, you have to look at it as an investment and asset allocation. However, a lot of these countries and new fortunes are buying art with the hope of creating museums and foundations and idealistic points of view. They want art to be part of the culture. Or sometimes they even think, “If I have a museum in Dubai, people will come not just for the beach but also for the museum.” So there are many facets and this incredible wealth that has bought into the art world.

But there is definitely a fraction who don’t care about the art and only speculate on what will appreciate in value.

There is a group of people that just speculate, but we should forget that. We should not give them attention. We should not talk about them. I think we should just talk about this extraordinary commitment to the arts that’s happening everywhere! I am sure that my children, if they want to see a great art collection and they don’t live in New York, they will want to go to MoMA, but they’ll also maybe go to Doha. The world which was Paris, New York, maybe Berlin, Los Angeles, these 10 cities, has just gotten bigger. And it’s fascinating to watch.

I feel like any time something is missing anything, it’s soy sauce. It’s horrible, I could be in an Italian restaurant and eating something and it’s like, “This dish could use some soy sauce!” (Laughs)

That’s a very simple choice.

Well, I spent three years in Japan and the best restaurants stand out because their seasoning was so perfect and so intentional. It was meant to taste that way; the perfect amount of salt, the perfect amount of sweetness. The best meal that I ate there came down to one bowl of soup simply because the seasoning was spot on.

You prefer a “less is more” kind of philosophy.

I think with food, there’s a tendency to go very cerebral. But I always go instinctive first! Complicated recipes might sound good on paper and they’re really interesting, but when you put it in your mouth, if it doesn’t taste good, it’s not a good dish. At the end of the day, you crave things, you want to eat certain things. So for me, before I give into that cerebral pole, I go with my instincts.

You’ve said that you used to tell yourself, “One day, when I feel ready, I’m going to start my own restaurant and be free.” Was it instinct that told you when you were ready to open your restaurant, n/naka?

I came to a point where I was spending so many hours of my life doing this work, and if I was going to continue, I really wanted it to have meaning for me. So when I really took a deeper look, it was pretty clear to me that opening something like n/naka was what I needed to do. It was time to take a leap of faith and put everything I had, financially and emotionally, into something I believed in… Whether or not it would succeed, I owed it to myself to try.

I guess there comes a time when you realize there’s no sense in waiting for the perfect moment. You just have to jump in and hope for the best.

The funny thing was, I was taking time to just do whatever I wanted and not really fully commit to anything… I had already found this great location and had been subletting it to somebody else. One day the situation changed and it was like, “They can’t continue subletting from you so you’re going to have to take it over now.” I was like, “I’m not really ready, but I think these are some universal signs that I should start getting ready.”

You’ve also mentioned a feeling of kuyashii — the emotion you get when you fail — as an early motivator for you. Does that continue to motivate you today?

I think any type of negative feedback can be a cause for kuyashii, like if a guest doesn’t fully enjoy or understand the concept we’re working on. The intention always comes from a good place though and we always try to see the positive in it. I try to use it to push myself to get better, but of course it stings! It takes a couple of days to get over it before you can see the silver lining.

Have your years of experience made it easier to find the silver lining?

No. I don’t think it’ll ever get easier as long as what we’re doing is something personal, something we really, really love.

n/naka seems like a very personal experience for you. Your menu is based on kaiseki, a traditional multi-course Japanese dinner. But your guests don’t actually get to choose what they eat, do they?

Right. With Azami, the sushi restaurant I owned previously, I felt that I had so much more that I wanted to express, and it became very limiting for me. With a regular restaurant, guests make it their space — and that’s great! But for me personally, I want to create a unique experience. I create custom menus for every table, so it’s a very clear statement of what I want to do.

You also keep track of what every guest eats, so that when they come back, they never have the same meal twice.

Most of our guests come back after six months or a year which is great because we’ve already developed new dishes for them to experience. But we do have guests that come back every three weeks, and that can become quite challenging! But because the kaiseki style includes many courses, it’s a bit easier to create a menu that isn’t 100% the same… Maybe there’s a dish here or there that they’ve already tried, but we always include as many new ones as we can. It creates a whole new dining experience.

How do you then balance your own identity with the traditional kaiseki style?

When I construct a menu, I can’t help but put my own experiences — growing up in the States and eating American food — in it. I might want cheese or pasta in a dish, whereas in Japan, I wouldn’t. It’s natural for us to veer away from the 100% traditional and to modernize it in a way that is familiar. The last question we ask ourselves is does it still taste Japanese? I try not to forget that. When I think of the best compliment that I can get, it’s when guests come and say, “I can see that it’s different from Japanese food but at the core, it tastes like a Japanese person made it.” We always add our personal touches to give the dish its own identity.

How did you learn the specifics of Japanese cooking? I’m sure they don’t teach you those skills in culinary school.

My time spent in Japan was very crucial in that respect. In Japanese cooking, you have to take a lot of time to master each skill in order to move on to the next level. There’s a mind to truly train you, to see how far you can be pushed before you break. In Japan, anyone who reaches a certain culinary level has suffered a great deal to get there. This kind of mentality brings you to a level of ease that you just couldn’t achieve otherwise. I often reach this moment when I’m cooking where I’m just singing to myself.

You make it sound very easy.

(Laughs) Getting to that feeling is only after the 100^th hour, though! The focus is just on the work and my mind is completely clear. It’s music in my head. My body knows it, my mind knows it, everything about me knows it.

Do you reach that point every time you cook?

Certain dishes allow me to get to that point because I’ve made them so many times, while others require more of my attention. It varies. For me, the goal is to reach that point where I’m not necessarily completely present. It’s a flow. And that’s what’s so enjoyable to get to in any work: to reach flow.

I’m hoping there will be another wonderful part in a film. Every time there’s an offer or a script comes, I get very excited, hoping it’s going to be something that would stimulate me. It’s not always the case, but you hope it’s going to be. Another nice meaty part would be very good in a film. I would also like to revisit King Lear. I’ve done it on stage a lot, and we did film it and I think a lot of it’s quite good, but I would enjoy that — that’s an old man part!

I guess you were never really in the running for the part of Frodo.

It is a shock when I look into the mirror or see a photograph and say, “Who’s that old man — oh my, God! That’s me!” Age does creep up on you. But I’ve noticed because I look in the mirror more than most people for my job that there are stages in your life when the face changes. You will notice this in other people but to notice this in yourself is shocking. “God, my eyes are never going to go back to what they were” or “That crease will never go. In fact, it’s getting deeper!” Well, there you are. You sort of come to terms with it. I don’t look forward to being decrepit though.

It will come for all of us sooner or later.

It’ll happen. I don’t have fears about getting older though — I am old! If I’m with people of my own age, we talk about death all the time. We talk about decrepitude, we talk about our eyes, our ears, our stomachs, our knees, our illnesses, our friends who have died or are dying. It’s a constant. I went out to dinner last night and I was with two people of my age and I said, “Look, can we get death over with before we start the evening?” (Laughs)

Have you started thinking about taking things slower?

No, I don’t think that, but it happens. If the bus is going away, I won’t run now. What’s the point? I’ll wait for the next one. I don’t want to fall over and damage my knees! You do find yourself accommodating old age, but stopping working? No. I might do less work than I used to, I might be happy to play a smaller part than the responsibility of playing a large one, maybe I won’t take that job because it means living away from home for too long, but I don’t see the point in saying, “No more acting.” I enjoy it too much.

I’d say you know what you’re doing by this point, too.

I do now feel I can confidently say I am an actor who can be relied on. You’re not taking many chances with me when you cast me, as long as you cast me well. But I don’t feel myself to be a supremely accomplished actor. Yes, I am accomplished, I’ve had a lot of experience, but there’s always something new to learn or an area that I might not have seen that needs to be explored. It’s co-operative. We’re all helping each other. We’re doing it together. It’s not a one-man show in any sense at all.

Do you still need help?

I relish help! For years I used to say to directors, “Please — will you please teach me how to act? Show me how to do it!” They never did! (Laughs) On the whole, they just let you get on with it. There might be a specific moment where they’ll say, “No, this is absolutely crucial, we’ve got to get this. What I need here is that.” But probably that will happen in discussing the film beforehand, making it clear as to what’s required. You arrive at the last minute and your job is to deliver their script. Their advice, their thoughts will be very useful to me and, when we’re actually doing it, I do like a bit of encouragement. But as long as I’m on the right lines, they leave me alone pretty well.

Why would an actor of such acclaim tell a director, “Please show me how to act?”

Well because I’ve been trying to get better as an actor. I’m talking about 20 years ago now when I said that. I used to ask for advice. But the thing I’ve gathered more of over the years is a self-confidence that’s to do with having done work that people have liked. But it’s also part of having come out as a gay man and the self-confidence that gives you is huge! It affects every aspect of your life, including, I guess, my work.

Has coming out helped you to become a better actor? Were you afraid your career might suffer because of that?

I didn’t really think about it because I was living a fairly easy life as an openly gay man in London. But I used to think, “Even though I’m gay, they won’t believe that as Romeo, I’m in love with Juliet rather than Mercutio.” You know? But politicians used to say, “I can’t come out because my constituents won’t like it.” Footballers say, “I can’t come out because they’ll shout rude things at me.” “I can’t come out as a teacher because my students won’t take me seriously.” People are always worried about somebody else. And in fact, what people like is honesty. They respect honesty. And my film career took off once I came out.

In terms of gay rights, society has also taken off since you came out in the late ’80s. Did you expect that back then?

When I came out, our aim was to get rid of that law, Section 28. What I hadn’t anticipated was that when we did get rid of that law, a lot of the other pre-existing anti-gay legislation also fell because we got the public actually to start thinking about this and engaging in it and understanding it. And now, in the UK, we don’t have any laws that discriminate against gay people. Everything is fine, legally.

Unfortunately reality is a bit different.

Now we have to get at people’s innate—not innate prejudice, there’s no such thing—but people’s learnt prejudices, from whatever source they come. And so that’s a bigger problem actually. The end will be when these labels don’t mean anything and they’re not used, when people are just people—good people or not good people, busy people or lazy people. Those are the sort of qualities by which you judge somebody rather than by sticking a label on the color of their hair or the nature of their sexuality or the color of their skin. I actually go around schools encouraging kids to be nice to each other and not discriminate against each other. So, the journey goes on.

That’s a really hard question. I don’t know how you could possibly separate it. Of course there are things I do that are seemingly completely mindless and waste tons of time, like playing tennis, walking around, hanging out with friends. But I would argue that you will find all of those things in my work, you know? I try to use everything in the work. I don’t know if there’s a separation. I don’t think there probably is much; I think it’s all one thing.

Would you say your personal life gets in the way of your work sometimes?

In a way, I’m constantly in a rush. It doesn’t feel like it here right now because it’s very calm, but normally there’s always some sort of thing that should have already happened. You’re basically trying to bring things into the world and there are always problems doing that. It’s very difficult, actually, the process of getting the vision that you want actually done. And then of course, once you’ve gotten it done, having it appreciated is a whole other story.

Do you remember the earliest memory of when you wanted to do what you do today?

Yes, I do remember. I remember my parents told me we were going to New York and I was very excited about it because I knew that’s where my future was. This memory that I’m talking about is prior to three, so I can’t say whether it was about being an artist specifically, but there were a number of people in my family who were artists. There was a very interesting cast of characters around growing up. It was a bit like a Wes Anderson sketch. My parents are in medicine and science— my dad’s a research scientist—but there was always a criticism or talking back to the pharmaceutical companies, talking back to the TV set. There was this permanent systematic critique of things going on. And I remember this as always happening in my house as people would watch the news, as people would watch the various things, as you would be hearing information.

A research scientist… That could also somehow be said about your work approach, couldn’t it?

True! Actually when I was at Cambridge, I did do a number of classes in the philosophy of science, studying Feyerabend and I was super interested in it. I was very interested in this idea that you prove something by disproving its opposites. It’s not like you can ever really prove anything. I thought this was quite an interesting paradigm.

And your work also has a very documentary approach.

I don’t really view my films as documentary.

But, for example, your film “Points on a Line” was about The Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe and the Glass House by Philip Johnson. 

I really think phenomenologically what I do is very different. It uses architecture. The subject matter is sometimes architecture, but it’s more like it uses the strategies that you experience in good architecture with my art. Of course, the easiest analysis would be, “It’s about architecture.” But I’m always a little bit like, “Actually, I don’t know anything about architecture.”

Does that attitude maybe make your work more accessible for people who don’t know about its background?

How important is it to know about Nabokov and the whole history of his upbringing in Berlin and his interest in butterflies? You read the book and you have an experience that’s visceral, that’s intellectual, that, of course, is multi-layered and yes you might realize this title is referring to this and there’s a history of that. But there are a lot of people who experience my work who don’t know the history, who don’t know the whole context of contemporary art. I think that’s okay; I don’t have a problem with that. I’m sort of used to that idea of an open reading.

Why?

Because I think that’s a desirable goal to have as an artist, period. I remember reading Umberto Eco and thinking, “This is how things should be. This is how the best things do operate.” I remember consciously thinking about that. But the other reason is just because my parents do very different things and I never went to art school, so I’m perhaps more apt than other artists to be interested in this interdisciplinary approach. Any good art becomes a virtual architecture. Whether you’re in front of a Pollock painting or you’re looking at a Matisse or Warhol or Judd, it creates an infrastructure of its own that you’re confronted with. And of course, this is both on a physical level and an intellectual level to varying degrees.

What is the infrastructure that your work creates?

It’s about ambivalence. I think there’s an aspect of distraction that goes on in my work, just visually, because of the scale, because of the color, because of its elements of ricocheting communication and graphic design. I will place myself in situations in which I’m definitely not trying to be didactic in any way. I don’t view myself apart from the legal system; I don’t view myself apart from the entertainment system; I don’t view myself apart from the political system. That juice on my desk, that’s petroleum. The paint. Everything. There is no outside. I don’t start from that position of objectivity. So you are confronted with the ambivalence of being complicit in what I call “the system.” I don’t view myself as outside. That might be confusing for some people, because you don’t necessarily know how to interpret it. And maybe I don’t even know how to interpret it! Yes, we all know how to talk about fossil fuels and global warming and all of this but at the end of the day, we’re all consuming endlessly. It’s not possible to be outside.

For many of your projects you have gained impressive behind-the-scenes access. In “Capital,” for instance, you were able to film Bill Clinton meeting with his cabinet. Does your approach help you to get such intimate access?

The ambivalence? No. Not necessarily. I usually try to play that down when I meet people who do have some level of power that I want to access. When we got into the White House—that was exactly one year before 9/11—I was vouched for by somebody very high up in the Clinton administration and then of course they gave me access, and I was in the cabinet room, I was on the south lawn… They were so confident that they’re not worried about the idea of an open reading. That’s what’s interesting about Clinton; he is always embracing his enemy. It’s all part of the thing. It’s like Katharine Hepburn said, “Enemies are so stimulating.” It’s not a problem.

