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Roger Ebert recently sat down with Errol Morris to talk about his new movie, Tabloid, and a bunch of other stuff. The interview is presented as a series of eight YouTube videos. In this one, he talks about how he got started writing his blog for The NY Times and how that helped him get over his 30-year struggle with writer’s block:
He’s working on a seventeen-part article about a murder case for the blog. Seventeen parts!
The New Yorker has a trio of interesting articles in their most recent issue for the discerning web/technology lady or gentlemen. First is a lengthy profile of Mark Zuckerberg, the quite private CEO of Facebook who doesn’t believe in privacy.
Zuckerberg may seem like an over-sharer in the age of over-sharing. But that’s kind of the point. Zuckerberg’s business model depends on our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display. The more that people are willing to put online, the more money his site can make from advertisers. Happily for him, and the prospects of his eventual fortune, his business interests align perfectly with his personal philosophy. In the bio section of his page, Zuckerberg writes simply, “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.”
The second is a profile of Tavi Gevinson (sub. required), who you may know as the youngster behind Style Rookie.
Tavi has an eye for frumpy, “Grey Gardens”-inspired clothes and for arch accessories, and her taste in designers runs toward the cerebral. From the beginning, her blog had an element of mystery: is it for real? And how did a thirteen-year-old suburban kid develop such a singular look? Her readership quickly grew to fifty thousand daily viewers and won the ear of major designers.
And C, John Seabrook has a profile of James Dyson (sub. required), he of the unusual vacuum cleaners, unusual hand dryers, and the unusual air-circulating fan.
In the fall of 2002, the British inventor James Dyson entered the U.S. market with an upright vacuum cleaner, the Dyson DC07. Dyson was the product’s designer, engineer, manufacturer, and pitchman. The price was three hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Not only did the Dyson cost much more than most machines sold at retail but it was made almost entirely out of plastic. In the most perverse design decision of all, Dyson let you see the dirt as you collected it, in a clear plastic bin in the machine’s midsection.
Remember the @BPGlobalPR Twitter account that sharply lampooned BP’s response to their oil disaster in the Gulf? Mat Honan has an interview with the person responsible. (And it’s not Mike Monteiro.)
The idea was mine, and all the long form writing, talks, and speeches were me. But a lot of tweets — a lot of my favorite tweets — weren’t mine. I edited and maybe tweaked some of them, but there’s no way I would have been able to come up with the quality or volume of jokes without a good team. We had about 15 people, and those writers deserve a lot of the credit. Some contributed every day. My dad did one, even. I sent him a message and told him about it, and I was like, “fuck, I’m not sure what he’ll think.” But he responded immediately with a joke.
Jeffrey Goldberg visited with Fidel Castro recently and has two posts on his Atlantic blog about his meetings with the former Cuban head of state: part one and part two.
After this first meeting, I asked Julia to explain the meaning of Castro’s invitation to me, and of his message to Ahmadinejad. “Fidel is at an early stage of reinventing himself as a senior statesman, not as head of state, on the domestic stage, but primarily on the international stage, which has always been a priority for him,” she said. “Matters of war, peace and international security are a central focus: Nuclear proliferation climate change, these are the major issues for him, and he’s really just getting started, using any potential media platform to communicate his views. He has time on his hands now that he didn’t expect to have. And he’s revisiting history, and revisiting his own history.”
This is substantial reporting but I’ll admit my favorite line was:
I’ve never seen someone enjoy a dolphin show as much as Fidel Castro enjoyed the dolphin show.
Because of Goldberg’s reportage on Castro’s remarks regarding anti-Semitism, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (and strong critic of Israel) announced yesterday that he would meet with Venezuela’s Jewish leaders. Someone get Errol Morris down to Cuba to make a sequel to his film about Robert McNamara. The Fog of Cold War perhaps? (via @kbanderson)
From 1980, Roger Ebert interviews Jodie Foster, who is on the cusp of entering college. Here’s an anecdote about Taxi Driver at Cannes:
The movie had been controversial. The president of the festival jury, Tennessee Williams, already had vowed that it would win a prize only over his dead body (it won the Grand Prix; Williams lived). The key people at the press conference were Martin Scorsese, the film’s director, and Paul Schrader, who wrote it. The French critics were lobbing complex philosophical questions at them in French, and then the English-language translators were wading in, and everyone was getting nicely confused.
