Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews Read online

  Over a lunch of sweet-glazed lamb chops and baked potatoes, prepared by his housekeeper, we are sharing a moan about how the petty restrictions on personal indulgence and busybody attitudes that nudged him out of his native England in 1978 have come to dog him in what-the-hell California.

  ‘We had some buttons made that said “End Bossiness Soon”,’ he says. ‘I wanted “End Bossiness Now”, but I knew that was asking a bit too much.’ He gives off a roar.

  ‘But I’m only talking about out there,’ he says, describing an overhead circle with his hand. Then, with a smaller rotation to encompass Hockney’s universe: ‘This is the real world and I paint it.’

  He says he does not really care about what goes on outside. But that does not mean he is detached. Indeed, he ponders a good deal on what he calls ‘the bigger things happening’. To Hockney, who relates only to things visual, these include the loss of ‘veracity’ in photography, exemplified on his studio wall by clippings of the staged Second World War planting of the US flag on Iwo Jima, and a more recent example from the Los Angeles Times, depicting an extraordinary illustrated apology for the publication of a digitally doctored photograph from the war in Iraq.

  ‘Look at a photograph and you believe you are seeing something that once existed in time and space. That’s not now necessarily the case. You don’t need to believe a picture any more: it could be made up.

  ‘I haven’t figured out what that will do to us, but it will be something quite profound,’ he says.

  He recalls a 1989 visit to ‘smoke-free’ Silicon Valley to preview Adobe PhotoShop software that facilitates the manipulation of digital pictures. On the way back, he remembers noting what he had seen meant the end for chemical photography and the darkroom artist.

  One effect, he says, now that digital technology has taken the art out of it, and put the mouse/brush in the hand of any snapper with a laptop and a few bucks’ worth of software, could be that photography in all its forms may lose the position of cultural dominance it enjoyed in the 20th century.

  He already knows how it has affected his world: those clippings mark the end of his involvement with the camera. The fate of his relationship with the medium was sealed, he says, during research for his last book, Secret Knowledge – an investigation of the old masters’ use of camera obscura and camera lucida in which the artist’s hand and eye are in essence integrated into an optical device, providing the focus and the means for preserving an image. His experiments with the format ended with a series of camera lucida drawings that spanned 1999 to 2001.

  Last year, in his longest stay in London since he moved to California, he discarded mirrors, prisms and lenses and drew 25 portraits from life in the most productive sustained bout of painting in his career.

  Those scraps of newspaper mark a decisive point in the life of an artist who experimented with photography to substantial acclaim for 20 years. The collage Pearblossom Highway, 1986 is one of his best-known pieces.

  But it’s not good enough for him now. ‘I think the world is beautiful but we don’t know totally what it looks like or how to make pictures of it,’ Hockney says. ‘Photographs aren’t good enough. Frankly, they’re not real enough.’

  Pounding away at his thesis, he mocks a recent software advertisement that claimed it could make an artist of anyone.

  ‘I had a good laugh at that. You can be an artist with a Bic pen!’

  He is glad the copywriter recognized the importance of the human hand in art, even if it is holding a mouse.

  ‘But as the Chinese would say, you need three things: the eye, the hand and the heart. Two won’t do. Very wise, the Chinese.’

  Which brings us back to another round of Camels and the first work he showed me in his studio an hour or so before: a small, smudgy reproduction of a 350-year-old Rembrandt drawing. Made in brown ink with a reed pen or possibly a sharpened stick, it shows a family group teaching a child to walk, sketched unaware, embraced by an aura of tenderness and attentiveness unmarred by the coarseness of the medium.

  All Hockney said was: ‘You can’t do that with a photograph.’

  Ignoring his sliver of angel cake, now lightly dusted with ash, he returns to his Rembrandt, devilled out of some dusty corner in the British Museum, and proclaims it a virtuoso piece. ‘It doesn’t shout “art” immediately. It shouts “humanity” first,’ he says.

  We have rambled through fame, fortune, a dismissive exchange on charges that he is a mere illustrator or ‘the Cole Porter of figurative painting’ and we are unintentionally back with the ‘bigger things’.