Well Clinton might not have cared, but your recent film “Strange Magic” was commissioned by LVMH for the opening of the new Frank Gehry-designed Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. The film seemed to aim at taking apart and exposing the construct of luxury. Did that ambivalence you have help to stem some of the anger they might have had?

I don’t know about anger. In the end I think they loved the piece because there is something very magical about appropriating our chemical processes that are hooked up to nationalism, hooked up to the fantasy life that everybody has on some level about themselves. It has to do with the idea of projecting the self in the future. “What do you want to be? Which situation do you want to be in? How do you want to live?” And I think that these brands play into that. I think they’re aware of it. I don’t think this is anything new to them, the idea that luxury is an ephemeral thing. It literally is like perfume. It disappears and you can’t be sure if you really had it. And also, in a very short time, luxury becomes old.

But you didn’t find the piece to be critical of what they are doing?

They knew right from the beginning what I was going to do, just not how broad. It was about building a museum, this Frank Gehry building, and in a way there was a desire to forget how you got there. How is it that you’re building this building in the Bois de Boulogne and that you have this money? Well, of course they know. They’re very proud of it, they’re proud of their history. But at the same time, there’s always the desire to suppress the capital. It’s actually genius, their development of the capital. They shouldn’t in any way try to hide it. I can’t think of an American company that’s smarter.

You seem to enjoy that tension.

I do. There’s a game-like approach to the work that is about a certain type of situationism, of placing yourself as an artist into contradictions. Some contexts that I place myself in are repulsive. Some people you really do want to meet or emulate. That’s what I’m talking about: ambivalence. It’s not always clear to me.

It’s easy to say that fashion is fast-paced, and there certainly have been a lot of designer departures, but to me fashion has always been a reaction to what is going on culturally, politically, and even economically. We take our cues from what’s going on out there, you know? And the truth of the matter is that we are in a very, very fast-paced world and for fashion to be on a slower pace doesn’t seem to make sense because then it wouldn’t be very relevant for the times that we’re in.

Do you thrive under that fast-paced pressure?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, I’ve always been very much a multi-tasker. I like being really busy and I like the idea of challenging myself from a design point of view and doing different things, like doing Jason Wu and Boss. For Jason Wu it’s very much my aesthetic, it’s very much the things I admired growing up that shape my design aesthetic, it’s very personal. At Boss it’s about me designing with a different side of the brain, it’s about interpreting something that’s already been there for 90 years and something that has a strong DNA and doing it in my way, but in a way that still makes sense for the company. It is an interesting challenge for me and I’ve always done multiple projects at a time. It’s simply the way I like to work. So for me it’s not that stressful. Were there stressful moments? Yes, but that’s kind of what I signed up to do.

You once said, “The worst thing is to be a designer and create work that isn’t honest.” How do you make sure to stay honest, especially when juggling two different brands?

I think it’s really important that you don’t lose track of yourself. Fashion moves on so quickly and you can get really caught up in that whirlwind, so for me it’s about really having a nice group of people around me that keep me on track and grounded. Also, I think I work very much based on instinct because whenever I’ve done things that are against my instinct I’ve always regretted it. So I really just trust my gut; I’ve always operated like that in my life and my career.

You’re not known for following every trend that comes along.

Well I think it’s very much my personality. I don’t consider myself a very trendy person. I also hate to use the word “cool.” I think it has a lot to do with the way I was brought up. My mother was a huge influence on me and my aesthetics. I remember when we grew up, my mom had antique furniture in our house and I always thought it was pretty old. All my friends had glossy, newly built houses and my mom bought like a 70-year-old house. And back then I wanted what everyone else had, but as I grew up I realized that wasn’t what I liked anymore. I preferred things with a history, with a point of view, things that have been touched and have been through time. And that has really helped shape my aesthetics.

Who do you look up to when it comes to those aesthetics?

Yves Saint Laurent, Charles James, Geoffrey Beene, those are the designers that have heavily influenced my work throughout my career. I think what I make isn’t about just one season; it’s about something that is relevant for a longer period of time. To me that just feels more authentic.

What does it take to have true taste?

We often say some things are good taste or bad taste, but who’s to really judge what is good taste and bad taste? I would say it’s really subjective; taste is in the eye of the beholder. But true taste is something that is yours and I think that takes time to discover. For me, comparing from when I started my career and my company to now, I think I have a much more sure idea of who I am and what my house represents.

How has that changed the way you approach your work?

In my early 20s there was a sense of needing to conform a little bit, I was sometimes even a little bit uncomfortable with myself. I was questioning myself and questioning if what I’m doing is even right. I never worked for a fashion house before I started my business—I had only interned—and I came right out of school and I kind of started into a world that I largely didn’t know, or had barely scratched the surface of. And with experience and just being through it all, I think you really learn that sticking to your guns and just really being yourself and being more confident and owning what you do makes your work better. There’s no wandering around because you are approaching it in a more direct way.

How do you measure success? Is it sticking to your aesthetic and what you think is right, or is it pleasing the fashion editors and reaching bigger sales numbers. 

I think success is to be well-rounded. The editors are going to form their own opinions and the critics will as well. But at the end of the day, the most important person that needs to be happy with the result is me. I need to feel confident about what I presented. And at the end you also want to make sure that what you’re doing is not only relevant in the galaxy of fashion, but also that you have a customer for it. To me that is the ultimate success. It’s one thing to see clothes in the pages of magazines, but, ultimately, I want to see my clothes on people.

Even if you risk being called a commercial designer?

I think it’s just been my personality from the beginning. I never thought the word commercial was a bad word. I liked the idea of balancing dreams and imagination and creativity and art with something that’s practical as well. That’s always been the basis of my aesthetic as well. I’m not a super avant-garde designer; there is a sense of reality in what I do because I really imagine the woman wearing it at the end.

As you said, you have gained a lot of experience and confidence in your first 10 years as a designer. Where do you see yourself in another 10 years?

I think it’s just about defining the next chapter of the brand. In the beginning you look at the clothes and you think about the clothes you want to design, but over the last few years it has become, “What bag does she carry? What kind of shoes? What is the jewelry? What is the environment that she lives in?” And that’s the part I’m really interested in digging into in the next phase of my career. To discover all the other parts, the world around her, in a more concrete way. Both in the way I think about the collection and also physically, thinking about building the space around her. Those are things I’m very excited and intrigued about pursuing and I think that’s going to be very important going forward, to think past the clothes.

What changed? I have a daughter. (Laughs) I hope a little more consciousness. I hope a little more knowledge. It is very hard for me to answer that question, I don’t know why. I know that there are some books that changed my consciousness, you know? Relationships, I don’t think I made a lot of progress in that. I had a relationship for 15 years – we stopped, we came back, we stopped, we came back – and somehow, because of that time of separation and getting back together, it helps you to be less possessive, and love in a different way. So maybe on that I made a tiny bit of progress. Life went by and I learned things, but changes? I think we’re always the same inside.

You don’t think it’s possible to change fundamentally?

Choices and actions are making us who we are and really confirming who we are. And I feel that I’ve mostly said yes to the things that were important to my life. But as an experienced woman you do have more stories to tell. There are different layers inside you that you can explore. There’s a freedom that is coming with age because your values are changing. You cannot hold on to the same things as before. There’s sort of a freedom and you’re more yourself. On the one hand you’re becoming more fragile and on the other hand there’s a strength that comes with it.

What do you mean more fragile?

Well, physically you’re changing so it makes you more fragile. Simple as that. There’s something else that’s coming. You let go of some things and you have to face other things. You have to overcome certain things; the need of power, the need of possession, the need of enjoyment – which are really the big three things that the human being has to face at a certain point. It’s challenging, it’s very challenging, but I think when you really make a decision to overcome it there’s a freedom that comes with it and it’s quite enjoyable. When you accept it, it’s like “Woooo-ahhhh! Freedom! Finally!” But you have nothing to hold on to. We all need to be reassured, don’t we? (Laughs)

When you are acting, do you need a lot of freedom?

On a film I did recently, I remember the first shot I put my hand on the knob of the door. I was trying something new and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I wanted to explore a little bit, try different things. And immediately when I put my hand on the knob, the director said, “No, you don’t put your hand on the knob,” and I was taken aback because even a director like Abbas Kiarostami doesn’t tell me that! So I said to him, “You’re going to lose a lot of possible miracles and possible gifts that I’m not aware of, that I’m exploring. So please, let it breathe. I’m asking you to give me three free takes. You don’t say anything for the first three takes. Then after that we can do 20, 40, 60 – as many as you want.” And that’s what we did. And we got along very well because of that. But it was the director’s first film, so he didn’t know.

I imagine that it’s difficult for some directors to let go of that control. They have to depend on what you offer them.

But it’s teamwork. It’s a co-creation. Thinking that a film is only the director’s point of view is wrong, to my eye. He has to make decisions at the end, but in the creation and the making of it, it’s definitely a co-creation. The co-dependence is big. I can ruin the point of view of a director if I want to because I’m the actor, I have a contract and if I don’t want to act like this, it’s my choice.

Sounds like a threat.

Well that’s why you have to be more intelligent, and trust. He has to trust me; I have to trust him. It’s much more interesting to work with trust than to work with, “I’m going to have control. I’m going to have the last word.” An actor can really use his power in the moment of acting, but the director can really use his power in the moment of editing. Unless in your contract you say, like, some big American stars, we won’t name them, but they have control of the film.

Actors that have more control than the director?

Yes, Emmanuelle Béart told me about working with Tom Cruise. She wanted to have some compassion for her role at the end of Mission: Impossible. And Tom went to the director and said, “She can’t play like this!” He wanted to control that. He was making sure his character was looking better and this woman was looking like a bitch! (Laughs)

You mentioned Abbas Kiarostami earlier and you have worked with many other celebrated auteurs over the course of your career, like Godard, Cronenberg, Kieslowski, Minghella, and Haneke. Which director is the most controlling?

Haneke is the most controlling. But he also respects actors a lot. He knows how difficult it is. But there’s a moment he likes to be very precise about things, which is nice. I mean, he’s not against improv or something, but it’s very hard when you know that this guy is so controlling to let yourself go as an actor. To trust that, “Okay, I’m going to trust going and not knowing.” So you have to work within yourself and say, “Hey Ju, just trust that.” And even if he’s angry that’s all right, you know? (Laughs) But you have to tell yourself that! Because otherwise you try to be too good. And in acting, if you try to please the director too much, to be perfect, you don’t always have the truth of the moment. It’s like living your life freely or controlling yourself all the time – you really see a difference.

Have you been able to live your life freely?

I’ve always found I chose quite freely what I wanted to do, yeah. At the beginning, less, of course because I needed to make a living, but life has been very helpful, you know? And you have to trust that things are coming at the right time. It’s very unnerving sometimes thinking, “Okay, I don’t know what’s going to happen next year,” especially when you have children, especially when you have bills to pay. You wonder how it’s going to be possible. And it happens that life is coming with surprises. Surprises as well as challenging yourself as well as finding solutions. So if you trust that, your commitment into life is different. You don’t feel as alone, in a way.

Oh yeah, sure. But I think almost all writers feel like they were misfits growing up!

Is that what it takes to be creative?

I think it takes desperation! When I teach, I always say that desperation is a great motivator. And a lot of students will judge themselves for how desperate they feel. But I think it’s a great thing, as long as what you’re desperate to do is not to succeed but to express something in a way you feel it really needs to be expressed, or to tell a story that you haven’t seen out there. The desperation has to come from a drive to express something. I want to learn and explore difficult things by writing.

Is that why your novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon explore such dark subject matter?

I have a running joke with my friends that I’m waiting for the day I feel inspired by to write a “fluffy, happy, hippie novel” – which is my kind of fill-in title for a kind of book that I would love to be inspired to write just because it would be really fun to write it – but it just isn’t in my DNA. Those kinds of self-entertaining works don’t hold the interest for me enough.

What makes violence interesting enough to write about?

I’m interested in the things that separate us, and so the experience of violence or anything that’s taboo in its way is something that separates us. The reality is that so many of us, especially in this day and age, are having these experiences that the culture hasn’t yet caught up with in terms of making room for.

Could you say that you’re fascinated with finding beauty in pain?

I think I’m fascinated with understanding pain. And so ultimately when you’re in that pursuit, you find all the nuances of it. And one of them may indeed be beauty. 

Is there a kind of release in finding those nuances?

Sure, I think writing about anything that matters can be cathartic. The hope is that it’s not just self-involved. You can write things that provide a release for you, but they still have to be good books or good writing. So, the motivation should be, in my mind, to create characters and to understand, not necessarily to be searching for release.

What was your motivation for writing Lucky, a memoir that describes your experience of being raped?

Lucky felt like a process done in the service of what I would write in the future. It untangled the knot of me and fiction. I knew that I wanted to write about rape and I’d known that… Even the night I was being raped I knew that. I think a lot of writers feel like they have some kind of mission, and that was definitely one of mine.

To write about that experience?

Initially, yes. There had been so little written in a novel form about rape in what I thought of as a “real way” that I felt I should be writing for everybody who’d ever been raped. I was trying to write to what I refer to as “the universal rape victim.” I felt like that was my responsibility. I think Lucky allowed me to give the specificity of my experience a place to exist within the confines of that book, and therefore remove any of that from whatever I would write in the future.

Is it difficult to constantly have to relive your past through a work like Lucky?

No. I don’t mind that at all because I feel like I can help people. I think maybe that might have been true ten years ago or when talking too much about that created a wall between my creative process and me. Pain is emotional, but it’s also intellectual. The luxury of the intellect is that it helps you parse the emotion in a way that if it were just purely emotional, you wouldn’t be able to pin it down. That’s another thing about time passing, it makes things easier.

You’ve said that it often takes you a long time to find the voice of your protagonists. How do you go about finding your characters’ voices?

If I knew that answer, I would probably have written many more novels! (Laughs) In my experience, it hasn’t been the same for the three so far that I feel like I’ve found. Sometimes if you’re lucky, you just get a voice or a line or whatever… A big part of my process is really reading a lot of poetry. It’s usually down to three to five poets per each book, and then I read a few of their poems every morning before I sit down to work.

How does that influence your writing?

There’s something about reading the right poets that makes your own drive a little bit more diffuse. When I finally get to the page, I’m not hammering at it like a nail, I’m more available to the subconscious than I would be if it was just all me and my narrative lines. But every novel is so different in its process and in its characters and the writer’s attachment, when it’s written, what stage of life, all that stuff… It feels like I’ve finally reached a point where I’m working in a way that I really enjoy.

What way is that?

(Laughs) Not in the fluffy, happy, hippie way but in an editing kind of way; to deepen and understand. For the first time, I would say I’m just really enjoying the writing. And to that degree, it feels like such a wonderful time that I don’t want this part to end. But of course, at the same time… You do ultimately end the book.

