The Talks
Autumn Durald Arkapaw: “It’s an out of body experience”
Ms. Arkapaw, as a cinematographer, how did you develop your taste in the visual?
It started probably with my grandparents on my mother's side. They traveled a lot, and they took a lot of photographs, my grandmother had tons of photo books that I remember we would always look through. I had a relationship with photographs when I was growing up, it was a way that I could connect with family members or see the world, see where they traveled. Then I started doing my own photography in high school, I wanted to do my undergrad in art history so that I could become a curator or get an internship at Sotheby's. That was the path that I was on. But then I went to LMU and took a film genre course and I started to understand films. We watched Broadway Danny Rose, Raging Bull, stuff like that… So the visual medium has always been on my mind.
What other films sparked inspiration for you visually? I read that in college you and your roommate would re-watch Trainspotting and Heat — two pretty different ends of the visual spectrum.
Yes, we would literally watch Trainspotting or Heat every day because there's just so much energy and excitement in those films. They made us feel, they kind of woke you up. To watch something multiple times, I mean, obviously you enjoy it, but also every time you find something new. It's a very visceral experience.
“You don’t think of your roles 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.”
“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 and started working very hard on that. And that’s how it started.”
“If I should be fortunate enough to make another film, it would be exactly what I have settled upon as what is right for me. I feel that these days, I understand a little more what the cinema is.”
“I’ve been very fortunate, and I don’t know why, but my shoes don’t have a special time period. I don’t design them with that in mind but it happens: timelessness. I have been absolutely gifted by that.”- “I’m 80 years old now, and little by little over your lifetime you begin to understand things that you didn’t understand earlier.”
“I discovered early on that I’m the kind of person that experiments and makes mistakes but then it’s all worth it because once in a blue moon it hits home.”
“I think it’s just been a long slow burn. I’ve worked fairly consistently, and I’m really grateful — even for the years of not getting so many acting jobs because that means I really appreciate being able to do what I love now.”
“I thought for a long time as the business grew, “Is this something I want to do for the rest of my life?” And I knew it was not. When I left Calvin Klein, I had done almost everything I wanted to do in terms of creation of products. And re-doing was less fun.”
“The game of basketball means everything. This is love. Definitely love. I had to practice and I had to make sacrifices, but basketball has given me so much.”
“I think it’s really important to not be afraid of failure and to push yourself to try things and jump in the cold water.”
“You can’t measure something like who is the best chef in the world. Whether I’m the best or not, no one can really say. However, my restaurant elBulli was certainly the most influential restaurant in the world.”
“For the first 20 years in my career all I did was add things; more courses, more silverware, more ingredients, adding, adding, adding. Only like three years ago or so I was able to really start focusing on removing and felt confident to do so. I finally created a dish where for the first time I felt like I achieved what I tried to do for 23 years.”
“There's going to be a moment where your work challenges you, where you’re at your limit… But if that deep love is really there, you're not going to abandon it. You are going to give your all to it!”
“The guys who are real artists are people who have figured out the art of living; their art is art because they live. They have made living an art, they have made an art of living. They are constantly inputting life as opposed to expressing life.”
“When you keep yourself open, you just might get to know yourself and know the good things about yourself. And that's why I always come back to songwriting. It's the way I kind of try and make sense of my life.”
“Making a movie comes with a great deal of joy, an incredible amount of hard work and equal amounts of stress, pressure, fun, and anxiety. But ultimately it’s extremely rewarding! I have the best job in the world.”
“It’s the rollercoaster ride of doing something creative: when it goes well and you enjoy the process then it’s a high and you just want to keep on doing it.”
“I think all the roles of my career have presented me with opportunities for my own personal growth. Roles that really push you out of your comfort zone, it really helps you to grow, and it then brings you greater capacity for love within yourself and love for others.”
“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.”
“In the moment when you’re designing a building, it’s the subject. One year later, when you just go back and see it, it’s the object. It becomes part of the city. It starts to sit where it should be sitting.”
