Preview only show first 10 pages with watermark. For full document please download

Dear Reader, You Probably Know That My Name

   EMBED


Share

Transcript

Dear Reader, You probably know that my name is Emma and that I am an actress. One of the distinct advantages of beginning my career at such a young age was being exposed to a number of extremely talented individuals and unique situations – Noah was no exception. so thank you Darren for letting me be part of your story. In addition to providing content that directly relates to Noah and my experiences working on that film, I’ve decided to include some interviews with people whose work has inspired me over the last ten years. I want to thank them for being so open, for The tale of Noah’s ark is one of the most iconic in religious history. Darren sharing their thoughts, their work and their time. Aronofsky managed to create a film that is not only epic in scale, budget and talent but stays true to what he is And finally thank you to Wonderland magazine and to YOU, its readership. known for: creativity, originality, and I don’t often get the chance to do personal intimate stories. Darren’s work, including Noah is truly different this. What started as an idea to help promote Noah turned into an amazing and will no doubt be controversial. I hope I will always receive the chance exploration that I hope you will enjoy as much as I did. to be part of films that I believe in – Love, Emma Thanks to: Luke Windsor (I couldn’t have done this without you) Ari Handel Clint Mansell Darren Aronofsky Douglas Booth Ezra Miller Guillermo del Toro J.K Rowling Jonah Hill Joseph Gordon-Levitt Lena Dunham Logan Lerman Lorde Mark Friedman Matty Libatique Michael Wilkinson Patti Smith Pharrell Williams Sofia Coppola Starn Twiins Tavi Derek Blasberg Nancy Brownlow Denise Morrone Kerry Hallihan Christian Oita Katie McLean Sarah Slutsky Liliana Greenfield Sanders Paramount Pictures Huw, Jack, Jack, Ali and everyone at Wonderland. Emma’s journey thus far. Bloom of the Wallflower Bloom of the Wallflower 144 Photographer KERRY HALLIHAN Fashion GRACE COBB Words DEREK BLASBERG DIESEL LEATHER TRIBUTE collection available exclusively at Selfridges. Wonderland ⋅ Spring 2014 My mother is the first person to say I always wanted a little brother or sister. I was the youngest in my entire family, and I always felt like it was a disservice to humanity that there wasn’t someone after me onto whom I could dispel my pearls of wisdom. So, when Emma Watson – then a smiley, sweet, super smart teenager – and I became buddies, I felt like my childhood prayers had been answered. There was only one striking difference: Emma, wise beyond her years, already knew more than I did about just about everything and didn’t need any such advice. Emma is one of those rare breeds of people who have an intuition, a good head on their shoulders, a quick judgment. I can’t be certain that, as her adopted big bro, she’s learned any of that from me, but I will say she’s taught me a thing or two. She is concise, put together, organised, forthright and reliable. (Which are not the sorts of adjectives that apply to most child actors.) Back when I’d visit her on the Harry Potter sets, her dressing areas would be tidy(ish) and her well worn and bookmarked books would be stacked everywhere. She navigated the pressures of filming the world’s most successful cinema franchise with elegance and grace, and she didn’t forget to do the little things, like send funny postcards from vacations and fruit baskets at the holidays. After Potter, I watched her grow into a beautiful young woman who is navigating a career that’s entirely her own. It’s been an interesting transition: As she herself says, she felt she was an adult even when she was in the body a little girl waving a magic wand. Now, it’s as though she has caught up with herself. In the film Perks of Being a Wallflower, she charmingly captured the end of an American innocence. In the upcoming Noah, she tackles the role of a biblical daughterin-law in an epic adventure. Behold: Emma, a thoroughly modern woman. Where are you right now and what are you doing? Right now I’m on holiday. I’m stood on the balcony of my hotel room and I’m scratching my feet because I’ve been eaten alive by mosquitos. I look like I have a disease. I’m told I have sweet blood. Well, I’m freezing in New York, so you won’t get much mosquito sympathy from me. Well, I miss New York. I loved living there. You were in New York during Hurricane Sandy. How surreal was that? It was surreal for a couple of reasons. It delayed the end of our shooting for a few weeks, so we got the irony of filming an epic biblical movie about a flood, and then a storm comes and floods much of New York. It even damaged the ark, which was what set us back. The other reason that it was surreal was because you and I were on the Upper East Side, which was completely unfazed by the storm. We had high speed Internet and our phones. All the shops were open and, even weirder, people were shopping in them. The Carlyle Hotel was packed with people getting drinks. I remember calling you and asking, ‘Isn’t there something we can do I feel like such a waste of space?’ And you took me on a meal delivery with Citymeals on Wheels. That was amazing that we could do that. Do you remember Pearl? Beaded dress by EMPORIO ARMANI, diamond necklace by HARRY WINSTON and gold band by RUTH TOMLINSON. 147 How could I forget Pearl? She was the spritely 90-yearold woman who was listening to Elvis Prestley records when we knocked on her door and delivered her food. Pearl was a babe. Were you ever scared during the storm? I remember not taking it very seriously, and then my dad called and said I should fill the bath with water. And I said, ‘Why would I do that?’ He said to put on the news and then I realized it was going to be a serious thing in some areas. When I showed up at Brown they warned me that it was going to get cold, and I said, ‘ I’m from England. I know what cold is.’ But I soon learned that, no, I didn’t know what cold is. My first semester at Brown [in Providence, Rhode Island], when it got into the negative temperatures, I just didn’t want to leave my dorm room. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I’d only go out to get supplies. The cold makes me miserable! Speaking of Brown, I’m very proud that you are going to be an official Ivy League graduate soon. Yes! I’m going to graduate in May, which I can’t believe. I can’t. I just can’t! Very exciting. So, tell me: What do you plan on doing with that major? Tough question… I’ve been very fulfilled by my studies. English has helped me think in an analytical way. It’s helped me see the world from new perspectives. Diving into these stories and characters has given richness to my own life. And now, when I read scripts or look at stories, I have these references for a larger understanding of humanity. I’m sure it will make my job as an actress more interesting. I visited you on the Harry Potter set a few times, and it was like a little family and everyone knew each other. It was. I miss the people too. I miss the familiarity. And to go from that to a new place, a new school, with new friends – must not have been easy, right? I really wanted a new experience. I loved not knowing anyone. It felt very exciting, and I felt like I was striking out on my own in a very real, very new way. But there’s this thing called the Sophomore Slump, which is a phenomenon that is apparently known and recognized, though I had never heard of it. It caught me by surprise. For the first year at university, everything is new and exciting. You don’t realize that you don’t have your support structure, your home comforts, and all those Cat print coat and embellished dress both by MIU MIU. Bloom of the Wallflower touchstones that help keep you on track. Then, after the first year, when the adrenaline wears off, you find yourself in a slump. That’s what happened to me by the end of my third term. I felt very unsettled and lost. My mother always told me that in struggles we find strength. She’s right. Now I really know how to take care of myself, how to be alone, how to deal with stress. If I hadn’t been through that time, I wouldn’t have got there. I never knew I had limits. You make good friends and you make bad friends, and you have to figure it all out. You realize you can’t do everything. I really did think I could do it all – commute back to the UK for Potter filming and press, then go to Brown for finals, and keep up with my friends and family. You can’t do by the way. You do have to take breaks. It’s how I became interested in meditation and yoga. I developed bedtime rituals. Like what? You’re going to laugh, but now every night before I go to bed I make a hot water bottle. It’s a ritual that makes me feel like I’m taking care of myself, and that’s important. Learning how to be alone is a good lesson, and one I don’t think a lot of actresses learn. 150 I realized that. When you’re on a film set you’re watched and you’re never alone and there are all these demands on your time. Everyone knows where you are at every moment of the day. Then, I went to Brown and suddenly I was all alone. At first I hated it. Now, I’m happy to be by myself. I can be calm and productive and content, alone in my apartment. Now, be honest: Have you ever wanted to go off the rails? Like, get drunk and get a tattoo? Ha, I love tattoos. But I love them on other people. In fact, I have a Pinterest account and a whole board of tattoos that I like – but I would never want one for myself. I don’t think I could pull it off. My own selfimage would not allow it. But you’re not as puritanical as that, Emma. I feel like I’ve been given a lot of credit where it isn’t due that I don’t like to party. The truth is that I’m genuinely a shy, socially awkward, introverted person. At a big party, I’m like Bambie in the headlights. It’s too much stimulation for me, which is why I end up going to the bathroom! I need time outs! You’ve seen me at parties, Derek. I get anxious. I’m terrible at small talk and I have a ridiculously short attention span. That, I have noticed. Is part of that because you’ve become this big public figure? Probably. I feel a pressure when I’m meeting new people because I’m aware of their expectations. That makes socializing difficult. Which isn’t to say that when I’m in a small group and around my friends, I don’t love to dance and be extroverted. I am just extremely self-conscious in public. Purple embelished bustier dress