Oh man. It had to be some sort of contest. I skated every local contest back then – which wasn’t very many – all the way out to New Jersey and New York and middle Pennsylvania. I never wanted to be the guy who jumps the gun too early – I didn’t want to start travelling long distances to skate contests before I had won everything. I wanted to win every local contest first. I wanted it to reach the point where if I showed up, people would be like “Oh, crap,” and just be fighting for second.

Today you are arguably the best technical skateboarder in the world. Where do you find the discipline to accomplish something like that?

I did it because that’s what it was going to take. I really wanted it. I had an older brother, and he was bigger and smarter, and when you’re a kid, you’re trying to catch up all the time. I think that that’s where it kind of came from, just that little brother syndrome. I was just trying to be something, trying to make myself worth something. It was proving it to other people and proving it to myself at the same time. I needed that.

You must be a very competitive person.

Sure, but you also have to find the fun in it. Especially in the science part of it, the physics thing: “Okay, what made the board do this?” And then you try that. If you can find the fun of trying, that’s when you’ve really won in skateboarding. If you only find fun in landing the trick that’s a lonely place to be. You’re only going to land it once in a blue moon.

What was it that initially drew you to skateboarding when you were younger?

It relaxed me! I just recently had surgery so I’m not skating at the moment, but skateboarding is still a pretty big release for me so to not have the option of skating is pretty tough. I still need it to keep myself sane in a way. As a kid, I had a lot of energy; I had to take medicine to go to sleep and stuff like that so I needed to get that energy out somehow. I filled my childhood with other things, like riding a bike and playing football, but skateboarding… skateboarding had it all.

What do you mean?

You set your own goals, you had your own list of accomplishments to achieve every single day, so you were always busy. You had those little take-homes, where at the end of the day you’re just like, “Man, I had a great day.”

Plus it’s a sport you can do on your own. You don’t need a team or anyone else to fully enjoy skateboarding.

A lot of people don’t skate by themselves. And I think that that’s really weird! To never experience that? If that’s the case, then any other sport would suffice. It wouldn’t have to be skateboarding. It only takes one to party, which was great because back when we were kids, you didn’t have cellphones. You weren’t able to text somebody and find out where they were at that moment.

The circumstances have changed a lot.

Yeah, I remember it being so depressing when you would think that you were going to have a whole day with your friends and you just couldn’t get a hold of them. You called them on their house phone, and if you didn’t get them – that’s it, you were alone! Oh man, what a bummer it was! (Laughs) But at the same time I feel like technology kind of ruins a huge part of growing up, like when you have to ask someone to a dance or ask somebody to hang out with you. It was a terribly nerve-wracking experience where you were really going out on a limb. That vulnerability is something that you can take with you throughout your life.

You don’t have to make yourself very vulnerable to send a text message.

Right, and you need those awkward experiences to overcome. If you don’t have anything to overcome then you remain less-than, in a way. Now it’s just a perfectly worded text message and a whole campaign of, “I’ll start liking her photos here and there, leave a comment here and there,” for the first two weeks or so. Then the comments get a little bit longer, she’ll respond, and everything is absolutely wordsmith perfect! If text messaging were dating, I’d seriously be a Casanova. But I wasn’t brought up that way.

You also used to skateboard by yourself because growing up in rural Pennsylvania there weren’t any other skaters that lived near you, right?

Yeah, back then, if you saw a kid with skate shoes, it was like, “Oh, my God! You skate! We’re friends now!” (Laughs) It was like finding a diamond in the rough, like getting lost in a desert and seeing another person. “Finally I found you!” It rarely ever happened!

That kind of isolation must have affected your skating ­– you’ve said before that you thought you invented certain tricks because there was no one else skating around you.

It was like I invented the wheel, but the wheel was already invented on a different island. (Laughs) It’s funny, you do feel sometimes like you’re just forging for yourself. You don’t know what other people are doing. For example, I knew what a boardslide was and I knew what a 180 was, but I never saw anybody do a lipslide. I thought I’d invented the lipslide! Eventually you grow to find, “Ah yeah, somebody already did that.”

But today, with the Internet and the popularity of skateboarding, that is completely lost.

I don’t know. Nowadays, you’re making up stuff and it’s like, “Well, I’ve never seen anybody else do it. But it’s probably out there.” Chances are they did it in the nineties or somebody on YouTube has already done it. There are tricks that nobody does in the spotlight because there’s a random kid in Texas that does that trick. He has it, but he doesn’t have the outlet to get it in front of everyone’s face. He can put it on YouTube, but no sponsors are making ads of it and things like that. And so, you really are inventing it for yourself, in a way, and you always were.

Has there ever been a time when skateboarding felt like a job?

During contest season it’s tough. All eyes are on you and you don’t want to go out there and look like you don’t give a crap. And the contest season isn’t just walking into the arena, it’s also every skate session before that. It’s really hard to get your mind off of contest skating, even when you’re just skating for fun. It’s also been tough since I joined with Street League. If you’re signed on with Street League, you can do a couple other contests during the year – but that’s it. It provides you with great opportunities, but that comes with certain sacrifices. As a result you have people being like, “Well, skateboarding is skateboarding, you should be able to do whatever you want.”

In the end it is how you make a living as well though.

Yeah. There will be a lot of people on message boards who will attack pro skaters for their decision-making or for skating for this company or for money and things like that. But you still have to work for money, right? People shit on you for that. You’re like the lamest person ever.

Even though you share the love for the same sport and you could have actually sold out a long time ago.

Exactly. I obviously know how to make spots unskateable, if I were some complete son of a bitch like these people are treating me. I didn’t throw in the towel; I didn’t sell out skateboarding. And neither did any of these other guys who took sponsors that pay them for what they do. It’s just we now get to provide for our families with the thing that we love doing more than anything ever.

Which in the end paves the way for other kids who dream of making a living doing what they love.

What people don’t understand is that skateboarding’s popularity is growing because of these big sponsors and because of these contest series; so it actually means that you’re able to get a skate park in your town easier than you were ten years ago. Now you have a place to go skate, and a lot of times these bigger sponsors are throwing in money for that. And these are foundations made by skateboarders that are making a lot of money from the sport. But that anger just comes from a love for skating. And that’s actually pretty cool, that people love it that much and they hold it that dear.

It’s sort of the opposite. I make the album for me and then it’s like, “Oh, fuck. Everyone else has to hear this.” I have a rule: don’t think about how to play it live. Don’t think about what other people are going to think when they hear it. And then it’s like, after the fact, like, “Fuck, I have to figure out how to play this live…” I recorded “Realiti” and that was just like, sort of gratuitously for other people. But other than that I ask myself, “What do I want to hear?” Some songs are really emotionally intense for that reason. And some of them only exist for the pure joy of making music.

So what was your reaction when “Realiti,” a sort of throwaway song that you released unfinished, got over 6 million YouTube plays and was called your best song in years?

I did not think it would get that big. I thought people would be like, “Aw, how cute,” and move on. It’s pretty awesome, but I really wish I’d finished the song… (Laughs) I hate unfinished things. And the sound quality is so bad! My last album Visions is quite obviously amateur sounding too.

That didn’t stop many critics from calling it one of the best albums of 2012.

But it wasn’t the most professional setting. My management at the time was just a friend from high school. There was a release date before there was an even album, so I was on a crazy deadline and didn’t necessarily finish things the way I probably would have wanted to. I had no training in music, barely played any shows, I didn’t really know anything about music at all…

Sometimes naiveté can be an advantage.

Yeah, definitely. But I think there’s also a point where when you’re a professional at something, you’re expected to be executing at a certain level constantly and intentionally. I’d made three albums being not a serious musician at all, which I think is enough albums to make as an amateur. (Laughs)

Things must have changed a lot for you in that respect. Your new album is your first since coming under the management of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation and you reportedly even went through media training – not quite your old DIY approach anymore.

I was just like, “Maybe there’s a way to stop Pitchfork from ruining my life all the time.” But I realized that it doesn’t matter what I say because they’ll still do it. I mean… not ruin my life, but just these ridiculous sexist attacks that I’m crying and so sad and having a terrible time all the time. And I just don’t even know what this is about. I was just like, “Is there any way for me to, like, stop this from happening?” But it’s the machine. It’s clickbait.

Is your new and professional management also trying to dictate how you should look?

No. I think music is performing. Especially the stage shows. It’s all related. I’ve been learning more about performance, watching politicians and speeches and things like that to integrate it into the show. The art I want to make tends to be quite audacious. But I’m not trying to be more professional in the sense that I care what anybody thinks. That’s not much of a concern.

What is the concern, then?

For this album I just wanted to be able to walk into a room with any of my peers and know everything that they know. I don’t want people to think I’m a worse producer than my male peers. I’m mostly tired of people who say they want to sound like Grimes calling up my male friends to try to get my sound. You could’ve called me but you don’t call me because the only reference point you have is Visions. I wanted to learn how to produce, I wanted to learn how to engineer, I wanted to learn how to play instruments… Before I even started the album I really wanted to just become a musician, as it were. And since I hate repeating myself, that involves learning quite a bit.

So it was important for you to be known as a good producer as well as a talented artist?

Definitely. I think I’m a shit vocalist! (Laughs) I think I’m, like, a very questionable vocalist. I think it’s just an identity thing. I could never identify as a vocalist, so for me the production part is very important. And if I’m going to charge people 10 bucks for an album, I want it to be fucking good! I want it to be worth people’s while.

Do you feel that’s not the case for most artists these days?

I think for a lot of albums right now there’ll be the single and then there’s just a bunch of crap. For example, when the Beyoncé album came out, because it came out all at once and there was no press, I just listened to the whole album at once. And I realized, “Fuck, I haven’t actually listened to a new album the whole way through in years.” Every song really meant something to me. I wanted to make an album like that. I hope people listen through the whole thing and every single song could be a single.

Wouldn’t that be a bit more mainstream than your music tends to be?

Not in, like, a Top 40 way. Just where every single song could be really meaningful to me and really well executed. You could take out any song and be like, “This is what Grimes is.” And it would be good. It was really hard to choose singles because to me it’s a real album. Compared to Visions and compared to the albums before it, I think it’s quite an improvement. There’s nothing on it that I think is bad. 

I guess that’s why it took you so long to finish it.

(Laughs) It’s just that when I look at the artists I admire, like Bob Dylan or Carravaggio or Leonardo DaVinci, they don’t just achieve. They achieve at the highest level. They’re great, great artists. And they’re great, great technical performers. Their skill is at the highest level and their expression is at the highest level. I don’t want to be good. I want to be the best. Even in failing that, you’ll hit a higher mark than if you never tried.

I actually am not a very good liar. I think a lot of actors say this and I don’t know if it’s because I’m an actor or if it’s just the way I am, but when I actually do have to lie in my life, I tend to become a bit of an idiot and I’m not very good at it. So I see myself as a pretty truthful person.

Even though your job requires you to “lie” on a daily basis?

I feel like acting is sort of a giant game of pretend. You have so many different things to help you with that, you know. You have costumes and hair and make-up and a director and writers and you know, you have this team that’s supporting you in your lie – whereas in life, you don’t. (Laughs) It’s interesting, I had this conversation with a friend the other day about how we’ve gotten more honest as we’ve gotten older in a way. You feel more and more like yourself, and you’re sort of less apologetic about who you are.

It certainly becomes much easier to be yourself and to be honest.

Right, don’t you think? You’re more and more willing to be truthful. After a while you find that it’s okay, that if you’re honest it’s actually better. You worry that the truth will hurt somebody’s feelings or if you’re honest about how you feel about something it’s going to cause a negative effect or somebody’s going to be mad at you. But as you get older, you kind of just go, “Fuck it!” I mean… In the end, they’re probably going to be mad at me anyways, so I should probably just be honest in the first place, you know? As you grow up, you try to change yourself less.

Sometimes it’s just too late to change…

(Laughs) Partly because it’s too late! But I think you also get more confident as you get older. You realize what your strengths and your weaknesses are and you’re more okay with your weaknesses and you value your strengths more. I look forward to being 50 and I’m hoping that I’m as confident as some of the people that I look up to.

I’m sure tons of younger women look up to you already. Since your role as Peggy, the secretary turned copywriter in Mad Men, you’ve become a sort of unofficial champion for feminism.

I don’t necessarily walk around thinking I’m the face of feminism at all, like I should be on a poster or something! (Laughs) But the main point of the character is to tell the story of feminism in the workplace in the sixties. When I started on that show, I mean, I thought very little about feminism. I’m a modern girl; I was 23 in the early 2000s. I had a great upbringing in Los Angeles, lived in New York, you know, very liberal… I had no reason to think about feminism than the next person, whereas now I’ve actually studied it.

What made you decide to study feminism?

Primarily because people like you ask me about it, so at some point I have to come up with intelligent answers! But I actually studied it for the Broadway show I was in called The Heidi Chronicles. It’s been like an accidental kind of education.

What do you mean by accidental?

I’m similar to Peggy in that she wasn’t a protestor, she didn’t go to political meetings or feminist meetings, she wasn’t part of any of the groups. She was just living second-wave feminism. I am a proud feminist because I’m a human being. And I do believe in gender equality, just as many men and women do. If people want to think of Peggy as a feminist character and as somebody to believe in, then I’m happy to be the person that played that. I do think it’s fantastic that it has lead to a new generation discovering feminism. I think it’s great.

Is it important for the films you work on to have that kind of impact? Two of your recent film projects, High-Rise and Truth, both have a sort of higher message. High-Rise, based on a dystopian novel by J. G. Ballard, is a critique of class systems and modern urban life and Truth is about Dan Rather and the moral imperatives of journalism.

Yes, there are parallels between High-Rise and the social class system of the UK. And yes, there are perhaps conclusions to be drawn about American politics from Truth. I think what’s cool about a film like Truth is that there are a lot of questions raised, but it allows you to find of form your own conclusion.

So you don’t believe that films should have some kind of moral lesson?

You can search for the deeper meaning, and people that are smarter than me can do that… But for me, I feel like they’re great stories, entertaining stories. In the end they’re just stories of people. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes fiction brings out more of the truth in every day life. We used to say about Mad Men: in the end, it’s just about entertainment. The relevance of these types of stories to society, to where we are now, is certainly really apparent and if you happen to get some sort of moral lesson out of it, then great. But we just want to entertain you.

Should we be concerned that these stories are still so relevant today?

Of course I think the fact that it’s still difficult for women in some ways that it was in the sixties or seventies is bad. I do think it’s bad that these issues are still a problem today, but I actually think that it’s good that art is continuing to explore that and is continuing to open that dialogue and open that conversation about it. I think it’s good to have different films for different kinds of people. That’s what’s great about art, is that you’re able to open these kinds of conversations. I hope that people understand that. I think it’s important that these kinds of films are able to be made.