“Although sometimes I feel tired and think I ought to give it up, I don’t want to just retire. No, I enjoy it all and you just keep going until the day comes when you can’t do it anymore.”
“I’ve learned that with time also comes pleasure: the pleasure of creating but also upholding the legacy that’s been passed down to me.”
“If I pass away one day, I am happy because I tried to do my best. My sport allowed me to do so much.”
“I think the mark of a great song, photo or a painting is something you can remember. It’s kind of that simple. If you work at it, there will be times when the intangible becomes tangible and for a moment… You are a wizard.”
“I am not that interested at the moment to work for the sake of others, I’m not interested in doing commissions. I'm way more interested in creating art for art's sake and in order to do that I have to believe in myself.”
“I think it comes from my desire as a kid to do something artistic that would amaze people, you know? I wanted to do nothing less than that. Those are the projects that I love: figuring out what might just be possible but hasn't been done yet.”- “I try to look at things more from the perspective that everything is happening for us, not to us. And so whatever challenges that were occurring at the time, perhaps they were happening just so this moment could happen.”
“During my career I was blessed to be able to constantly be motivated and constantly be pushing myself, because otherwise I never would have achieved what I did.”
“Happiness for me is just being; just being at any given moment. If you are searching for happiness, you are not happy. It’s the pot at the end of the rainbow.”
“I feel quite free as an artist. I don't feel that I have to prove anything. It’s a liberating feeling. I can go in any directions, I can explore and embrace whatever I want.”
“I hope the scale of my works is way bigger than what you see. I hope they live in you.”
“I always want to take a human portrait. My goal in life is always to enter into everything with great care and with great humanity.”
“I want to be an authentic person. I start to feel that it’s a mission. I am not going to hold back on an opinion I have about something; I don’t know what the point of that would be.”
“When you are in a very, very tough moment of a day and have 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.”
“I’m doing something that I love, and I consider that to be success. But if you think it’s gonna come fast or easy, then you probably are in for some rough times. You need to always be ready to throw things out and do it over again, and know that you love the process enough to be doing it repeatedly. Always be in love with the process and in love with your talent. And know that you’re going to keep doing it because it’s what you love doing.”
“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.”
“I would like to think that someday I will be content enough with myself and feel good enough about myself to think I don’t need to do all that sort of shit and I’ll just go and watch tomatoes grow or something.”
“We’re going after it. We’re going after what we believe and what we deserve and we’re not taking the back seat anymore. I see an improvement in the way that we as women are standing together and paving the way for the next generations. It’s time for that.”
“I just try to live my life and just be who I am. If people really accept me they have to accept me as I am, you know what I mean? My highs and my lows and my vulnerabilities… It's who I am as a human being.”
“I feel like the best art comes from a sense of necessity and urgency, like I can't help but talk about this.”
Joachim Trier: “I’m going for it”
Mr. Trier, as a filmmaker, do you ever get nervous on set?
Well, I sometimes feel this anxiety of performance. A lot of the time, I feel that I'm failing. I'm strange in that way. But I think when we create something, a combination of confidence and talent is necessary to create something of value; you’ve got to question it and then find it. Question it and find it.
Do you always have to question it? There’s always that little bit of self-doubt?
That's the mixture! I don't mean to sound stupid about this, but it is natural to feel that — I say this often because I think of young directors who might be listening or reading: it's natural to feel that you're fucking it up along the way. It happens every time, every time I see the first cut of the film that we put together, I’m devastated! Every time I call my wife or my friends or my mother or whoever and I say, “I fucked it up this time,” and then at the end of it, I feel okay. I resolved what I can do with this. But that's the way it is. So I'm never fully getting used to it.
Jessie Buckley: “There’s nothing I let go of”
Paul Thomas Anderson: “We continue to move forward”
Adolpho Veloso: “It puts you in a different state”
Flying Lotus: “Music is a spiritual experience”
Fiona Crombie: “Every choice has meaning”
Lachlan Bailey: “Just focus on that moment”
Kate Hawley: “It’s the push and pull”
Sandra Barclay: “Light is essential to life”