by DSQUARED2 and feather headpiece by LOUIS VUITTON. On that note, I’d like to formally apologize for being so shocked when you cut off all your hair. Why? I loved that you were one of the first people to see it. I loved your reaction. You were utterly shocked. It was an appropriate reaction for a big brother. You caught me off guard. It was so unexpected. It wasn’t unexpected to me. I had been crafting it in my mind for years. So, when the time came, I went ahead and did it. Have you ever thought of the psychology behind it? Like, did you do it because you were done with Harry Potter and you wanted to craft yourself a new image? Like Jennifer Lawrence and The Hunger Games? I think Jennifer Lawrence needed to cut hers off. But I see the parallel you’re trying to make. Maybe Miley Cyrus is a better example? Ha! Exactly. My mother always had really short hair, always had a pixie. So for me, it wasn’t as crazy as it was to you. To be honest, I felt more myself with that haircut. I felt bold, and it felt empowering because it was my choice. It felt sexy too. Maybe it was the bare neck, but for some reason I felt super, super sexy. So, one day you’ll cut it again? Absolutely. I miss it so much. The minute I get pregnant, the first thing I’m going to do is cut my hair off because I know I won’t be working for a time. If I wasn’t an actress, I’d keep it that way. I could wash it in the sink and shake it out like a dog. It’s so low maintenance!!!! Wonderland ⋅ Spring 2014 Let’s continue discussing appearances. Has fashion been any sort of fulfillment for you? I love fashion as a thing. And I very much still follow it and find it interesting and when I come across something really great I get excited and I’m inspired. But there was a moment when I took a step away from fashion. I was once sat next to Gwen Stefani at some fashion event, and she told me she always often feels like she’s in a Saturday Night Live skit at those things. I find it slightly surreal too. I can remember my first Paris fashion 153 week, and the insanity and hysteria that went along with it. Just to get into a fashion show? It’s more intense than a movie premiere. Sometimes people ask me why I don’t go to more shows, but to be honest I’d rather watch it on the internet. Fashion is this massive, huge industry, which I like to dip my toes into. But it’s not my industry. That’s true. Film is. Do you remember the day that you and me went to see the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Tate, and I told you that I could see you being a producer or director one day? And you looked at me like I had ten heads. Yes! People say that to me a lot now. Maybe I will one day. Are you still looking for something else you enjoy doing? Do you remember that time I called you up and asked if you knew anyone who needed an intern? And you almost died laughing? Hair Vi at management. Makeup Dotti at Streeters using la Prairie. Nail Technician Zarra Celik at CLM Hair & Make Up using Chanel S 2014 and Body Excellence Hand Cream. Set Design Gillian O’Brien. Photographic Assistance Gareth Horton, Robert Wiley and Matthew Lawes. Fashion Assistance Lizy Curtis and Francesca Turner. Production Samantha Jourdan and Sylvia Farago. Digital Operator Jonathan Stokes. Thanks Flash Film Studios, MacCulloch and Wallis and Sharna Osborne. Yes. You asked if I knew anyone who wanted me to be a personal assistant for a week. I was serious! I am interested in everything!!! This year, I’m turning 24. A lot of my friends are really worried about turning 24, but I like that I’m getting older. In a way, I started out like this old lady, and now I feel like my age is catching up with me. And I’m excited by all these new things for me to do. I feel like I have so much more to accomplish as an actress. I’d love to try theater and that’s a whole other thing. But when I finish my degree, I will have a lot more time to pursue other passions, and I want to figure out what those will be. I love having something completely unrelated to the film industry. Black silk high-waisted pants and black lace bra (both worn throughout) both by DOLCE & GABBANA and sheer lilac top by MIU MIU. I want to find something that will let me use my brain in another way. I like connecting people who aren’t part of that world too. I’ve seen your paintings, they’re swell. I love painting. So maybe I hone in on that and do more art classes? Or maybe something different. Well, I know you’re great at yoga. Then, there you go. I can be a full time actress and a personal part-time yoga teacher? Ha! Well. We’ll see. On High Wonderland’s cover star and guest editor, actress, red carpet Adonis and friend to some of Hollywood’s most revered and groundbreaking talent, Emma Watson spent much of last year covered in biblical mud and sea spray. “The most gruelling part of [filming Darren Aronofsky’s fantasy epic Noah, out in cinemas in March] I can’t really talk about,” she tells me from a studio in Dalston, London. She’s sitting next to co-star Douglas Booth, who plays Shem, son of Noah (or as atheist Aronofsky saw it, Russell Crowe), and love interest of Watson’s Ila, the patriarch’s adopted daughter. 