I think melancholy is kind of a misunderstood emotion. I don’t think it’s necessarily an unpleasant or bad emotion. There’s an emphasis, especially these days with social media, that everyone has to be this ecstatically happy person living this amazing life. Melancholy is a state that I very much enjoy being in, actually. It’s not the same as feeling sad. It’s a more complex emotion; it derives from a tragic view of the world, a tragic view of art.

A tragic view of art?

(Laughs) I don’t know… I’m not sure I can provide any explanations for that. This sense of melancholy has a deep resonance with me. It’s a mode that I slip into very easily and very naturally. It’s an end of the spectrum that I very often find myself in. It is where I feel most comfortable. I gravitate to these emotions with all art: in film and in literature and in music and in painting.

What do you hope to communicate with your art?

I think my music is a way of communicating very directly with people and with people’s emotions. I try to make music that doesn’t need layers of complexity or obfuscation to speak to people. Music should resonate with people on an emotional level. That’s one of the criterions I use for an idea. Does it speak simply and directly without obfuscation and without being unnecessarily complex or obscure?

Steve Reich once said, “I don’t care how much people understand what it is I’m doing, I just want people to be moved by the music.” Is that what you mean by speaking simply or directly?

Yeah, I think I can certainly echo that. People can certainly very easily appreciate my music on its own without knowing anything about it. And that’s how a lot of people listen to it. I think sometimes the prettiness of my music deceives people into engaging with it on a superficial level. It can be enjoyed on a very superficial level, but I think it rewards more active listening, more active engagement. My personal projects often have these conceptual layers or narrative layers that are very important to me. IBM 1401 is a good example of that. It has a big conceptual layer behind it.

I read that your solo album IBM 1401 is a response to technology’s inevitable extinction.

The IBM 1401 was the first mass produced computer, and it was also the computer that my father worked on as an engineer and a programmer in Iceland. One of the things he did was to program these little melodies on that computer using punch cards, essentially making it into a musical instrument. When it was taken out of service in the early seventies, they made a recording of this music, like a farewell ceremony, a funeral for this computer. So I decided to write a requiem for this computer using the music that my father programmed on it. It says something about our relationship to machines, about nostalgia, obsolescence, and age.

As an audience, do you think that we should be actively or passively listening to music? 

I think you should listen actively to music. I don’t listen to music except actively. I don’t really like having music on as a background. For example, when you listen to something like La Monte Young’s The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, which is this long piece for trumpets playing the note C basically for an hour, you have to listen to it actively. If you don’t, it just sounds like an annoying buzz somewhere. For me, these droning loops are very fundamental, very visceral. They speak to the basic frequency that the body vibrates in. But when you listen actively you start to hear an immensely complex sound world, and an immensely complex relationship between overtones and harmonics and entire melodies and entire worlds within this very simple material.

How do you go about creating worlds within your music? Do you always have the same starting point when making music?

It’s different every time. The physical or mental acts of composing are always kind of the same. It really involves, for me, turning off the more critical faculties of the brain and reaching a state where things just flow. It takes many days to get into that because normally you’re in this critical mode, this analytical mode where you’re structuring things and putting things in order. To create the material, to create the building blocks, you have to go into another state, which is much more receptive and much more intuitive.

Is it easier to get into that state when you already have the building blocks of a particular story, like when you’re scoring a film, for example?

Obviously when you’re doing film music, you’re locked into a framework which is predetermined, which you work inside of. Whereas with my own projects, I create that framework myself. You have a much larger scope and you have much more time to let the music evolve and let it flow over a much larger canvas than in a film score. With film scoring, you have to make these little miniatures, like one or two or three minute pieces that work within a given scene. Film scoring is about miniatures, whereas my own work is a larger canvas.

For Sicario, your most recent film score, there wasn’t any temp music used in the editing process, so you were starting from a blank slate. Do you prefer to work like that?

Denis likes to make the film work without music in the beginning, and then he sends it off to me, like a rough cut with no music at all. This is both a daunting and fairly frightening proposition but also a very exciting one, a very challenging one. And I really relish that. I was very enthusiastic about taking that on and I love working in this way. Prisoners had some music in the first edit, but with Sicario there was no music at all. It gives you a lot of freedom and it gives you the opportunity to take risks and to make experiments and push the envelope. It discourages falling into familiar formulas.

It’s becoming more and more common for composers to venture into the film industry – is that a necessary evil in order to make a living?

Well, speaking for myself, I’ve always made my living from commissions and from work in theater. And I’m very passionate about film music. For me it’s not a necessary evil or something I have to do; it’s something I’m very, very passionate about. I think I’m more a film composer than I am a musician. It’s something that’s always been a part of what I do. That said, it’s necessary for to balance the two domains.

Aside from film and solo albums, you’ve also worked in theater, ballet, and television. Do all your different projects influence each other?

Absolutely. They are always in a dialogue. For me, this kind of restlessness keeps things fresh and keeps me engaged and excited about what I’m doing. It’s very necessary to keep that balance. I don’t like to do the same thing twice really, and I like to challenge myself with every project. I don’t want to make the same album twice in a row or the same score twice in a row. Career-wise it’s been maybe not as clever. I think the key to having a successful career is to find the thing you do well and do it again and again for the rest of your life. But I’m not really interested in that. I’m interested in expanding my language as an artist and as a composer. And I try to expand it with every project.

Yes. That kind of thing is difficult. When I go into a secondhand bookshop in the countryside in England or something like this, if they’ve got my book there, I think, “Well, this is an insult! Somebody didn’t want to keep my book!” (Laughs) But if it’s not there, I feel it’s an insult too. I think, “Why aren’t people exchanging my book? Why isn’t it in this store?”

Does being a writer require a thick skin?

Yes, for example, my wife can be very harsh. I began working on my latest book, The Buried Giant, in 2004 but I stopped after I showed my wife a little section. She thought it was rubbish. (Laughs) The problem is that when she was first my girlfriend, I wasn’t a writer. It was before I’d even started to write at all. So when she reads my writing, she still thinks of me as this post-graduate student who thinks he’s one day going to be a writer.

Even after you won a Booker Prize?

She’s not intimidated at all and she criticizes me in exactly the same way that she did when I was first unpublished and I was starting. She needs to be very strict. We’ve argued about my books, other people’s books, about the movies we go to, the plays we go to since 1980 – for 35 years! There are some things that I agree with her and some where I always disagree. So there are some things that she says that I don’t take so seriously, but there are other things that I know I should take seriously. She has certain areas where she’s very strong.

But you would never compromise on your vision.

No, I wouldn’t ever compromise on the essential, on the essence of a project, the ideas or the themes. This isn’t really what my wife is trying to criticize me about. It’s always about execution. She says, “You haven’t done that correctly. I know what you’re trying to do, but you haven’t succeeded.” I don’t think she’s ever said to me, “The actual vision of your book is wrong.”

So why did you put the The Buried Giant aside for so long? Apparently you started working on it over 10 years ago.

I’ve often stopped books and left them for a few years. Never Let Me Go, my previous novel, I had three attempts! I’m used to this idea that things I write, I can put to one side, and maybe two years later, three years later, if I come back to them… They will have changed. Usually my imagination has moved on and I can think of different contexts or a different way to do it. It might look similar, it might look quite similar, but it takes on a very different significance. It’s happened to me before, so I don’t panic when someone says, “Just put it to the side.” Because I know from my personal experience that that works out quite well.

What does it feel like when you finally finish a book?

It’s funny you say that because I never have this moment when I feel, “Ah, I’ve finished!” I watch footballers at the end of the match, you know, the whistle goes and they’ve won or lost. Until then they’ve been giving everything and at that moment they know it’s over. It’s funny for an author. There’s never a finishing whistle. It’s not very spectacular.

Why not?

Well, even after the book’s publication, things keep changing. Since my British hardcover came out, for example, various translators have raised queries — they’re very sharp at picking up little details. I listen to all their comments and then I change it a little bit more. It’s only when the paperback comes out that it feels to me like that it’s the final edition, and I can stop… Because it’s too late, that’s the final whistle. There’s no real triumphant moment.

Do you ever feel pressure to write more? You’ve published only eight books over the course of your 35-year career.

I made this decision at the beginning of my career that there is no problem about the number of books in the world. I had this discussion with my editor at Faber & Faber, Robert McCrum, the man who discovered me. After my first novel, I said to him, “How long should it be until I publish my second book?” And he said, “Well, really for your career you should publish a book every two years.” I always remind him of this because we’re still very good friends, and he always says that was a stupid piece of advice! But I remember thinking then, “That’s impossible for me.”

Usually creativity can’t be rushed.

I decided right then that I wasn’t trying to contribute numerically to literature; what I had to do was to try and create books that are a little bit different to the books that are there already. What’s the point in adding to this huge mountain of books unless there’s something new or slightly different? Stanley Kubrick was a kind of model for me. He can spend a long time thinking about a project and each movie could be completely different. I thought, “I’ve got to be like Kubrick. I’ll take as long as I need.” That would allow me to build a new world each time.

What do you create first, the story or the world?

I choose the setting according to the needs of the story. And in fact, this often leads me into quite difficult situations. I often have a story but I haven’t decided where it should take place, in which time period it should take place… I feel like I’m location scouting, like on a film, driving around the countryside. The setting, and that includes the time and where it is geographically, that is one of my main tools in telling my story. So, I’ve become quite interested in creating this little world. But music is also very important for my kind of storytelling.

How so?

It’s hard to explain how. In music, particularly if you immerse yourself in the particular song, even if it has no words, you become deeply acquainted with a certain kind of emotion that is in the song. And when I’m writing, what I’m trying to do is convey a particular kind of emotion or a particular kind of mood. So often I find myself thinking about the atmosphere of a particular song I like that is quite close to the emotion that I want to capture.

What kind of things can you communicate without words?

I’ve been travelling just in the last few days and for some reason I was thinking about a favorite track by Keith Jarrett the pianist that I feel captures something about an older person looking back to their youth. It’s an instrumental, no words, so I was thinking I’d like to capture that story in the novel I’m thinking about writing next. I need something of that kind of atmosphere: a mixture of regret and pride. But you can only get that feeling through listening to a piece of music…

How do you translate an emotion from a piece of music into words on the page?

The problem for novelists is that because we use words as tools, and the words are often used in essays or argument, the temptation is to think that you have to always think in terms of logical intellectual patterns. And of course, that’s an important aspect of writing a novel but it’s also important, I think, for a novelist to use the imagination like a musician, a composer or a painter would, in a kind of non-logical way. I think it’s very important for me to not just become a kind of intellectual writer.

Yes, I do — I go to therapy! That’s helped me a lot.

Is that the American influence on you?

Yeah! You’re absolutely right. Because in Europe nobody is like, “What’s wrong with you?” And you’re like, “So many things, you don’t even know!” (Laughs) In America people talk about it, so it’s no big deal. People take off work because they have to go to therapy. And at first, I thought this was crazy but I have to say, it’s freeing! And I think it’s actually made me a better actor.

How so?

Because you’re not confusing yourself. You know this is work, this is that… Or if you use something from your personal life for work, you’re able to, you know, make better categories of where to put things.

Do you need to partition things in your life?

I think to be able to do what I do, I need to. I just don’t want to bring work home anymore. Sometimes you can’t help yourself. If you’ve been crying all day, you’re not going to come home and be like, “Let’s go out and party!” I’m in love with my partner not with my co-star. You know? It’s true! It happens.

When you were growing up there was so much said about the method and DeNiro and that style of acting. Did you feel like you had to do that?

No. There’s always been two schools about that. I think Jack Nicholson said, “It’s called acting.” You know, switch it on and off. I don’t know if I’m able to completely switch it off sometimes… But I really, really try. I went to the method acting class for a day, and they asked me to be an artichoke. And I was like, “I don’t think I can ever use that.” Then I went to Le Cours Florent, which is a very old theater school in France, and I studied Victor Hugo and the old, old school stuff. It prepares you to be on stage, to be looked at and all those things that are awkward when you’re in front of a camera for the first little while.

Have you ever been camera shy?

Oh, of course! My first movie, I was trying to hide from the camera! I think it’s human to not want to expose yourself. If you have to cry, you don’t want everybody to look at you, you know? Obviously you know you’re playing for the camera, but it’s like you instinctively hold your hands in front of your face or something. But you learn through other actors. My first movie was with Dennis Hopper and he literally was like, “You’re the greenest person I’ve ever seen.” And he taught me everything.

What kinds of things?

The basics, you know? Like, don’t hide from the camera! If the camera can’t see you, it doesn’t really work does it?

Do you think that will be different for the next generation of actors who have grown up with smartphones and social media? They are constantly performing for the camera in a way.

Maybe. It’s hard to tell but I think so. Most people meet on Tinder, right? I was at a premiere recently and an actor that was in the movie brought his girlfriend. I was a little drunk and I was like, “Oh, how’d you two meet?” And they were like, “On Tinder!” And I was like, “What?!” I thought you only have sex on Tinder. I didn’t know you actually date. I’m so behind…

Most people meet on the internet these days.

Good for them! It’s so much easier, right?

I feel like I was cheated to not have that simplicity in dating.

Me too! I was like, “I’m never going to meet anyone!” You had to have friends who introduced you…

Unfortunately a lot of people don’t wait for that and just hit on people in uncreative ways.

The worst kind is when I’m on location and I’m at the bar after work or whatever, and you know that a guy definitely knows who you are but he pretends he doesn’t know who you are. And he just comes over and he’s so nervous to come and talk to you, and he’s like, “So, what are you in town for?” And you’re like, “Well, you know, I’m here on work…” “Oh, for a movie – I mean, what kind of work do you do?” (Laughs)

Very smooth.

The awkwardness of it. I personally don’t like fake people. Especially in the industry that I work in, there can be a lot of superficiality. I do think you make that choice for yourself. You choose who’s around you.

You generally seem to be making your own choices. Not many Hollywood actresses would use their Instagram to post a headline of someone defecating in the seaweed at a Chinese restaurant.

I’ve always felt free. I don’t let anyone make decisions for me. I just opened this account a year ago, and it’s actually been really interesting to share aspects that I choose to share with the public and see the reactions. Sometimes people are not agreeing with me, sometimes they are. But I think it’s about showing or sharing an aspect of my life that a regular interview or a regular photo spread can’t do.

Do you feel like you can be more bold now, also in the roles you choose as an actress?

Yeah, as I get older and have more experiences in life I’m able to bring more to a role, you know? I am unafraid to ask for the things that I need to be able to perform, too. You learn that you have to speak up for yourself. If I work, it’s because I chose it and it’s a pleasure and I believe in what I’m doing.

How did you get through times in your career where that wasn’t the case?

You have to be very strong. I always say that when people say to me, “I want to be an actor!” It can be tough, you know? You hear “no” so much and you have moments where you work a lot and then others where you don’t. I’ve certainly questioned whether or not it’s worthwhile going on and considered doing something else. You don’t get the parts that you want… It’s such a mind fuck! And you play on your emotions all the time. It can be very confusing. Some films are more tense than others, you tend to mix your life with what you’re doing that day… It’s hard for your people, your family, you know? So, I don’t know. But my love for what I do, I guess, has always won so far.