Someone finally condescended to ask a question of the little girl down at the end of the table - the one, you might assume, who’d been brought along to France as a treat, along with all the ice cream she could eat. The translator grabbed for the microphone, but Jodie Foster waved him off and answered the question herself, in perfect French. There was an astonished round of applause: At last, an American who spoke French! And less than 5 feet tall!
Professionally. From the tail-end of a recent interview with the sprinter:
Ultimately, he says, he’d love to make a go of playing football professionally. He’s being deadly serious. One of the perks of being Usain Bolt is that sporting stars love to meet him, so whenever he’s travelling and there’s time, he tries to train with a top football team. Last year it was Manchester United, a few days ago it was Bayern Munich. He’s still carrying a copy of the French sporting newspaper L’Equipe, which features a spread on his football skills and praise from Bayern manager Louis van Gaal. He shows me a photo of himself with his arm wrapped round the dwarfed 6ft German forward Miroslav Klose. “If I keep myself in shape, I can definitely play football at a high level,” he says.
“With his physical skills, I reckon he could play in the Premier League,” Simms says.
Professional American football would be even more of a no brainer…Randy Moss with Darrell Green speed++.
The Art of the Title Sequence interviews Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess about how the film’s instant-classic title sequence came about.
We actually had Jon Heder placing all the objects in and out [of frame], and then showed it to Searchlight who really liked it and thought it was great, but some lady over there was like “There are some hangnails, or something — the hands look kinda gross! It’s really bothering me, can we re-shoot some of those? We’ll send you guys a hand model.” We were like “WHAT?!” This of course was my first interaction with a studio at all, so they flew out a hand model a couple weeks later, who had great hands, but was five or six shades darker than Jon Heder. So we reshot, but they’re now intermixed, so if you look there are like three different dudes hands (our producer’s are in there too.) It all worked our great though and was a lot of fun.
The interview also addresses Pablo Ferro’s involvement and the Napoleon Dynamite animated series currently in development.
The New Yorker has published an interview with Francois Truffaut conducted before his death in 1984.
Cardullo centers the conversation around Truffaut’s first feature film, “The 400 Blows,” the overwhelming success of which, in 1959, was a key moment in the launching of the French New Wave. As such, he gets Truffaut to talk about what went into the beginning of his career and how his filmmaking process was influenced by his years of work as a film critic and his lifelong obsession with watching movies.
Kevin Kelly has a short Wired interview with Fred Brooks, author of the essential Mythical Man-Month and the new The Design of Design.
This has been linked around quite a bit in the last week, but it’s worth a look if you haven’t read it and like Bill Murray at all. According to the article, this is only the fourth or fifth time that Murray has been interviewed in the past ten years. On his involvement with Garfield: The Movie:
No! I didn’t make that for the dough! Well, not completely. I thought it would be kind of fun, because doing a voice is challenging, and I’d never done that. Plus, I looked at the script, and it said, “So-and-so and Joel Coen.” And I thought: Christ, well, I love those Coens! They’re funny. So I sorta read a few pages of it and thought, Yeah, I’d like to do that.
[…] So I worked all day and kept going, “That’s the line? Well, I can’t say that.” And you sit there and go, What can I say that will make this funny? And make it make sense? And I worked. I was exhausted, soaked with sweat, and the lines got worse and worse. And I said, “Okay, you better show me the whole rest of the movie, so we can see what we’re dealing with.” So I sat down and watched the whole thing, and I kept saying, “Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the fuck was Coen thinking?” And then they explained it to me: It wasn’t written by that Joel Coen.
And I love that he loved Kung Fu Hustle so much…I agree that it is underrated.
In this filmed interview, the Sherlock Holmes author discusses how and why he came up with the famous detective.
He refers to Watson as Holmes’ “rather stupid friend”. (via mr)
The legendary Braun designer talks about his craft.
A design should not dominate people.
And hey, I didn’t know that a book had been published on Rams’ work. I bet Jony Ive has at least three copies. (via monoscope)
As a casual Penn & Teller fan, I didn’t know that the pair rarely socialize outside of work…and that they might not even like each other (although the respect is obviously there). That and more from this interesting interview.
