Building a picture: Pollack on Gehry
Updated on 03 July 2007
More4 News examines how a film maker tells the story of an architect.
It feels like the most uncommercial film of all time - a collaboration between Oscar-winning film-maker Sidney Pollack and the notoriously difficult architect Frank Gehry - designer of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.
And yet this weekend, Pollack's portrait of Gehry has had a cinema release.
It's a sign - some say - that, after the example of Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock and Al Gore, the documentary is gaining in popular acclaim.
Speaking to More 4 News though, Sidney Pollack says it's the same motivation regardless of whether it's factual or fiction.
He said: "My way of working is because the kinds of movies I do are really character driven movies. So, totally dependent on actors, I concentrate on the behaviour of actors - and it's the only reason I ended up in the film.
"Because I had no script, I discovered truths about Frank and Frank's work - and my own questions about what the nature of talent is and how if functions in different people".
The film looks at the struggle between art and money in a world of commercialism - invoking parallels in the relationship between independent, even documentary film and mainstream cinema.
Gehry said: "The world I was confronted with was a commercial world; they weren't interested in what I was doing, and I talked to you about this and you said you faced the same commercial world and made peace with it by finding a small percentage of space in that commercial world where you could make a difference and that was amazing to me."