 Do you ever choose roles because you want to comment on world affairs?

I don’t think I choose roles because I want to comment… But I think as a citizen of the world I’m concerned with what’s happening in our world, right? So, if I read a script that talks about certain things, chances are I might be interested in that. I’m not sure that I want to make a personal political statement or comment on something. I’m not sure that’s my role as an actor. I’m just there to tell the story. But I know that as an audience I like films that have multiple layers. But, for example, when I made a film about Marie Antoinette – people in France are so split about whether she was a goddess or the worst person ever – I never, ever told anyone my personal point of view.

Why not?

Because that’s not my role. In a personal relationship, you know, if we go out for dinner, I could tell you about that. But I think people are smart enough to judge for themselves. I hate movies that are preachy! Who needs to be told what to think?

Yes, there is a different definition of the leading man now. It’s fantastic. You look at the leading men of the past and you look at them now and they are very different. Hollywood is finally opening the door wider to more realistic portrayals of who people are, not just beautiful Hollywood stars. In the past people had a very limited imagination in terms of character – the size was defining the role for me.

I can imagine. But even in your first film, Steve Buscemi’s Living in Oblivion, you played an actor who was annoyed to be cast in a dream sequence, saying, “Have you ever had a dream with a dwarf in it?”

My size does not define me. It’s just part of who I am, so why would it define a character? The roles I choose, it’s part of who they are but it does not define them. Especially nowadays, a black actor doesn’t play a black actor. He plays a character, who also happens to be black. It doesn’t define you; it’s just part of you. But that’s just bad writing… (Laughs)

But even when you were a struggling actor you refused to play parts like elves or leprechauns out of principle.

It’s tricky, but it’s important to say no – especially earlier in your career – because life is short and you want to be proud of things that you have done, not ashamed of them. I thought I was going to be eating canned soup for the rest of my life and I worked a variety of other jobs to supplement my income, but I’d rather be doing that than working on certain acting jobs. I loved acting, so I didn’t want to tarnish it with bad experiences. You just want to feel comfortable with who you are at the end of the day, if you can. I was always attracted to great writing and storytelling and the stuff for people my size was limited.

Your character in Game of Thrones turns the image of male strength on its head. What do you think it takes to be a real man?

I think just confidence is a big one. 9 times out of 10 women run much deeper than we do and they respond to things that aren’t just on the surface, like a sense of humor. And their definition of sexuality and attractiveness is much different from ours – thank God. Women respond to confidence in oneself and a sense of humor. That’s always been my go-to defense and/or flirtation.

Did you always have self-confidence?

No. I am actually not that way at all. I am pretty shy. I am just in a profession where it’s hard to be. You throw yourself into roles that aren’t shy, like the character in Game of Thrones. Or it’s great to get the girl, so you sort of throw yourself into those roles. But I am not an external person. I love my privacy. I like my peace and quiet.

Isn’t that a contradiction between your shyness and your extroverted profession?

It does not go together well, especially in the days we are living in with all the cell phones and cameras. I miss the days when people went‚ “I wish I had a camera.” Everything is on the Internet. I live in New York City, which is a very external place to live. Part of the reason I used to love New York is the anonymity factor. I am four and a half feet tall, but nobody looked twice at me. But now they are looking twice because I am on a TV show. I miss the anonymity. But it’s a bourgeois problem at the end of the day, because it’s usually just people enjoying your work and the show or the movie they saw you in.

Your popularity also has its advantages. For example, at the 2012 Golden Globes you brought attention to the unjust injury of fellow dwarf Martin Henderson. Do you feel comfortable as a spokesperson for things like that?

No, and I don’t want to be. I am only an actor. There are people that are much better equipped for this, be it politicians or activists. I just heard about that guy on the way to the Golden Globes, so I was thinking about it and then it just popped out. But the world can be a fucked up place at times and we shouldn’t accept that. Whatever you can do to contribute to a better awareness and make the world a little bit better of a place, sure, I’ll get in line. But there are other people that do it much better than I do.

Although some people argue that the explicit portrayal of sex and violence on Game of Thrones is detrimental for society…

If people concentrated their disapproval on the world we live in and not on a fantasy TV show that has dragons, then I would understand. But people are having issues with a show that is fantasy. There are dragons in it. There are White Walkers. In life there is much more violence, there is much more sex. These puritanical views on the arts, that it contributes harmful things to society… It really doesn’t.

Well, that depends on the material.

True, but not if it is good storytelling. And Game of Thrones is incredible storytelling. I think people respond and react so vehemently to these things because they have grown close to these characters that meet their demise.

It’s different than just seeing random violence with characters that you don’t care about.

Right, that sort of washes over you and has no effect on you. And in terms of sex, especially, people should get the fuck over it. People have sex. We have such a puritanical view of sex in most of the world. We are all here because somebody had sex! Everybody should relax a bit. When there is sexual repression in a society, it will find its way out in more dangerous ways. The more sexually repressed a culture is, the more violent and dangerous it becomes. So shame on people for taking issue with sex on violence on a fantasy show.

Do you enjoy returning to the real world and working on other projects after shooting a season of Game of Thrones?

I do. I love to vary my choices, especially with the smaller movies. I am fortunate to do Game of Thrones, which I guess I can consider my day job. That is an incredible project, a big project, and it affords me the opportunity to work on smaller films. Lower budget films are very important because people are not there to make money, but to create things for other reasons. I always really appreciate that. It keeps it fresh. It keeps me in touch with the earlier part of my career.

Back when you supposedly lived in a rat-infested apartment in New York…

Well, I don’t know if it was “rat-infested.” It was very cold and there was a rat one night. But it sounds much more romantic the other way. As a 46-year-old I would not be able to live in those environments now and I am glad my comfort level is higher, but that is part of being young. For me it was part of this struggle. It sort of fed your hunger. And it made you fight harder to get better. I feel the struggle is all. The fight is all. I wish I had the hunger and the fight in me still as much as I had back then. But I have other priorities. I sort of miss that it was okay to be broke. But it’s no longer okay to be broke now.

Because you have a family to feed?

Exactly. But they’ll be fine. They can take care of themselves. Unlike me. I am an actor. I am a big child. Everything is done for you. You don’t even need to make your own coffee in the morning. It’s absurd. But I am not allowed to be a diva at home. That keeps everything in perspective. My wife is brilliant. She is definitely the artist of the family.

And you are not?

I am just the TV actor that pays the bills.

Not really. Struggling with your identity is something that everyone struggles with. Nobody comes of age. I don’t think anyone gets to that point. Story-wise my film is based on my childhood. It was a nice way of me almost laughing at my former self and looking at how pathetic I was as a kid. I went about it completely wrong as a teenager. I wanted to be cool and that for me is like the message of the film. That being yourself is what you should do and not strive to be something you’re not, because it usually ends up wrong. That’s what I wanted to show.

What would you have told yourself back then?

To be myself! Be completely myself. I just always wanted to be like somebody else, like the cool kids. But the kids who were cool in school are probably not that cool now… It’s really weird how the world works out. In school you don’t really know what’s right and what’s wrong and there’s no way of figuring that out. Most of school for me was trying to find a place where I fit into the social status of things, what group I was in. And I was kind of just not really in any group. I remember just going to the cinema a lot and spending a lot of my money on Xbox games. I was quite a boring teenager and I was afraid of showing that, so I tried to be somebody I’m not.

On the bright side, maybe if you were more confident as a kid you wouldn’t have spent so much time in the cinema.

I’m not confident even now! I don’t think I’ve gained any kind of confidence in any situation. But cinema definitely helped me express who I am, yeah.

You must have learned something since your school days…

To a certain degree, yes. I stopped trying to conform and I started doing my own thing. And it isolated me from everybody else. I became more of a loner, but it meant that I could do my own thing. I don’t think it made me socially accepted though.

Even today?

Well yeah, but that’s because it’s a generation where the idiosyncratic people are cooler than the people that try to conform. Also a lot of people are scared. You walk around and people are scared because nobody knows what’s going on. The only people who seem confident in any kind of way are just bluffing their way through pretending they know what’s going on.

Did growing up in a small town in Wales isolate you from the wider world of culture somewhat?

Yeah, I mean the town that I’m from in Wales is nihilistic. There’s not a whole lot going on. It’s a very beautiful place, but there’s nothing for kids to do. You spend most of your time just thinking. It’s a very strange space. It’s like Twin Peaks. It’s so slow and almost Roy Anderson-esque where you believe that maybe life doesn’t exist beyond it. I remember the first time I got out, I was like, “Wow, there’s so much to see.”

Were films your connection to the outside world growing up?

Yes, absolutely. When I was younger, cinema was definitely escapism for me, complete escapism. I remember watching King of Comedy, that’s one of my favorite films. Just watching Scorsese films when I was younger and stuff.

Dakota Fanning started saying she wants to direct when she was only 12 years old. At what point did you start thinking about it?

A couple of years ago I started getting asked the question, “Who are your role models?” And I was never really saying actors. It was always directors, like Paul Thomas Anderson or Scorsese. Just because they were people that stood up for what they believed in and told their voice without compromising. I suppose seeing Punch Drunk Love and seeing how weird and wonderful it was made me want to make something that I thought was interesting

Quentin Tarantino used to want to be an actor, but now he can’t imagine having to help make someone else’s film. Could you imagine directing something someone else wrote?

If Paul Schrader wrote a script for me, you know, like Taxi Driver, then yeah, sure. (Laughs) I don’t know. I like directing my own thing because as an actor you’re for hire and you’re telling somebody else’s story. I do find it strange when people don’t direct something they’ve written, because they’ve obviously created that world, so would they not want to follow that through? But I would have loved to see Quentin Tarantino become an actor. I think that would be the best thing in the world.

He was horrible in Django Unchained…

Yeah, I’m saying that completely sarcastic. That scene… I don’t know why he’s Australian, it doesn’t make any sense! He’s not a good actor, but he puts himself in everything. He’s just Quentin Tarantino in his movies! But he’s such a fascinating character. I spend endless nights watching interviews with Tarantino because he’s so hilarious to watch.

He’s also famous for his encyclopedic knowledge of cinema. Do you feel guilty when you haven’t seen an important or classic film?

Yeah, and what really frightens me is that there are so many movies that I will never see. But that also excites me that I could probably watch a good movie for the rest of my life if I planned it properly. But I’m 24, I can only watch the amount of films that I’ve watched. I would love to freeze time and then watch everything that came before the ’80s and then pick it up again. I feel like what we should start doing is almost re-releasing old films.

You mean in theaters?

Yeah, maybe stop making films as much as we do and put all the money into campaigning old movies. Like if we would re-release Cool Hand Luke and there was posters everywhere for it. Because there are great movies. I wonder if the best movie of all time has already been made. I hope not.

I think a lot of actors get disillusioned and say, “Oh, I thought it was going to be one way, and it’s something else.” I never thought anything was going to be any particular way at all! You know, in the good times and the bad times, they’re all just new experiences. So I can’t really be disillusioned with anything because I didn’t have any expectations at all.

What about people’s expectations of you?

I’ve never really acknowledged people’s expectations of me. A lot of actors sort of fall into the job and feel like they’re going to get “found out,” like, found out that they’re a fraud or something like that. I think loads of people feel like that. I did a film with Anton Corbijn called LIFE where I played the photographer who shot those famous photos of James Dean and there are a lot of parallels between an acting career and a photography career.

Like what?

Both of them are almost entirely dependent on the material, especially if you’re doing stuff like taking photos of famous people and really talented people who are incredibly interesting and charismatic. As an actor, you want to be an artist, but you’re so dependent on everybody else! And even if you’re great in something, there’s only a few actors who the audience acknowledges that they were the reason something’s good. With a photographer, it’s very difficult to claim stuff, too.

As someone who has been hounded by the paparazzi more than most, was it cathartic to switch roles and play the photographer for once?

It was quite strange walking up to the Chateau Marmont as a paparazzi. It was very weird at the actual place. I don’t know if it was cathartic. Maybe it would have been if, because of him being paparazzi, he ends up getting beaten to death…

They’re just people, too.

Well… In fact, not at all. That’s probably why my character was so filled with self-loathing, because he’s a paparazzi. (Laughs)

When your career started off you had some trouble with photographers yourself.

When Twilight first happened, a lot of the franchise people at the time were under strict control by the studios and stuff, so they did it quite “kid-friendly.” And I think for the first few months I kept getting photographed, like, being drunk and smoking cigarettes and things. So I think that’s kind of why people said it was a bit different. But I think the landscape has changed so much. I remember even people like Colin Farrell and stuff. I guess when he was super wild, that was only seven years ago, eight years ago, but I don’t even think you’re allowed to be like that anymore.

Why not, what would happen?

If you do that now, you just don’t get employed. At all. Everyone wants you to be so vanilla! It’s so lame! So, everyone’s just like secret drug addicts instead. (Laughs)

Did you have interview training once you signed on to do Twilight to keep all of your comments vanilla?

Yeah, Summit put me in media training because I was doing too many stupid interviews. I just wanted to tell jokes and stuff and then they sent an email afterwards saying that I refused to cooperate with the media training! It’s my agent’s favorite email she got because she thought it was so hilarious that I refused to relent to the media training.

Would it be possible for you to still be friends with a journalist?

I think it works until you get to a certain level of fame. Before the first Twilight came out there were a couple of journalists who I got on with. They did good profiles on you and stuff and they’d kind of champion you for a bit. But I think if you do too many interviews, people aren’t interested in the nuances of what you’re saying. You’ve just said too much and you end up repeating yourself. The editors are like, “Get him to say something that makes him sound like an idiot or get him to say something controversial.”

That’s pretty much exactly how it goes for many publications, sadly.

Yeah and I think you can’t really be that close with a journalist when you can see them, like, needing you to say something bad for their own jobs. I know actors who have made deals with paparazzi and stuff – it always backfires. Always. Because, like, you just shouldn’t. As soon as you start throwing shit around, you’re going to get covered in shit.

Well, after Twilight ended you’ve been choosing to work with auteurs like Herzog, Cronenberg, Anton Corbijn, and James Gray on smaller projects where your exposure is a lot different.

The last few years I’ve basically done stuff just for the director. After working with Cronenberg on Cosmopolis it just opened stuff up. People approach you in a different way. And now I’ve done a few other things and it kind of just works on a roll, being able to work with these auteur-y kind of guys. It’s quite nice to do smaller parts, so the film doesn’t totally rely on what I do in it. I get to work with who I want to work with and it’s not my fault if it doesn’t make any money!

After working with a few of those directors, has there been a moment where you noticed the difference in how they work?