154 Photographer CHRISTIAN OITA Fashion MATTHEW JOSEPHS Words JACK MILLS Black lace dress by DOLCE & GABBANA. For a number of reasons, the pair’s coming together is a significant turning point in the 23 year-old’s adult career – one far removed from the less intense and grub-splattered grounds of Hogwarts, the setting for seven sequential record shredding films in the Harry Potter saga. It was there where Watson spent most of her pre-andmid adolescence playing Harry Potter’s cutely bookish best friend, Hermione Granger. Since meeting Booth on the set of Burberry’s autumn/ winter 2009 campaign, she’s played a couture-obsessed criminelle in Sofia Coppia’s The Bling Ring, Logan Lerman’s endearing collegiate lover in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, has co-kick started Fair Trade fashion brand People Tree and is executive producing and lead starring in in-development fantasy trilogy The Queen of the Tearling (which re-unites the star with Potter producer, David Heyman). And all the while maintaining H-town’s most faultless of Twitter accounts (we checked and checked again for existential Tuesday afternoon hangover tweets). No, the Paris born, Oxford raised Watson is a picture of hard work and focus. In interview, we forget tabloid-y topics – her polarising backless dress at The Golden Globes, dull, New Boyfriend conjecture, her stud-struck first encounter with Booth, (she spilled to VMAN how “offensively attractive” she thinks he is) – and focus in on Noah’s pound-shedding, vertebrae splaying filming schedule. Booth is just as wide-eyed and obsessive about his moda, and the pair spent most of the conversation dewily lost in their admiration for Aronofsky and his grandiose ambition. Booth impressed at just 17 as a true-to-life Boy George in 2010’s excellent biopic, Worried About the Boy and this year stars alongside Channing Tatum in the Wachowski Brothers’ newest fantasy thriller, Jupiter Ascending - amongst other high exposure parts. Dusted down and fresh from a day of asymmetric poses and bijou headwear for their cover shoot, the pair got real with me on all things OCD, Myra Hindley and Book of Genesis-style dystopia. White dress, necklace and earrings GIVENCHY BY RICCARDO TISCI. Ring emma’s own. 157 Wonderland: Tell me about filming in the ark – and for so long. You weren’t chilling in a west London green screen with freshly blended gingerbread lattes just off camera – the director built it and sent you all to Iceland. Kind of torturous, no? Douglas: I think one of the obvious ones was the weather; we actually started filming in the summer in New York. It was so hot that Ray Winston [who plays Tubal-cain, Noah’s arch enemy] at one point, who wore a beard and heavy makeup up, nearly fell down a flight of stairs. Emma: His makeup was literally melting off his face. Then we decided to shoot the soaking wet scenes. We literally went through all the seasons. W: Well, that’s weirdly atmospheric… D: The whole film felt atmospheric and also being on location in Iceland felt like we were on another planet. We were very cut off and secluded and away from the world so it made everything more intense. We simply had to focus, as there was nothing else to distract us. I was impressed by the lack of green screen involved in Noah - we tried to make the film as real as possible. E: Darren really hates special effects. He tried to do as much as he physically could without using green screen. The special effects guy was like a magician. If he could turn leaves from brown to green on camera without using CGI, he would. W: How much in the way training did you have to do for it? E: Because of the storm, Doug and I ended up shooting most of our scenes between the hours of 4am and 7am – and at that time I never function well. Because the film has a pro-environment message, Darren didn’t want anyone drinking from plastic water bottles on the set, either. So that made things slightly harder. Everything we used had to be recycled or recyclable. Having no water bottles on set at five in the morning - when you’re exhausted and delirious – wasn’t ideal. I was so tired one morning I picked up a mug from my trailer and drank some stagnant water that had been there for the duration – so three months. I was so ill. I came in the next day and was like Black silk jacket and trousers both by PRADA, shirt by T.M LEWIN and velvet ribbon stylist’s own. Emma wears black velvet coat by MIU MIU, white shirt and skirt both by RYAN LO and beret stylist’s own. Emma wears black lace dress by DOLCE & GABBANA and tiara from BENTLEY & SKINNER. haven’t even seen this film. Darren talks a lot about his films being a bit like a ride - like a rollercoaster. He explained, in an interview I just did with him, that: “If people are going to pay a sum of money to come and see my movie, I want it to be an incredible, terrifying, overwhelming experience from beginning to end.” I think it’s much easier to do that when there’s a level of mystique or nervous energy about a film. I think Doug and I feel it’s important that we protect it. “Darren, I don’t think I can do this, I’m really sick.” He was like, “Use it for the scene.” And I turned around to the bus and was like, “Is he joking? He’s joking right?” and there was deadly silence. W: You’ve been friends since 2009. How did it feel being cast together in such a high budget big screener? D: Well you [Emma] probably had insider knowledge of casting because you’re friends with Darren. E: No I really didn’t, I had nothing to do with it. W: When you first met as models, did you talk about films that you had done, actors you mutually loved, or directors you wanted to work with in the future? E: Oddly, we have the same favourite restaurant in London, and I remember asking him out for dinner and both of us dreaming about what kind of films we wanted to make down the line - not thinking we’d film together only three years later. Weirdly still, Doug bought me a first edition signed copy of the album Just Kids by Patti Smith. Patti ended up working with Doug and I and Darren in Noah - she wrote a lullaby, which is going to be used in the film. She was very present and around on the set, too. W: Emma, tell me about your hair in the film. Are you wearing dreadlocks? E: Dreadlocks. I essentially had a bob at the time. I had a chestnut brown bob, which was sort of the opposite of ideal in that situation. So she put in these hair extensions and we just couldn’t hide the fact that my hair was so short. She [her hairdresser] suggested matting it all together. I mean they didn’t have baths or showers or anything like that on set, so that worked out really well for everyone. W: You and Aronofsky have been friends for years. Where and when did you meet? Did he help turn you into the staunch environmentalist you are now? E: He was at the trailer premier for Black Swan and I was at the BAFTAs accepting an award for Harry Potter, and so we were both backstage at the same time and that was that, really. But I was aware of his work, and that was definitely one of the things that drew me to the project and to the script. It’s cool to be working on a movie that tells a story that is thought-provoking in a realist way. W: Darren has said that he wanted to tell a heavily embellished version of the biblical story – he is, after all, an irreligionist… D: For me, I didn’t necessarily sign up to make an environmental movie, I just signed up to work with Darren Aronofsky. I’m such a huge fan. E: Darren wrote the script with Ari Emanuel, his writing partner. They did a huge amount of research into various versions, scriptures, writings and different tellings of the story - from King James’s Bible to other editions. The main problem is that, in the bible, the story of Noah’s Ark covers about half a page. He made a three hour movie from three paragraphs’ worth of storytelling. D: But everything he did take from it was deadly accurate. The 162 measurements for the ark were exactly the same as it was in the bible - the exact shape and dimensions. Darren is one of the best filmmakers out there, and it was down to his bizarre imagination and creativity to bring a story like that to life. E: To me, Noah as a story is very much “doves and rainbows” - it’s a little cheesy in an hilarious kind of way. Mixing that with someone like Darren Aronofsky - who is the lord of darkness and angst - makes for a really interesting dialogue. W: Aronofsky has made a point to not let on much about the film, its contents, or its narrative arc (no pun intended). I remember reading an article in The Guardian about it – the writer was clearly interpreting the plot from the film’s slightly opaque two-and-ahalf-minutes long trailer. Did he mention the importance of secrecy to you? E: Let’s put it this way – we Emma, tell me about The Queen of the Tearling. When did you first read Erika Johansen’s novel? David Heyman sent it to me last summer. I had kind of said I would never do a franchise again, so I was desperate to hate it. Unfortunately, I didn’t sleep for about a week because I couldn’t put the bloody thing down. It would be fair to say I became obsessed with the role and the book. Now I am executive producing it. Ha! W: What’s next in the ongoing Booth and Watson saga? Are you this generation’s Starsky and Hutch? E: Richard III and Queen Anne would be cool… D: That would be different. E: Maybe Bonnie and Clyde? W: Amazing! Douglas wears shirt, trousers and knitted top all by ALEXANDER MCQUEEN. Emma wears black velvet coat by MIU MIU, white shirt and skirt both by RYAN LO and beret stylist’s own. DARREN ARONOFSKY Director of Noah, screenwriter and film producer Graduated from Harvard where he studied social sciences. Oscar-nominated director of Black Swan, The Wrestler, The Fountain, Requiem for a Dream and Pi. Fearless auteur. On-set beard grower. So, you were involved in writing the script for Noah. You haven’t been with all of your films, but this one, and The Fountain and Requiem, you wrote those.   And Pi.   How does that process start for you? I imagine it requires a very different set of skills than those you usually use for directing.   It’s a completely different job. You know it is much more of a lonely job. Directing is really a collaborative job. And I think everything in the directing process, pretty much apart from storyboarding and shot listing is collaborative. And you know writing is really pretty lonely. Luckily I had Ari Handel to work with and we bounce a lot of ideas off each other.   