  Painting is in the dumps. Why? ‘Because they stopped teaching it,’ he says straight off.

  At 16, Hockney went to art school in Bradford, Yorkshire, and spent four years learning drawing and being taught how to look and see before going to the Royal College of Art. ‘The destruction started in the early 1960s. I witnessed it at the Royal College. I used to argue and they said, “Oh, it’s David again – the old back-to-the-life-room story.” I said, “No, no, forward to the life room.” ’

  The requirement that secondary-school students must obtain A-levels to be admitted to art colleges continued the insurrection. But nothing is forever. Now, he says, there are young people – perhaps even prompted by the potential of the computer – who realize the value of being taught rather than hoping for the best from trial and error.

  Hockney continues to learn. His new portraits are executed in watercolour, a difficult medium he had not used previously.

  ‘I spent last year training my eyes not to see like a camera and, believe me, you’ve got to do a lot of work to achieve that,’ he says.

  In his studio, a dozen or more portraits hang in various stages of completion. There is a light littering of cigarette butts on the floor and an abandoned, unplugged jogging machine. ‘I swim these days,’ he says.

  Back at the table, I ask him what is left. ‘Oh, I’m painting now and it will grow. The more you understand what photography was, the more you begin to see that painting is necessary. I’ve got plenty to do but I’ve got to be left alone to do it quietly and I will. And I will show you what painting can do.’

  He has already learnt that Secret Knowledge, recently published in Hungarian, its 12th language version, has given art historians and students new avenues to explore. More importantly, it has opened a way forward for the autodidact Hockney.

  ‘I’m just beginning,’ he says. ‘[The book] led me back to the hand and back to the hand with a loaded brush.’ Just how loaded will be revealed at an exhibition of portraits and garden paintings planned for the Whitney Museum in New York in March 2004 and, to judge by the set of Hockney’s jaw, in years to come.

  ‘You can’t go on saying art is this, that and the other and ignore the deep desire to see images of ourselves,’ he says. ‘If drawing is 30,000 years old, do you think that just because some theoretician comes along in 1960 and says there’s no need for it, that we’ll forget it? It’s only a temporary disturbance. But then temporary things are disruptive,’ he says.

  ‘I’ll avoid New York for the next five years. There’s no bohemia there now, because bohemia is by definition tolerant of human frailty. It’ll come back. All we need is a bit of tension and we’ll all be smoking again.’

  CHEZ DAVID HOCKNEY

  * * *

  2 x grilled glazed lamb chops

  2 x baked potatoes with butter, green onions and bacon

  2 x mixed salad

  2 x angel cake

  1 x Clausthaler near-beer

  1 x San Pellegrino

  1 x coffee

  1 x tea

  29 JULY 2011

  Angelina Jolie

  ‘Acting is like being in therapy’

  As she finishes her debut film as a director, the Hollywood star takes time out to explain why she doesn’t love acting as much as she used to and why she dreams of crossing the Sahara by camel

  By Matthew Garrahan

  Watching Angelina Jolie stride thr
ough a restaurant is to be given a lesson in how to avoid attracting attention in public. She looks ahead impassively, her back is straight and she walks at speed so that she will have moved on before any diners, who think they might just have spotted the world’s biggest female movie star, have time to do a double take.

  Unlike the other diners in The Grill on the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood, I know she is coming, so although I am seated at the back of the restaurant I notice her as soon as she enters. She is dressed entirely in black – black shirt, black trousers, black shoes – her long brown hair falling over her shoulders, a Louis Vuitton bag clutched at her side. Suddenly she is standing next to me and I am scrambling awkwardly out of my seat to introduce myself. ‘Hi,’ she says, putting out her hand for me to shake, her face lighting up into a broad smile that almost knocks me off my feet. ‘I’m Angie.’

  We squeeze into a booth facing each other and a waiter asks if she’d like something to drink. I arrived 10 minutes earlier and am already halfway through an Arnold Palmer – iced tea mixed with lemonade – a staple of California lunches. She orders a mint tea, flashing another smile.