There was a moment at the end of The Rover. We had just wrapped and David Michôd was standing in the middle of the parking lot we were just shooting in. He looked sort of weird and was watching people packing stuff up. And I was like, “You all right?” And he said, “Yeah, I just think I’m only going to have like six more of these days in my life, so I just want to feel it for a second.” It’s so funny the difference between someone who is doing a job essentially for their next job, or somebody who has written it, produced it.

Someone who is going to devote several years of their life to it when it’s all said and done.

Yeah, you can feel it. It’s much more exhilarating and fun to try to fulfill someone’s dream. A lot of the time you’re working with someone and they don’t really know what they want and they don’t even necessarily want to do the job they’re doing. So you’re just trying to not drown and they’re panicking the whole time. It’s horrible. But with people who are confident and believe in their projects, it’s a completely different experience.

Never. I look at them but I’ve never ever tried one, I don’t know how they work. I have nothing against them, it’s just that they feel so unromantic and dangerous to me. They look like a war weapon!

Well that’s not very surprising since you are known for the way you cook meat over an open fire, utilizing methods and ingredients inspired by your Patagonian roots. How did you develop your own language of cooking?

After three or four years working in France with some of the best chefs, I went back to Argentina. I started a very nice career, became quite successful, and at age 40 I won this prize. But when I got that prize, I realized that I hadn’t yet found my own language of cooking. So I got on my knees and gathered all the tools from my childhood – the fires, and the voices of the natives of South America, the voices of all the Gaucho cooking – and started working very hard on that. And that’s how it started. That’s how I came up with these seven fires.

You have said that cooking with fire is a bit like making love. Why is that?

Well, because it has all those different temperatures and possibilities. It’s exactly like that! It can be something very tender and fragile, and it can be brutal like an animal… It’s very related! I lead a very sexual life. It’s the inspiration of my life: lust.

After fire, what is the most important element for your cooking?

Every day is different and I really believe that cooking is something that adapts to how you’re living your day. For me, the romance of cooking is very important. It doesn’t mean that you have to have a very complicated menu. Maybe you have a potato, an onion, and a piece of meat… It’s more related to the weather, to who’s around you. Is it winter, is spring, are you under a tree, beside the stream, are you cooking in the snow? It’s related to the music you hear, the clothes you wear, what you take in your backpack, and so on. For me, that is a very, very important ingredient: the romance we have with life.

What is the best meal you’ve ever eaten?

I don’t know what the best meal is. A pig that I did four days ago, I de-boned it and I put a stick through it and I cooked it very slowly on a fire on a frozen lake in Patagonia. I sat on a little bench and I rotated it for five hours, smoking a cigar and drinking wine and talking with friends… And it was certainly delicious, but every day is the best meal I’ve had because I’m an optimist. I believe in change, I believe in new things. I like that oriental thing that the past is past. The only thing good is what’s happening today and tomorrow. I love the past, but I don’t think much about it.

A lot of your cooking seems to require being outside. Is the indoor kitchen limiting for you?

Well, there’s certainly more dreams in cooking outside, you know? There’s beauty in a fire; there’s beauty in people sitting around a fire. I don’t mind cooking inside, but true happiness for me comes from the wilderness, from being outside and enjoying a desert or a mountain or a frozen lake or a beach.

If you’re in the city for too long, is it overwhelming?

Yes, it is. I was brought up in Patagonia and nature was sort of my most healing friend. I learned so much from my dogs and being outside and sleeping in the grass and watching the mountains without knowing it until I was grown up. I realized that nature was my second language in life. It’s something that I’m very related to, it brings a lot of peace, inspiration, and it makes me extremely happy.

Is that also why you have a house on a very remote island in Patagonia, with no internet or cell service?

Yes. I’ve been going to that island now for 30 years. I just came back from it yesterday or the day before. I try to go as much as I can. It’s very far away, it’s difficult to get there in winter like now, but it sort of heals my soul every time I go.

That must conflict a lot with the hectic schedule you’re on. Is travelling the sacrifice you make to be in so many different places? 

In a way, it’s not a sacrifice at all. I find it very, very inspiring to change countries, cities, to go to different farms and exchange ideas with people around the world. I live a very global life. It’s sort of an addiction. I need it.

So you need both extremes?

Yes. I love opposites! I love contradictions; I think human beings need contradictions. We need opposites. We need to sleep in a five-star hotel and we need to sleep under a tree. The distance and the difference between those two extremes are what makes us happy and what makes us think and what makes us grow. If you only sleep under a tree, it’s quite sad. If you only sleep in a five-star hotel, it’s extremely sad, too. So, I think that we need those contrasts in life – in every way! In love, in lust, in sex, in food, in reading, in music, in walking and dressing, you know? Luxury can be a potato and an onion. And it can be a bowl of Sevruga caviar and a wonderful blini or a coulibiac or a selle d’agneau.

Most people associate luxury with a high price tag.

Very low prices and very high prices, again, they’re opposites, and in both ends you can find wonderful things. Some of my restaurants are extremely expensive, and I really like that. I’m ambitious. I like money. I’m romantic, but I believe that good things have to be expensive sometimes. But luxury is more related to the spirit of your life, to what you’re doing for that luxury. I imagine myself eating under a willow tree by a stream with a tin plate and a tin cup and I find that is extreme luxury. And then I can think of having dinner in a palace in Paris with candles and I think that’s luxury, too. Luxury is a new beast now. In the last 15 years, the world has changed a lot. Luxury nowadays is now more related to space, to silence, to respect. Before it was more related to glittering things and to other topics that are fading away.

Do you like that development?

Yeah, I like how luxury is changing. It’s just that there are too many people who have a lot of money to live a luxurious life, but they don’t know how to do it, so we have to teach them. I find that my life is quite related to that. I sort of turned my back on what luxury was, what I was taught, but I have found that what I do is very luxurious in a very simple and beautiful way.

I hope that they’ll say that I made a contribution to art history. That was my goal from the time I was a little girl. That was what I’ve been intent on doing all along, to make a contribution to art. That’s what my life has been about. And trying to demonstrate that women have as much to say as men. They’re just as worthy to be in our museums and our history books – that’s what my life has been about, and that’s what I’ve been hoping to prove. That gives meaning to life. And purpose.

You often use traditional male skills, like pyrotechnics and welding, and contrast them with traditionally female art skills, like embroidery. Is art gendered?

Art isn’t gendered, but artists are. I was just reading an article by a very well known art writer about minimalism. He was talking about male minimalists like Robert Morris and Donald Judd who were creating phallic symbols of power. Is that not gendered? In the ’80s I remember looking up the word “gender” and the only thing that came up was writing and thinking about women. Only women had gender! Men are normal and only women had gender. That’s only now beginning to change because of queer theory. Now, in America, there’s a new movement that established men’s studies, masculinity studies, in the same way that we study women.

Gerda Lerner, a pioneer in the field of women’s history and a hero of yours, said that, “Women’s history is the key to women’s emancipation.” Would you say that’s true?

Absolutely. Before the 1960s there weren’t any women’s studies courses. Learning that history was incredibly empowering. At the time, the idea was that women had no history. And in fact, when I was in college, I took a course called History of Europe, and the professor was a very respected historian. In the first session, he said, “In the last class, I’m going to talk about women’s contributions in history.” I waited all semester! I was a very ambitious young woman and I wanted to know what had been done. During the last class, he came in and he said, basically, “Women’s contributions to European history? They made none.”

How could that have been taken seriously?

That was the prevailing point of view! I had a really hard time in the L.A. art scene as a woman. It was a completely macho art scene. I started to wonder if what my professor had said was true, so I started buying all these books and found out about all these women writers, women artists – my professor was wrong! There was a huge amount of contributions from women throughout history. And discovering that really changed my life. That was one of the reasons why I set out to overcome all that erasure of women’s history.

Women’s history is also the theme of your most well-known artwork The Dinner Party, a triangular table with 39 place settings for 39 important historical women. Have we started to learn from our past, or is history destined to repeat itself?

No, not actually, but civilizations build on civilizations and it’s very different for men than it is for women. Men grow up, and they look on television, and they see male heroes. I used to say that it was a relief to see Margaret Thatcher because she wore a skirt! (Laughs) The problem with Angela Merkel is that she only wears pants! Men see themselves reflected in government, in history, in art. It’s really difficult to understand what it’s like to go to the museum and see only art by men. Men see themselves, their past, and their achievements and that shapes their self-image. It’s really difficult for women to do the same thing with the absence of a history. We take history classes and study what men do, with a few women thrown in now and then. Men build on their own achievements, but women have no basis to build on.

What would you say to those who call your work vulgar or pornographic?

What? I don’t know what you’re talking about, that is a very, very old idea! I turned 75 last year and there were events all over America celebrating my birthday and my work. I did a fireworks piece in Prospect Park. There were 12,000 people there. And afterwards they all burst into applause and sang “Happy Birthday” to me. Those kinds of things don’t happen if they think the work is vulgar!

I agree, however, a recent article in The Guardian described your work as such, saying, “On the one hand, you could called it vulgar and semi-pornographic, while on the other it could be just another form of expression.”

Right! If we had a level playing field, women’s work would just be seen as another form of expression. I mean, why would my work be called that when Gustav Klimt’s paintings of little girls or Henry Darger’s paintings of little girls… Is that not pedophilia? Is that not vulgar? Somewhat? No. We’re used to it in men, but we’re not used to it in women’s work. We’re not used to women’s work, period. That’s what I’ve been trying to say! “Get used to it!”

What kind of impact do you hope that your work has? Aside from the message, is it enough that your art just be beautiful?

Well, that’s not what it was about for me. Yes, art should be beautiful, but the function of beauty and art is to convey ideas. I’ll tell you what I want. The Brooklyn Museum did a show of my early work, and a museum in Santa Fe did a show of my years in New Mexico. And on opening night, a stranger, this man walked up to me and he said, “I am completely overwhelmed. Thank you so much.” I think that given the kinds of emails and letters and outpourings that I’ve had over the years, there are many people who say that seeing my work changed their life. That’s pretty good!

You’ve also said that the greatest lesson in your career was to never give up. Was there a time when you considered picking a path that might have been easier?

Listen, I’ve got to tell you something. It’s not a lot of fun to read that your work is vulgar. I had some pretty horrible reviews in my life. And would it have been easier to give up? Maybe. But when people ask me if I have any advice for young artists, that’s what I say. Don’t give up. Trust yourself, even if people don’t see what you see or understand what you’re trying to do. Don’t give up.

Why was it worth it to keep going?

Because you never know what’s going to happen in life if you live long enough! I opened a show in New York in 2000 that was part of a work called Resolutions: A Stitch in Time. Oh my God. The guy who reviewed it for The New York Times wrote such a vitriolic and hateful review. He called me a feminist relic! Then in 2014, I did all these new shows, and the same guy wrote a review of my show in Brooklyn and suddenly he called me a feminist visionary! (Laughs) In 2014! You never know what’s going to happen if you live long enough.

I don’t know. You don’t think of it that way. You don’t think of those parts as achievements. You think of the roles you play, the paintings you’ve made. I mean, imagine an actor saying, “I don’t want to go on anymore because I can’t do better than the last movie I made. I might as well quit now.” We’d call that resting on your laurels and I guess you’re not supposed to do that. I’m all for that! You know, resting on your laurels, you get a nice big check, take another profession on… But for some thick reason, I keep wanting to go back and do this stuff.

Because you want to try to do something new?

Yeah, if I find something that I feel I can contribute to in a way, and feel as though I’m in it, I’m saying something – whatever that means. What it means is that I “hold as it were the mirror up to nature,” as Shakespeare says. If I’m expressing something that I feel is a way to exercise my talent and help to communicate a role, a human being in a movie, I will try doing it. I’m not going to say the word “retirement” because it’s kind of a strange word for an artist to say, “retirement.”

The artist Christo says that artists don’t retire, they just die.

But there are artists that have retired. Like Phillip Roth – I did a movie of his book The Humbling. He has quit writing and he’s very happy! So he says. He goes off and does what he does. I can understand that. It gets so routine. You get the script, you’ve got to read the script, you’ve got to learn the script. You have to go through that process again. So, you’re looking for the other things, like a director who wants to use you.

But surely all directors want you.

Before The Godfather, the first Godfather, nobody else wanted me. But Francis wanted me! He just wanted me, and I didn’t understand it… The studios didn’t want me, nobody wanted me – nobody knew me. I think when a director is interested, I have a tendency to lean forward instead of backing off. You’re looking for a risk you can take, a challenge, the fact that you fall down and get up and go on.

Why?

When you do it long enough, you want to keep yourself open. You don’t want to close off because vulnerability is important. You can’t let your skin get too thick. Like Brecht says in that great play he wrote, at a young age, too. At 22 he wrote In the Jungle of Cities and one of the characters says, “Man’s skin is too thin for this world.” So, he sees that it grows thicker and thicker, until finally he is bumping into things and not feeling them anymore.

Do you regret any of the movies you did because of your desire to push your own limits?

I don’t regret anything. I feel that I’ve made what I would call mistakes. I picked the wrong movie, or I didn’t pursue a character or I played somebody and made some choices… But everything you do is a part of you. And you get something from it. And I mean, the idea and excitement of being in these situations and places – they are more than just memories, they inform your life. So I don’t regret anything.

Not even turning down the role of Han Solo in Star Wars?

Star Wars. Yeah, that was my first big mistake.

And a Terrence Malick script?

Yeah, a long time ago Terry wanted me to be in a movie, and I always wished… There’s another one of my many mistakes. They’re in the museum of mistakes! All the scripts I rejected!

Would you say that you have a different approach to acting today than before?

Yeah, I would imagine I do. I couldn’t go on this long otherwise. We just go through our cycles as we live and I think age is about that. I think we’re here – and then we’re not! Whenever we go, we go and we don’t know when, any of us. So we go through cycles.

Are you enjoying this cycle of your life?

You know, when you think of it, is the glass half empty or half full? That’s the way it is for all of us, really. There are days when I really do enjoy it. But there are days when not… If I were a painter nobody would question me about my age. “I paint! I’m an artist!” I hate saying that. I don’t like saying that. That’s one thing I learned early on. A woman I lived with said, “Whatever you do, don’t tell them you’re an artist.” I said, “I know! I don’t!” (Laughs) I’ll avoid that. And I have been avoiding that for many years. Let’s put it this way, I think I’m an artist. I hope I am. But I think if I were a painter, the questions would be different.

But all actors have the same problem.

Because of the visual thing. It’s because of the image. It’s because we have to deal with our image, even though we play different characters, the image is always there… So that’s part of why there’s a kind of pretentiousness in saying you’re an artist, because after all, you’re a movie star. And that’s wrong too! That’s pretentious, too – I’m a movie star! So what the fuck do you say?