“But then you come out here and it turns out, as insane as this is, that you have more artistic freedom in Las Vegas than you have in New York. Much more. And the reason is this…” He leans forward conspiratorially and says, in a stage whisper. “In Vegas, our investors don’t give a f—- about us. The people who are our bosses see our show maybe once a year. One of them will bring their kids and come by. And they are pleasant and they love us and they sincerely enjoy the show. Then they leave and they don’t think about us. And because nobody’s paying attention we do exactly the show we want. As long as people come to see it nobody cares what we do. And it means that we have done wilder things and more new stuff here than we ever did in New York. The contract is 100 per cent between us and the audience. And that’s crazy.”
“The contract is 100 per cent between us and the audience”…I love that.
NY Times readers recently had a bunch of their questions answered by a NYC window washer. (This is more interesting than it sounds.)
For safety reasons, music and cellphones are not allowed up in the scaffolding, but some of us listen to our own music in our heads.
Here’s part two. (via @nicolatwilley)
Possible clues have emerged that Eadweard Muybridge may not have taken all the photographs attributed to him.
Naef explains why he thinks that stereographs attributed to Muybridge were in fact taken by Watkins, who sold the negatives to Muybridge. Muybridge then printed and sold them under his own name. “I think from what I’ve seen and knowing what I know about Muybridge - and I’m not an expert on Watkins by any mean and Weston is - I think yes Muybridge published pictures by other people,” Brookman said. “Some by Watkins potentially, but I think Muybridge was also a photographer and a significant photographer.”
Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes has a three-part interview with photography curator Weston Naef about why he thinks this is so. Part one is here. (No word yet on why Muybridge has so many unnecessary letters in his name.)
Robert Birnbaum interviews David Remnick.
But I remember, one week after getting [the New Yorker editor job], in the almost absurd way I got it, I had to go to San Francisco, and I was at dinner and some guy came up to me. He had been in the Midwest and lived in San Francisco and he came up to the table where we were having dinner and grabbed my arm in a way that was slightly alarming and his message to me was, “Don’t fuck this up!”
The whole thing is great.
Madonna uses a surprising number of cliches and figures of speech in this interview (conducted by Gus Van Sant).
his Girl Friday
talks the talk
walks the walk
lots of ways to skin the cat
he’s got a fire under his ass
a bee in his bonnet
a trip down memory lane
turn my lemons into lemonade
clotheshorses
so far, so good
reinvent the wheel
The interview itself may not be worth looking at unless you’re already a Madonna, GVS, or cliche fan.
Over at New York magazine, the Vulture Reading Room is reading/reviewing David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, an almost straight-up transcript of a 5-day Rolling Stone interview with David Foster Wallace in 1996. Participating are D.T. Max (author of a forthcoming DFW biography), Sam Anderson (New York mag book critic), Laura Miller (Salon book critic), Garth Risk Hallberg (from The Millions), and me (blogger, dad, slacker).
David Foster Wallace’s interviews were always show-stoppers: erudite, casual, funny, passionate, and deeply self-aware — like he wasn’t just answering the questions at hand but also interviewing himself, and his interviewer, and the entire genre of interviews. Last month, David Lipsky published essentially the Platonic ideal of the form: the book-length Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself — a sort of DFW version of a DFW interview.
Scott Berkun transcribed some of the more interesting points of a video interview with Ed Catmull done during an Economist conference last month.
[At Pixar] there is very high tolerance for eccentricity, very creative, and to the point where some are strange… but there are a small number of people who are socially dysfunctional [and] very creative — we get rid of them. If we don’t have a healthy group then it isn’t going to work. There is this illusion that this person is creative and has all this stuff, well the fact is there are literally thousands of ideas involved in putting something like this together. And the notion of ideas as this singular thing is a fundamental flaw. There are so many ideas that what you need is that group behaving creatively. And the person with the vision I think is unique, there are very few people who have that vision.. but if they are not drawing the best out of people then they will fail.
The video is embedded in Berkun’s post as well. (via sippey)
Great interview with Five Guys Burgers and Fries founder Jerry Murrell. Their entire focus is on the product.
The magic to our hamburgers is quality control. We toast our buns on a grill — a bun toaster is faster, cheaper, and toasts more evenly, but it doesn’t give you that caramelized taste. Our beef is 80 percent lean, never frozen, and our plants are so clean, you could eat off the floor. The burgers are made to order — you can choose from 17 toppings. That’s why we can’t do drive-throughs — it takes too long. We had a sign: “If you’re in a hurry, there are a lot of really good hamburger places within a short distance from here.” People thought I was nuts. But the customers appreciated it.