  She explains that she chose the location because she is using an office at the studio to put the finishing touches to her directorial debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey, a love story she also wrote, which is set in the Bosnian war. It’s a low-budget affair with a little-known cast and today is her final day of post-production. ‘This is the crazy day,’ she says, looking at the menu. ‘We’re down to the wire. Today at four o’clock we make the call and it’s all over. We’re locked and there’s no changing it.’

  Lunch has taken a while to pin down. In addition to making films, Jolie, 36, has six children and a raft of humanitarian commitments with the United Nations as an ambassador with its High Commission for Refugees. Over the years her UN role has involved visits to camps in countries such as Sierra Leone, Pakistan and Ecuador.

  She doesn’t have an agent or publicist so our meeting was arranged after several weeks of email and telephone correspondence with a mysterious Frenchman called David. ‘I’ve got good news and bad news,’ he said one day. ‘The good news is she definitely wants to do it. The bad news is you have to go to Malta.’ Her partner, actor Brad Pitt, had been filming in Europe and she and the children were there with him.

  We decided it would be better to wait until she had returned to Los Angeles, which is why we are now in a restaurant at Universal, home to Steven Spielberg’s production offices, several soundstages and the sets of numerous television shows. Inside The Grill, framed prints of classic Universal releases such as The Birds and The Creature from the Black Lagoon hang on the walls. I had taken in the surroundings while waiting for Jolie to arrive but now she is here it is difficult to look at anything else. In person, her beauty is amplified; her eyes sparkle mischievously when she laughs, her celebrated lips frame a set of blinding white teeth. She rarely does interviews and is guarded at first – particularly when I broach subjects that she is reluctant to discuss. For instance, she doesn’t want to tell me too much about her new film because she doesn’t want to preempt the press campaign which is being lined up ahead of its release. But as she deflects these questions, there is a knowing smile and a shrug that is almost apologetic, as if to say, ‘Sorry, it’s all part of the game.’

  The waiter has returned with her tea, and when it is poured Jolie adds some honey to her cup. We look at the menus again. ‘There’s a pasta in here somewhere,’ she says when the waiter asks if we’re ready to order. ‘I’ll have that with chicken.’ I choose grilled salmon with heirloom tomatoes.

  She tells me she has brought her daughters with her for this trip. She explains that she and Pitt tend to travel everywhere with their children and the family is never in the same place for long. ‘We take turns working so one of us can be home with the kids.’ They are apart when we meet, though. ‘It’s been hard – I’ve been [in Los Angeles] for a week and it’s very unusual to separate for this long. I brought the girls so we’re having a special girl trip. All the boys are hanging out with Brad … he’s filming a zombie movie [World War Z].’

  The Jolie Pitt family is a miniature League of Nations. Their eldest son Maddox, who is almost 10, was adopted in 2002 from his native Cambodia. Zahara, aged six, was born in Ethiopia, while Shiloh, the couple’s first biological child, was born five years ago in Namibia. Pax, whom they adopted four years ago, was born in Vietnam and three years ago, Jolie gave birth in France to twins Knox and Vivienne. ‘They are all learning about each other’s cultures as well as being proud of their own,’ she says. ‘So it’s not like just the boys get to do the Asian thing. They all have their flags over their beds and their individual pride. We owe Vietnam a visit, because Pax is due. Z wants to get back to Africa, and Shiloh too. So everyone takes their turns in their country.’

  She has been to Cambodia this year, to shoot an advertising campaign for Louis Vuitton with Annie Leibovitz. An impoverished country might seem like an odd place for a luxury fashion house to shoot an ad campaign but the final decision was made by Jolie herself. ‘To actually do it there, to highlight the beauty of the country, was something I was very happy to do because it is a place people should travel to,’ she says. Indeed, she and Pitt have a house there – ‘It’s a little place on stilts.’ Her fee from the campaign will go towards charitable projects in the country, she says, building on work she began with a foundation the family established in Maddox’s name. ‘It’s focused on protecting mountains from deforestation, poaching and clearing landmines. We put it together for Mad so when he’s older he’ll hopefully take it over.’

  Our food has arrived. Jolie’s pasta is simple, with pieces of chicken in a tomato sauce. But my salmon is a part of an elaborate creation, built into a tower, with an ornate garnish of fennel, heirloom tomatoes and some other diced vegetables that I fail to identify. It looks ridiculous and when she sees my plate she bursts out laughing.