A product needs to perform, but if it can do so with a little poetry, so much the better. Technology increasingly robs us of the “mystical” in our lives, but not everything needs to be fast, available, and convenient. I like ideas and products that reveal themselves slowly – more whisper than scream, something that becomes part of our own personal universe. I’m always happy to trade off a little function to improve the form, though ultimately both need to co-exist. More than form, I feel strongly that the ethos of all great brands must be built around a set of coherent principles that find expression in distinct and compelling ways.

There is a system and a method for every process in your company, from the toilet paper to the way a parcel is wrapped – even the finance department has approved colors it can use for graphs. Why are those things important, even if most of your customers won’t ever see them?

The parts that you don’t see often matter the most. The smallest, well-intended rituals and gestures matter and the energy they generate infuse into space, spirit, and eventually the product itself. It’s why the philistine plagiarists who attempt to copy what we do always fail – always. Thousands of seemingly insignificant and bizarre actions accrue and collude together to become the essence of the product. I think the same principle applies to people. It’s our human fractures that make us appealing. Perfection bores me. 

There are now over 100 stores around the world. Has it been challenging to maintain authenticity as your brand has grown?

Authenticity is an uncompromising decision that needs to be taken at the outset of a brand’s journey. It’s a commitment to “doing it well” with minimal tradeoffs and a capacity to endure pain where required if that’s what’s required for the best, long term outcome. So much of the commercial environment around us is ugly, lazy, and banal. We’re so often accosted with a kind of cheap aesthetic assault designed to momentarily titillate and superficially provoke. Enduring brands all have a strong and confident signature, a real perspective, a confident aesthetic – aesthetic in the literal sense of the word, to feel and sense something. Taste matters in the end.

Did you have a formative experience with taste as a young person?

I remember in my early teens working for my father in his barbershop after school and spending hours looking at all these strange tonics and grooming products for sale. The well-designed stuff that had been left untouched from the 1960s was so much more interesting than what was being churned out in the late ’70s. Sharp design endures, whether it’s a bottle cap or typography.

Do you feel like the current generation is more interested in products that are simple and honest?

In some ways, yes. We have to remember that our products are very personal; they touch the skin, literally and metaphorically. These products become a trusted friend and one that is not easily superseded. There is a kind of evolutionary discovery that happens as the connection deepens. We’re not for everyone, but those who “get it” really feel like they’ve found their thing. Our products fulfill a real need and we design these to be enjoyable and accessible.

Even luxurious?

It’s more about seeking the best that’s possible in the small gestures and decisions we make. Good bread, a real newspaper, clean water – these are luxuries. The luxury that matters most to me is rarely the sort that comes with a logo.

So it has nothing to do with hedonism? That seems to be what many would call luxury.

The version of hedonism that’s more interesting is one that’s built around a certain spirit and generosity for life itself rather than some spin doctor’s take on why a mass-produced handbag with vulgar branding all over it might change your life. It won’t. For the most part I think indulgences are healthy and necessary. Material indulgences have their limitations. But if you attend a great performance and it deeply moves you enough to want to return again the next night, why not? Life is fleeting, the more we fuel ourselves the more we have to give. Life without some excess, forget it.

Sigmund Freud once said, “Love and work, work and love… That’s all there is.” Would you say that’s an accurate depiction of your life?

Family and work mean everything to me. Overall, my family time has remained consistent though the workload has actually increased, however this work is no longer singularly Aesop related. I think balance as an ideal and concept is grossly overrated, if you’re energized and passionate there’s no point fighting this, there are times when I’m driven to work like a mad man and this brings great joy.

I think many entrepreneurs are driven to work like mad…

I’ve never thought of myself as an entrepreneur; I don’t instinctively possess an alpha desire to lead or conquer the commercial world. Perhaps in some way I’m an “accidental merchant.” Through my working life, I’m driven by an innate need to produce and be surrounded by interesting projects and activity that stimulates me.

What is a project that currently interests you?

There are a few ideas fermenting. The one I’m most attached to has a working title of “Up Joyce’s Nose” and is intended to express the olfactory lows and highlights of Ulysses through a series of “smell-scapes” and performance readings over a number of years across cities that the great man connected with, like Paris, Zurich, and Trieste. It’s a completely crazy thought that I’d really like to see it happen.

You seem to have a profound interest in chemistry. What can you tell us about the way that science and beauty interact in the current commercial climate? What is Aesop doing differently?

I’ve not been involved with Aesop product development for many years however what I love to observe is how much care and diligence continues to be applied to every single product throughout the entire development process.

Could you imagine a life without work?

 I can’t imagine life without love. I don’t know where work begins and ends, that’s not so important to me, what matters is to dive in, just to get on with it. I’m not so precious about work or play, it’s always the action and possibility that excites me. Work, the process itself can be incredibly grounding when you love what you do, it builds resilience and fortitude and with time we learn to adapt and forgive when things don’t pan out as we imagine. Know your own script, write your map, and sweat it out. Rise above short-termism; good decisions deliver joy and value over a far greater length of time.

Only if I had murdered somebody and had to go underground.

Do you think that would be enough of a disguise, like Clark Kent’s glasses?

I could hide that way, definitely. If I ever got sentenced to prison I would have to because I wouldn’t have the proper tools to keep it. I don’t think they sell Maybelline eye line pencil in the prison commissary. I’d have to be like grinding down ashes and stuff from illegal cigarettes. I don’t think I’d go that far.

Have you been to jail?

Of course, for a night or something. I was never sentenced or anything, but I’ve been arrested. I don’t trust anyone that hasn’t been to jail at least once in their life. You should have been or something’s the matter with you.

You seem attracted by outcasts and criminals. Patty Hearst, who was convicted of bank robbery and later pardoned, appeared in your film Cry-Baby and you are friends with Leslie van Houten, who is still in prison today for her involvement in the Charles Manson murders. What is it about these people that you are drawn to?

They survived incredibly extreme situations. Way more than I ever have. That’s what Role Models was about, my book, just about people that have survived. Patty Hearst was great. Whatever she did, she did to stay alive. Even though she got life in prison, Leslie van Houten still tries to make herself a better person than she would have been if she hadn’t done that crime, which is all you really can do when you’ve done something that bad. Which is, to me, admirable and amazing. I don’t know if I’d be that brave.

Some people say that the bad guys are really the good guys in your films.

They are! The good guys in my movies mind their own business and they don’t judge other people. And the bad guys are jealous, they judge other people without knowing the whole story, they want all the attention and they’re mean spirited. So yes, I think my films are politically correct in a weird way.

 Could you even say that your films are driven by a sense of social justice?

Yes. I think social justice is important. I think it’s not fair. Life is a rotten lottery. I’ve had a pretty amazing life, a good life, and God knows I’m thankful, but I do believe that after 30, stop whining! Everybody’s dealt a hand, and it’s not fair what you get. But you’ve got to deal with it. Stop blaming your parents. If you’re really angry at 60 years old, you’re an idiot! You’ve got to work some of it out. You can be angry at social issues. But the only way I’ve learned to change anyone’s mind politically is to make them laugh. My whole career has been about that.

Your films aren’t just funny, they are also really weird. Whenever I watch your films I feel like I’m being a bit naughty.

Aw, that’s okay! That’s good! I think I invite you to come into a world that you might be uncomfortable with but if I’m your guide, then you feel safe. That’s all right. I’m a filth elder, I’m a good uncle. I’ll get you an abortion, take you to rehab. I think that I’m a good family member.

My brother wouldn’t let me watch Pink Flamingos growing up because of the scene where Divine eats dog shit.

Oh, but it was okay to watch artificial insemination? Or blow jobs between mother and son? Or chicken fucking? Your brother said that was the only scene? There was worse stuff! (Laughs)

A lot of your films have included similarly revolting scenes. Was it important for you to be subversive or transgressive with your work?

Transgressive was too highfalutin a word, really. But certainly I’m flattered when… At first, when I was young, I was called pernicious. I didn’t know what that meant, so I looked it up and you can never be called anything as scary as that! So, everything afterwards was a let down after I was called pernicious.

Your dad loaned you money to help finance your early films, but is it true that he never saw them?

Of course he didn’t. Why would I make my father watch Multiple Maniacs? Those movies were made to horrify parents. My parents knew what they were, they read about them in the paper and stuff. My mother came to Mondo Trasho and she said, “You’re going to die, end up in a mental institution, commit suicide, or OD,” and I said, “Oh, you liked it?” (Laughs) But they grew to understand it. What parent would be happy – like Divine’s mother – what mother would be happy that their son is in drag eating dog shit? Really, no parent’s that liberal.

But that style is what made you into a cult filmmaker. 

Well cult is a word you would never say in Hollywood. Cult means that it lost money and three smart people liked it. In any film business, if you’re trying to get your next film made, you would never say, “Oh, my last film was a cult film.” I’d say, “Oh great, well I hope this one isn’t!” I always say to Johnny Knoxville, “How do you do it? You sort of do the same thing we did, except you made millions and I made hundreds.” (Laughs) Johnny Knoxville would eat dog shit. If we hadn’t done it, he would’ve done it.

It’s all about timing.

I remember watching the first Jackass movie in a very blue-collar neighborhood in Baltimore and there were these blue-collar fathers and their butch, heterosexual sons watching and enjoying men putting toy cars up their asses – and they’re bonding over this. And I thought, “That’s great.” He has a gift, you see, that he can do this. He just sent me a good present in the mail last week, a real product called anal bleach. I wanted to take it to California to show it to a friend this Thursday, but I can’t because if they find that in my luggage at the security, I’ll be so embarrassed! Nobody would believe me that it was a joke. I don’t want to go through the airport and explain what my anal bleach is.

You don’t mind explaining all the weird stuff in your films?

That’s in my movies! This is in my real life.

Is it easier to talk about your movies than your real life?

Well, I have to talk about my movies. I have to give interviews to promote what I’m doing. But no one really knows my personal life. And if you don’t have a personal life I feel bad for you. That’s the reason why if I go out for dinner with you and it’s not tax deductible it’s a compliment really. Not every meal is about business. I definitely have a great personal life, actually. I always feel bad when I meet celebrities and I can just tell every single thing about their personal life, I just say, “Well, they don’t have friends. Or a therapist.” Once you have both, you don’t have to share everything with people, because then you don’t have a private life, and then you’re, I guess, a workaholic.

Jeanne-Claude always said, “There are a million people born on the same day.” But it happened that we met, that’s all. That is something not unusual. But there are many things that are not destiny. You make your own destiny.

You worked together for nearly 50 years. Would you have become the same artist without her?

It’s the same question to ask, “What would happen if I were Chinese?” (Laughs) We cannot discuss these things – if, if, if – there are no ifs. After living for 80 years, there are no ifs. I can only say one if and it was that I was rather lucky to escape in 1957 to the West. I had never been outside of Bulgaria until 1956 and if I didn’t go to the West, things would have probably been different.

The Soviets had a very strict policy against modern art so you might have not made art at all.

I was drawing all the time as a little boy, like 5 or 6 years old, and it was at this age that I decided to be an artist. There was never a thought about anything else. But it’s true, in the late ’40s and early ’50s most modern art was not permitted to be seen in the Soviet Bloc countries. There were some very bad reproductions and old books… I desperately tried to go beyond Bulgaria and the Soviet Bloc, but even going to other communist countries was very difficult. Fortunately my aunt and my uncle were living in Prague and finally I succeeded in finding a way to visit them. And I was totally flabbergasted by Prague!

Why?

It was the most Western country. Even before the chance to fully escape came into view, I had already decided that I was never going to go back to Bulgaria! I was going to stay in Prague. I was young, like 21 years old, and when you’re young and you discover the relatively small freedom of the Western art in Czechoslovakia and Prague in the late ’50s, suddenly you dream of going to Paris! And this is how the stage was set for me to go to Paris.

And that made all the difference after all. It was there that you met Jeanne-Claude and you were together until her death in 2009. How has your life changed since she passed away?

We are missing her all the time, you know? You should understand that living with one person for over 50 years, we miss many, many things. Probably one of the greatest things was that she was always very critical of anything we tried to put together. You can see in many of the films the Maysles brothers made about our work how vigorously we argued with each other – almost fighting each other! This is the thing I miss the most because it is so important to the process of what we are doing, to have this critical attitude all the time, not bending, not compromising. But there are many, many things. Many, many things.

Is it true that you always flew in separate planes so that in case one crashed the other could continue the work?

Exactly, because we are always working on two or three projects and at least one should finish the project that was very much advanced. That was the story. I remember often we would take different planes, then on the way to the connecting flight we would kiss each other and take another plane.

Was it natural for you to continue making work alone after her death?

To be a visual artist is not a profession – it is existence. In the Maysles’ film The Gates, she is in a car and a journalist is asking, “You’re very advanced in age, will you retire?” And Jeanne-Claude says, “Artists do not retire, they simply die.” It’s not a profession, it’s existence, you know? You exist through art. You cannot even compare it to other professions, in the office and things like that.

Why did you decide in 1994 to change your artist name “Christo” to “Christo and Jeanne-Claude?”

Because all the people that were working with us knew that everything was decided by both of us. Jeanne-Claude used to say that everybody can have ideas. But to implement it, you need enormous gifts in many areas. Sometimes it was my idea, sometimes Jeanne-Claude’s idea, but the idea is nothing. They need to be implemented and all the choosing how the work should be done was all done together.

What does that process look like? Your projects are often incredibly complex.

In the studio here in New York City, in Manhattan where I am working on the top floor, I put our idea on paper using drawings, collages, scale models, anything… But the work is always decided by life-size tests on a very small section with 1:1 scale. Then when I see them in place, me and our collaborators can choose the right cables, fabric, colors, thickness, weave. And that is done for all the projects. The life-sized test is not decided by me or by her, but it’s decided by that consensus with the real light, the real weather, the real site.

What do you mean decided by consensus?

I’ll give you an example. When we were doing The Umbrellas (Joint Project for Japan and USA) there were the umbrellas and we decided on the proportions, the height and stuff. But at the very end we had to decide on the color, and there were many yellows and blues and we built several umbrellas at 1:1 scale, blue and yellow, and we positioned them on the site of the project and in the season during which the project should happen. We tried to see how they looked from far away, from one kilometer away, in the sun, on a gray day, when it’s wet from the rain in Japan, all these things. All these things aren’t just decided like that, you know? The process, the realization of the project, is a very collaborative work. The drawings are only indications, after that we have to move to the real things.

You just turned 80 this year. What feelings do you have when you look back at your life now?

(Laughs) I don’t like looking back at my life! I am so excited and happy that we have a new project and that we have a problem or two – just off the top of my head! I am not interested in spending any moment, any hour, to do a so-called “retrospective” exhibition. I always think that they can do a retrospective when I’m dead. I really like to do new things. I love enjoying that I am physically capable to do the new project, I am enjoying the physicality of the new project, the people I meet, the young people.

I guess that’s why even at 80 years old you still have three major projects in the works – one in Italy, one in Colorado, and one in Abu Dhabi involving 410,000 barrels that will be the largest sculpture in the world.