Good name too. My son frequently asks if we’re “going to go visit the five guys” to get “hangleburgers and peanuts”.
I try not to do too many interviews these days (they tend to get in the way of actually getting stuff done), but I was pleased to be interviewed for an episode of Dan Benjamin’s Pipeline podcast.
They discuss blogging for a living, general vs. niche blogs, content longevity, making the transition to full-time blogging, how taking a break (even for a week) can affect traffic, finding links, guest bloggers, the good and bad of comments, and more.
(Christ, is that my voice? I *was* just getting over a cold…)
You never expect too much from the first few questions of an interview, but this interview of chess world #1 Magnus Carlsen is good right out of the gate.
SPIEGEL: Mr Carlsen, what is your IQ?
Carlsen: I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise.
SPIEGEL: Why? You are 19 years old and ranked the number one chess player in the world. You must be incredibly clever.
Carlsen: And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too clever for that.
SPIEGEL: How that?
Carlsen: At the age of 15, Nunn started studying mathematics in Oxford; he was the youngest student in the last 500 years, and at 23 he did a PhD in algebraic topology. He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess.
SPIEGEL: Things are different in your case?
Carlsen: Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.
His comparison of his abilities with Garry Kasparov’s later in the interview is interesting as well.
The interview is a little rough in spots but people — like Lagerfeld — who have strong opinions but don’t try to push them on others are always interesting to listen to, even if you disagree.
The whole culture of cell phones, texting, and instant messaging is very impersonal and also very distracting.
I’m not working at a switchboard. I have to concentrate on what I’m doing. The few people I have in my telephone are already too much. When I’m on the phone I talk, but I really want to be alone to sketch, to work, and to read. I am reading like a madman because I want to know everything.I think that you might have Asperger syndrome. Do you know what that is? It’s a kind of autism. It’s like an idiot savant.
That’s exactly what I am. As a child I wanted to be a grown-up. I wanted to know everything-not that I like to talk about it. I hate intellectual conversation with intellectuals because I only care about my opinion, but I like to read very abstract constructions of the mind. It’s very strange.That’s quite Asperger’s. There’s a boy who’s 20 years old; you can see him on YouTube. He’d never seen Paris from the air before and they flew him over Paris in a helicopter. Then they took him to a studio and he drew the entire city. Building by building, street by street.
I can do that with the antique Greek world.
(via siege)
Paul Ford is moving along from Harper’s to work on some other stuff. This part of his reasoning, especially the part in italics (mine), resonates with me on all of my frequencies:
I had an opportunity to be an editor at Harper’s, to edit pieces for the magazine. It was something I expected to really want. I had wonderful editors to learn from. I did a little of it for print and a lot for the web. I wasn’t bad at it, even. Not great, but not bad. I could have been a respected editor instead of a huge nerd. But all the editing in the world can’t compare to building little websites and mangling text and writing things and messing around in spreadsheets and figuring out what’s wrong with comments. I wake up thinking about how all the pieces fit together and I want to do more of it and with lots of people.
The Guardian recently interviewed Dave Eggers and found that the Staggering Genius is no more.
Time to break the ice. You hate doing interviews, don’t you? I ask, sitting down (there is no desk; he works on an old sofa). “No, not at all,” he says. There is a look of mild amazement on his face as he tells me this and it’s not disingenuous; as he will explain later, he feels a certain sense of distance from his old self. Perhaps he prefers not to remember exactly how he used to be.
A 1970 interview with photographer Garry Winogrand on how he’s not trying to say anything with his work. Instead, he sets up photographic challenges for himself, which he then attempts to solve.
My only interest in photographing is photography.
In an interview with DJ magazine, Carl Cox talks about how his DJ setup has changed through the years.
What I am worried about and don’t want to fall into, is dependence on too many screens to play a set. It’s bad enough having one computer screen. After all, it’s all about the performance and the people. I want to be looking at the crowd and them looking at me, interacting with one another. If we start getting dependant on screens it is going to ruin the art of performance.
(via @jessicadeva)
You know it, you love it, the Feltron Annual Report for 2009. This year, he asked people who knew him to report data.
Update: Here’s a nice interview with Felton about the report.
All sorts of goodies come up during the interview, including master passwords, keeping data after it has been deleted, and the the ubersmart Facebook engineers that you can’t talk to “on a normal level”.
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