  Given how much they travel I wonder where they consider home. ‘Home is wherever we are.’ Does she feel rootless? ‘Yes, but happily. I’m very bad at staying in one place. I’m also bad at sitting still. I was a terrible student at school. But there’s so much to explore in the world … so I love travel. If you can travel I think it’s the best way to raise kids.’

  This reference to her youth reminds me how much she has changed over the past 15 years since she came to prominence with her role in the high-school cyber thriller Hackers. Back then she seemed an archetypal Hollywood wild child. The daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand, she talked of self-harming in her teens and by her late twenties she had been married twice – first to Hackers co-star, English actor Jonny Lee Miller, and then to the American actor and singer Billy Bob Thornton. She had an interest in knives, acquired several tattoos – including one of Thornton’s name on her arm (it has since been removed) and wore a locket containing his blood.

  The controversies accompanied a rising career. In 2000 she won an Oscar for her startling performance as a patient in a mental hospital in Girl, Interrupted and soon became a fully fledged action star with the role of Lara Croft in Tomb Raider (2001) and in films such as Mr and Mrs Smith (2005). It was on that set that she first met Pitt and the pair have since become Hollywood’s premier power couple, their fame magnified to the extent that they are, according to their friend, actor Matt Damon, ‘like prisoners’. The media scrutiny shows no sign of letting up. Last year the couple sued the News of the World when it printed a false story alleging that they were breaking up; I ask if she shed any tears at the newspaper’s recent closure. ‘I did hear something about that … clearly I never read it. So it’s hard to know how much of a loss it is.’

  She has spent most of her adult life in the public eye. But the person I have read about before our lunch couldn’t seem more different from the poised woman opposite me. Motherhood has changed her, she says, particularly with respect to her career. ‘I’ve never not been grateful to be an acto
r … but I think when I was younger I needed [acting] more. I was trying to question things in life so you find these characters that help you find things and grow.’

  She explains that her relationship with acting has changed over the years. ‘It’s like being in therapy, in a way,’ she says, taking a forkful of penne and chicken. ‘You’re drawn to certain roles because they question something about life, or about love, or about freedom. You ask these questions as you grow up: am I strong enough, am I sane enough? Do I understand love, do I understand myself?’ Now, she adds, ‘I’m older and I know who I am … and I’m less interested in the character helping me answer something … than in being able to answer it for myself, as a woman, as an adult, with my family.’ We talk about Salt, an action film released last year in which Jolie punches, shoots and kicks her way through the CIA, Secret Service and a cabal of rogue Russian spies. The title role was initially written for a man but the script was modified when it became clear she was interested. ‘I’d just had the twins,’ she recalls. ‘I’d been in a nightgown for a very, very long time. And I was sitting in the hospital breastfeeding and reading this script in my nightgown, feeling so soft and mama … and I was flipping these pages and it was all fighting and shooting guns. I thought, “That’s what I need. I need to get out of my nightgown and I need a gun.” I’m sure many a woman who has been through childbirth has thought, “It would be nice to get a little physical, get a little wild … to remember what that other side is like.” ’

  ‘She says she is not thinking of quitting acting any time soon. ‘But I don’t love it as much [as I did]. I love being a mom.’ She is, however, clearly excited about being behind the camera for the first time. ‘I prefer it to acting,’ she says. I ask if she drew on her experiences with the directors she has worked with. ‘I think I’ve learnt something from all of them – even the ones I didn’t like.’ I try to get her to dish the dirt on the latter but she politely declines. She is full of praise for Michael Winter-bottom, who directed her in A Mighty Heart (2007), the story of Daniel Pearl, the journalist who was abducted and killed in Pakistan. ‘I also learnt a lot from Clint Eastwood [her director in 2008’s Changeling] about how to appreciate the members of the crew, empowering them to do their job. I never worked with David Fincher [director of Fight Club and The Social Network] but I know him as a friend and have seen how meticulous he is, his attention to detail, how hard he works – even when you’re too tired to go back into the room – to make sure that you’ve got it right.’