Absolutely. If you go through all of our images, they are all unique images. We never built another gate, we never built more umbrellas, we never wrapped another parliament, we never built another Running Fence. They are unique things, they are their own physicalities. This is what we enjoyed most because they are adventurous and not boring. For example, after The Gates we had so many people from different cities come to us and say, “Can you install the gates in my park?” It’s idiotic… Our projects are not like that. They are all a new challenge.

Is that desire for creating something new also why you create art that doesn’t last?

No the question is the time. I believe anyway that the prime-time for every work of art exists in the time in which it was done. After that it’s transformation, continuous transformation. You go to the Louvre and you look at Venus de Milo, does it look like art? Only the slightest idea. The idea that artists are creating things and that they will not remain is a philosophical discussion, because they stay in our memory. One color slide, one photographic image of our project is better than Venus de Milo! (Laughs)

Do you consider the photos of your art also artworks in and of themselves?

Of course there are films, there are photographs, there are objects, there are drawings, there are many additional things. But all of that together is not a substitute for the project. It is the material historically related to the project and it is a great source of information about the project. But it’s not a substitute, because the unique moment cannot be canned. This is an important aspect of our temporary works. The work of art is not one gate or two gates or three gates. The work of art is 7,503 gates, on 23 miles of walkway, in Central Park, in New York, and so on. All that is the work of art. Pink fabric in Florida is not the work of art.

You sometimes fight for years to get permission to realize your projects. Wrapping Pont Neuf in Paris took nine years of negotiations and wrapping the Reichstag around 25 years. Once you’ve worked on something for that long and it’s finally finished and you go and look at it, what feeling do you have?

All of our projects, because they exist so briefly, Jeanne-Claude and myself, we like to spend time with our baby. Basically we spend from morning till evening with the things while they are visible. We say to our friends who come from around the world, “We don’t want to talk to you! We’ll talk to you in the evening.” We don’t like to see anybody except the things. Sometimes the project is very difficult, like The Gates was so public, or some projects like Umbrellas in Japan we need to travel. It was so vast, so great, you need to walk it, spend time in all kinds of different places, to enjoy it, to be there, to see it in the morning light, in the midday, in the evening. We worked so hard to install each umbrella in the perfect location that I could go to every single umbrella to see how it looks! So basically the moment the project is exhibited, we like to be with the work, like it’s our child, all the time, nonstop.

Yes, otherwise I would have nothing to do. I don’t want to only do what I know how to do. I want to be pushed somewhere else. I need a director because I think actors need to be directed. Of course I could direct myself, but I would do things that I’ve already done, you know? And that’s the danger at a certain time for an actor, to do things in an easy way, to always choose the same style of characters.

You want to keep reinventing yourself.

Not to reinvent, but to have the impression that a new film is a first film in a way. That’s the impression that I have when I do a film anyway. I don’t feel blasé. I wouldn’t like to do something and have the impression that I’ve done it before and it’s just going to be one more day. There should always be a challenge in the everyday life of work.

You’ve been acting for 50 years and have appeared in over 100 films. Haven’t you already done everything?

I haven’t done everything yet. (Laughs) Human nature is a very wide thing. There are roles that are more in relation with people of my generation. When you grow older in life, it’s the same thing. You have an experience and a type of character that you cannot play if you are 30, let’s say. It’s difficult to find a good path. You can grow older better in Europe than in America, that’s for sure. But women seem to be younger than they were 50 years ago. It’s the evolution of human beings, ah? 40 years ago, when you see a 50-year-old woman, she looked her age. Today, much less.

What has changed the most in the last 50 years of filmmaking?

The thing that has changed a lot is the technique. The fact that you work with much smaller cameras, with less light, cameras are always much closer to you… As an actor you have to adapt. At the beginning it was very difficult to have cameras so close to you. It was not like that before! In a certain way you had a field where you were acting. Today, the camera can be right next to you! So that was a little difficult for me at the beginning.

The stories being told now are a lot different than when you started out, too.

The stories are always sort of a mirror image of society, so cinema has been following society and the way people live and the way people love, the way they show their feelings. Cinema has always been a reflection of that, so of course it has changed. In 30 years it has changed a lot. People get divorced much more easily, women can have sex without the fear of getting pregnant, that has changed a lot of things and cinema has been following that. You don’t tell the same stories. Now you cannot smoke in films so it will look different. You have mobile phones – that changes a lot of things in the plot of a story! Before you could imagine situations where the fact that you couldn’t get in touch with someone would create an incredible situation, but today it’s very different. Everyone’s got a mobile phone so you can contact anyone, anywhere, anytime. It does change things.

Do younger actors have a different way of working now than they used to?

I don’t feel that the younger actors are very different in their way of working. I just think there is not enough time because there is not enough money. There is less time to do everything.

There is more of a hurry to produce than in the ’60s and ’70s?

Yeah, everything is more expensive… It’s very difficult. It’s a big problem. The European cinema is not like the American cinema that can go anywhere and you get a chance to get the film paid back in a few months. It’s not like that for a French speaking film. Everything is becoming more expensive all the time. It’s just the balance, you know? Maybe the camera is less important and you need fewer lights nowadays, but they still spend a lot on the costs and all the salaries and we pay a lot of taxes in France. But I’m not complaining! I don’t want to be heard as that! But it makes a very big difference compared to some other countries. Still I think there are too many films made. When I receive the box of the César Awards, and you see the amount of the French films… I think there are too many French films.

Do you consider yourself first and foremost a French actress or a European actress?

I think both, frankly. I feel very French, but I speak Italian and English, so I feel very European. But I don’t feel close to English people, for example. It’s not that far away geographically, but I don’t feel close to English people because it’s such a different sensibility, such different characters. We are so different. I feel closer to Spanish or Italian people than to English people. Because of the nature of the Latin character compared to an Anglo-Saxon character. We have different educations… we are very different.

Can you imagine a life without acting?

It’s too late! (Laughs) I’m at an age where I can’t say, “Oh, I’m going to change my career.” You retire or you go on doing what you do. That’s all.

Would you agree to someone making a film about your life?

I don’t think I have a right to say no, do I?

No, but you can choose to cooperate or not.

Ah, oui. No, no, no. I’m not interested in giving myself more than what I’ve done. No, I have no desire for that at all. I don’t have the desire to be more public. I need to keep things for my life.

Well it’s likely to happen at some point or another. You’ve already received a lot of tributes, like the Lifetime Achievement Award at the European Film Awards in 2013…

I’m going to be careful about that. Tributes, they start at the time where things seem to be slowing down!

You seem to be speeding up the last five or ten years…

No, no, no, I’m not speeding up! I’m not doing more films than I used to! But, you have to be careful with what they call “homage,” “tribute,” because it becomes something very… final in a way.

Sure, but it’s not uncommon for filmmakers to work well into their 70s or even 80s…

70 is young for a director. I think if you are very busy doing something you like very much, like making films or writing, I think it helps you stay in shape, even if you are very tired. I wouldn’t say it keeps you young, but it keeps you in shape.

But you still haven’t given up smoking have you?

Who, me? No. (Laughs) You can’t do everything, ah?

Don’t people warn you about smoking?

All the time.

What do you say to them? 

I don’t say, “Mind your own business,” I say, “Yes, I know, thank you.” But what kind of advice is that? “You shouldn’t smoke so much. You should stop smoking.” Yes, of course I should, but that’s not what I’d call advice. That’s a fact! Give me advice on how to stop smoking without suffering. Yes, that would be interesting.

I think the talent of an artist very often and surprisingly does not lay in, “What was the idea and what artwork came out of it?” But the success of translating an idea into action is very often where the talent is to be found. To have an idea is very often mistaken for having achieved something, but I think a studio like this is all about the space between the idea and the outcome. If you can give a body to the idea, not just an architectural body but a body with blood and air and space in it, then I think you are onto a very interesting process.

Where does the process begin for you? 

When having an idea, I very often ask, “Where did I get this idea from? From what emotional landscape or intuitive path did this idea take its origin?” Sometimes an idea comes out of a great experience, but it could also be from a trauma, something that you don’t necessarily want to deal with. But dealing with it might amplify the idea and indicate the direction that ideas should take in order to get shaped and take a body.

So you let the idea take whatever form it wants?

Exactly. And as with anything else, there are good ideas and there are bad ideas. And the bad ideas, they are often so narcissistic and so egoistic that they kind of rule themselves out or they kind of grow into teenage-hood and they’re abandoned. Whereas the better ideas, they seem to grow! Taking an idea into action is taking it through maybe a thousand steps.

A thousand?

Some of them are tiny, subconscious, instantly made steps – but they are still real decisions. They are decisions that are invisible to the McKinsey segment that runs our country. But what makes these steps creative is not the choice between two colors, two materials, the size of something, it is the consequences that the choice has on the world. Very often creativity is actually not in the studio, but it is in how the studio influences the world around it. Once a work of art is done, it is out in the world, on the street, in a museum, in a gallery somewhere. It could be a building, a situation, or a theater play. The potential of the studio lays in this creative exchange, in how we shape the world and how we are shaped by the world.

You have 90 people working in your studio here in Berlin. What do they all do?

There are three teams. One team is craftsmen, some trained craftsmen and some artists, about 25 people. Then there’s a team of researchers who are more academically trained; some in art history, some in literature and philosophy, some in theory of some sorts, some internet and programming people, some film editing, music, and sound people. And the last team is made up of architects. They develop the research further and follow it through implementation. They’re often on-site installing, hanging complex works, or handling the installation of large shows. We are building a few buildings that are, in a sense, very large sculptures and they are also handling that. So it is sort of a very wide talent team!

How do you delegate the work among so many people and still retain creative control?

There is a team of studio directors, one for each of those teams, and I tend to work with the studio directors. So I actually only work with a few people most of the time. My focus is on why we are doing things, the aesthetics, the theoretical background, and so on. I’m less involved with logistics, financing, or the relationships with commercial partners and galleries. On a good day I am only involved with the creative work. On a bad day, I have to sit and do logistics because there is a kind of tight knot that needs to be released. Of course, somehow this is not how the studio then really works. That’s just the kind of pragmatic sense of the studio.

So how does it really work?

The truth is it’s more like a very organic, trust-driven machine in which a lot of effort is being put into ambiguity, into risk-taking, into creative choices, into things that seem absolutely hopeless and not worthwhile. Within our teams there is a flourishing, crazy, maniacal life where a lot of really strange stuff is going on. And we ourselves sometimes forget to appreciate it. Things are out of hand, things are nuts, things go wrong, and we celebrate it still. Sometimes when I talk about the studio I need to leave a bit of space for the unpredictable success and for the nurturing of unpredictable success, which I think we focus on a lot.

Much of modern life seems based on minimizing ambiguity and uncertainty, not celebrating it.

Right. I met with Frank Barkow of Barkow Leibinger not so long ago. He is a lovely architect from Berlin and at first we were under the impression that our studios have a similar size and type and nature. But in an architectural office ambiguity is very expensive! At the end of the day it’s very much about having confidence in the muscle that art has. I think it’s an unbelievably interesting friction in society. And I have a lot of confidence in the role that the cultural sector, and in particular the art part of that, has on the world. It’s funny because if you look at natural science, for instance, there are not a lot of papers on ambiguity, uncertainty, doubt, risk… What we do here within traditional science is still on the periphery of the attention of scientists. And this is where I see there is a great potential in what we are doing.

The idea of community seems to play a big role in your studio. Your whole office has lunch together where in-house chefs provide high quality vegetarian dishes and there even is some sort of cleaning schedule that all employees take part in.

Yeah, the kitchen is like a gas station for a car. It’s very simple. If you don’t get fuel in the car, then the car doesn’t run. So having that in mind, we decided to put the best possible energy into our people. It’s also about the social constructs that a kitchen environment allows for: this sort of momentary deconstruction of the hierarchies that are inevitably evolving in a building with 90 people in it. So the kitchen serves a sort of socio-political function in the house.

With 90 employees, several different divisions in your studio, and a seemingly endless schedule of upcoming exhibitions, how many projects do you work on at the same time?

Well, I do three or four, maybe five projects at a time. But somehow I don’t split things into different projects. They are all interconnected because they all feed each other. So, the truth, the real answer is that I actually only work on one thing at a time. Even my project Little Sun, which many people see as a deviation from my attention to art, is about using the creativity that I have in a way that I think is more interesting than a lot of art environments allow for. It’s about resources, people, access to the quality of life you want to achieve. Addressing energy access in Africa and doing a piece in a museum are surprisingly connected, especially up in my head.

Little Sun is a project that provides solar-powered LED lamps for communities without electricity, all while creating local jobs and local profits. Do you consider Little Sun a work of art?

For me it’s an art project because my definition of art is much wider than what people normally see in museums or in galleries. Art is not the object but what the object does to the world. If it takes into account the ambiguity, the creativity, or the trust that Little Sun can generate, I think one can give it an artistic labeling.

What makes something art?

Art is something about everyday life. Art is about finding creativity in the normal gutter next to you. To see the potential in something where there is no potential in terms of how society sees it is often where art or creativity is a great tool. It’s about making the impossible possible without doing a major detour. Very often art is actually also a frame of reference in which people can identify with things that are otherwise excluded in our society. So this is why, when you ask me, “Is it art?” I say, “Yes, of course it’s art,” because my definition of art is about how to exercise hospitality beyond the narrow definition of normality that our society otherwise exercises.

Is that also why sensory experience and interaction play large roles in your work?

Yeah, that became very, let’s face it, fashionable when I was an art student… The focus on the viewer and the idea of the person experiencing a work of art being a co-producer of the work really fueled the idea of asking, “How do we create a proactive, involved, connected participant in civic society? How do we prevent people from feeling indifferent and disconnected?” You’re not consuming art – you’re producing art by experiencing it! Suddenly as a viewer you are not a passive receiver, but a proactive producer of art. I find this very interesting and it’s always been a very central force for me.

Why?

I think the physical senses are key to feeling included and engaged. If you are emotionally aroused, you are much more likely to react than if you’re intellectually stimulated. For instance, the climate debate is incredibly academic and science-driven and very hard to understand because it’s so abstract, so how do we understand it? Is it through intellect or is it through our somatic, muscular bodies? Is it through our senses?

Theater director Robert Wilson’s work functions in a similar way. His Einstein on the Beach is five hours long and he said the intention was so that “people could get lost in the situation where they were experiencing something. To experience something is a way of thinking.”

And art can offer things that go beyond what the private sector can handle themselves. For example, the unspoken justification for U.N. is being eradicated because the people who lived through the World War II are dying. I’m very interested in how on earth the U.N. is going to survive if people don’t have an emotional need to have it anymore. So who does the U.N. need to solve that riddle? Who trades in emotional needs? Emotional narrative? It’s the cultural segment. It’s music, it’s theater, it’s literature, it’s poetry. So this is why I’m so confident that being a culturally involved person, you are going to be involved with reality production from now on.