The Talks
Yannick Alléno: “Keep searching for more”
Mr. Alléno, apparently one of the formative moments for you as a young chef was a trip to Japan in 1988. What was so special about that trip?
Absolutely, I used to work at Le Royal Monceau in Paris and the chef there asked me to come with him to Japan for the summer. We stayed for three weeks in Sapporo in the north of Japan. It took us 24 hours to get there! And at the time, it was not so easy to eat Japanese food in Paris, in those days it was expensive, and I was young, so the accessibility of that cuisine was pretty much impossible. When I visited Japan, I found a new world… I was seeing some things I’d never seen in my life: culture, people, food. I tried real sushi for the first time, I ate soba, I ate soft crab and fugu, I was learning about the natural gift of seafood. My passion for food really started from those experiences.
What was unique about the Japanese approach to cooking that was so inspiring to you?
One of the most important things I learned was the way that they treat the animals and live products… It is a sacrifice. When you kill a fish, it’s a natural gift to you, a sacrifice made to feed you. Nature suffers for us, it’s a contradiction between our pleasure and our responsibilities. So there is a great concern for quality, for treating ingredients with respect. Everything is a gift in Japan, even if you buy an apple or a strawberry, everything is treated as something beautiful. And this was an inspiration for me. Since then, I’m trying to work more with what we get from nature, to have a conversation with ingredients, to find the beauty in all produce and products.
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“If I want to make a movie and I can at 62, I will. But I want to leave the ring triumphant. I want this guy, this guy you see right now, I want him to be the guy who makes the movies, not the autumn dude.”
“Filmmaking is never anything less than a beautiful gift. I've been doing this forever, and as hard as it may be, it's never let me down. I have such a will to make these movies!”
“To fight this game alone is actually every day a struggle. Sometimes you are not in the best shape. The biggest thing is that you must find in it a personal happiness.”
“You better make every moment count. Live your life now; start in the morning. You mustn’t sit around waiting to die.”
“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.”
“I think we've all lived through the pandemic and it has awakened in all of us a concept of time, and how fleeting our time is and can be... I want to apply my energy doing good and creating and hopefully not squandering that. That's what I live for.”
“Once I commit to an idea, then I just move forward with it, no matter what. And that's always how I've operated when it comes to my art. I'm kind of tenacious in that way, even if it takes a lifetime, eventually I will make that thing.”
“As a photographer, as long as I remain truthful with myself in the transaction, as long as I maintain a level of empathy for my humanity in that process, then what is being translated back is honest and the transaction is not objectified.”
“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.”
“I dreamed of winning the Olympics since I was nine years old. That was definitely the most memorable race of my career. But the next day I woke up, and I wanted to win the next race.”
“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.”
“The bottom line in the end is to grab the heart of the audience and talk to them directly and tell them: "I share with you my soul and my heart."”
“If it sounds right, then I’m happy, no matter how I got there. I just want to make beautiful music.”- “I knew what felt instinctively right for me, and I pursued that throughout my entire career. It’s the way I live; it’s the way I work. Everything that I’ve done and everything that I have is an extension of my personal taste.”
“I consider myself a storyteller. I feel that is what good directors do, they are really just following criteria: is this a good story? Is this the story I want to tell? All we’re trying to do is the hard task of making interesting, thought-provoking films.”
“I think the final circle in being an artist is connecting, making some conversation to the world you’re in. I think if you have that feeling of why you need to do something, you’ll find a way. And I think that really takes you forward!”
“People have said that before, “Oh, I'll read a recipe and know it's yours before I see your name on it.” That's the best compliment because I feel like working with food is such an extension of my personality.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“For me, success is having integrity and really staying true to my own voice. When I was younger, maybe it was more about the big spaces and getting awards. But now I’m prioritizing more this idea of having a beautiful process.”
“I’m surviving. I do everything I can to speak out and make sure that I keep my humanity.”
“I have a responsibility that lasts a lifetime with my children. They know that I love my work, and they know how I go about it. And I hope that they find work that they love, because nothing can compare to watching your child succeed.”
“I am Valentino. I live in my own world. I love to create clothes, I love beautiful things. If they want to call me an icon, okay, then I am an icon.”
“I can’t make people happy if I’m not happy myself. That applies to anyone who tries to achieve something in their life: if you’re not happy, you can’t transfer any happiness”
“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 think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. I just always felt whole when I was writing. I felt this kind of beautiful privacy that I never felt in any other way.”
“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.”
“You can catch ideas at a deeper level when you start meditating. Intuition grows, and intuition is the number one tool for an artist – feeling and thinking combined. The ideas are flowing, and the feeling that you can get it to feel correct. You know what that is. It’s a knowingness that grows. It’s really beautiful.”
“Every time you hear a piece of music that you’ve written, you remember the joy of it. Even if you don’t remember exactly what the writing process was like, there’s a moment where you hear it and your heart is full. It’s a similar emotion like when you are in love with someone, you feel that internal joy.”
“There is something in leaving this place better than where you have left it, working on yourself, doing things with other people, there is something in that that feels right, deep in your core. I go with that.”
“If I pass away one day, I am happy because I tried to do my best. My sport allowed me to do so much.”
“The success of translating an idea into action is very often where the talent is to be found. If you can give a body to the idea, I think you are onto a very interesting process.”
Jack Antonoff: “It’s a lived life together”
Jack, several years ago you were asked what the key is to success as a musician, and you answered that it involves finding the thing that brings you discomfort and sitting in it. What kind of discomfort is informing your work these days?
Well, to me, the core discomfort in my writing has always been reckoning with grief. What's so fascinating about grief is how it changes, and it changes through the lens of life that you're in. It changes. It goes on. Eventually you start reaching a point where the grief is not even with you every day, and it's almost more sad. That’s always been the driving force for me as a musician because when I really was growing as a writer, when I was young, that's when my sister got sick, and a few years later she died. That time period of my teenage years, that chunk which is obviously formative, that was the story… And a part of you freezes. The part of me that froze, I'm just trying so hard to drag into the present, it’s almost like there's like two of me, and I'm trying to join it as one person. So I would say that's the great discomfort.
And of course that kind of discomfort impacts every part of your life, not just your songwriting.
Right, how does that affect my relationships? How does that secondary me, that ghostliness affect my marriage, my family relationship, my friendships, my band, all of it. And so even a song like “dirty wedding dress,” from the new Bleachers album everyone for 10 minutes, which I think is pretty fun, even that is an expression of that discomfort because I’m saying that I don't want to be casually seen; it’s about the past and the future, and trying to push forward as hard as I can.
Jeremy Chan: “It feels very free”
Joanna Van Son: “Painting became my anchor”
Thomas Houseago: “There’s a form of survival in that”
Inez & Vinoodh: “What is reality?”
Autumn Durald Arkapaw: “It’s an out of body experience”
Joachim Trier: “I’m going for it”
Jessie Buckley: “There’s nothing I let go of”
Paul Thomas Anderson: “We continue to move forward”