The whole process started, when I was in seventh grade and I was thirteen, I met Mrs. Fried who you might remember from set. And she was this great English teacher who told us to write something on peace and I ended up writing a poem about Noah. Noah was very much a patron saint for me. There emerged an idea that maybe I could be a writer or a storyteller and then when I finished Pi, I started talking, thinking seriously about, is there a way to somehow turn the Noah story, even though it is such a small story in the Bible, into a two hour long film.   And then a few years went by and Ari and I decided to give it a shot and see if we could set it up and start to write it. How we normally do it is we just spend a lot of time walking around and thinking and talking about it, about ideas. We do a tremendous amount of research, which on this one was even more so because we wanted to read everything there was about the Genesis story and all different types of commentary from the last few thousand years about it to try to breathe a 21st century sensibility into it and make it work for modern movie audiences. Interviews with the Cast and Crew by EMMA WATSON Wonderland pg.164 Have you worked with Ari on any of your other writing projects?   I worked with Ari on the story of The Fountain. We spent a lot of time thinking about that but this is the first one we wrote together.   Is The Fountain a companion piece to Noah?   No, I don’t think they’re really related. They’re very different. I think The Fountain fits exactly where I was and the scale of Noah, the complexity of it, the ensemble nature of all the different characters really make it a very different project. You know, The Fountain was really about one guy in different areas of reality.   My stepbrother David is absolutely obsessed with The Fountain. He watches it every few weeks. So I asked him, what should I ask Darren? And his question was that you’ve used religious referencing as a key storytelling device, and it’s a very personal question, so completely you can choose to answer it or not, but what is your personal connection to religion and its use in carving out a moral or meaningful sense in your life?   I think a lot of these stories that come out from religion, people have been telling them thousands of years and they have been having an impact on people for thousands of years because they are incredibly well crafted stories that have just lasted and survived the test of time. I think because they are such ancient stories for us, there is something about them that is connected to our condition on this planet and that’s the reason people keep telling them over and over again.   For me, the Noah story, there were a lot of things that were very interesting. There is a real idea about family and re-starting and I think for anyone that is becoming a father, which is something I was doing when I was starting to write it, it’s a very interesting idea because there is a lot of fear that when you become a father and I think I was able to think about Noah, because he was not only becoming the new father for the whole of civilisation but he was he was also literally becoming a grandfather in the story so a lot of those ideas connected to me.   Basically it is the fourth story in the bible. There is Creation, then Adam and Eve and Original Sin. Then Cain and Abel the first murder. That happens and then basically it jumps down, and the next story 10 generations later the world is so wicked that the creator decides to Wonderland destroy the world and only Noah and his family survive.   That was just interesting, it goes from perfect creation to the original sin to being over with Noah and it just made me think. It really connects to what is happening now on the planet, when we’re sort of witnessing man’s complete domination of the planet and we’re in a very similar place where the environment is changing pretty quickly and pretty radically. 100 years ago, the seas were filled with fish and now it’s a pretty dire situation. Noah was instructed to go out and save Creation. The two by two is such an interesting important part of the story that it would be interesting to see if there was a way to connect that to what was happening now.   So, in some senses, the environmental aspects to the film could be perceived as political. Have you thought about how you might answer questions about whether the film is really speaking to that? Is that something you want to talk about, or would you rather let the film speak for itself?   I think that in the story of Noah there is an undeniable environmental message.  His job is to save the animals; he builds an arc to save the animals and his family.   I wanted to ask about your relationship with special effects. I was so interested in your approach.   Well it was the first time I’ve ever dealt with effects on this scale. We have a tremendous number of special effects. The Watchers (the legendary Nephilim) and the actors interacting with them was complicated. We didn’t have any animals on set and we had to create them digitally. And all the miracles of the story, which are many, the waters of the heaven and the waters of the earth, we had to think of a way to portray that.   So Noah certainly has the biggest budget you have ever worked with and is probably the first film you have ever made that isn’t going to a film festival. How have you found that process and do you think you’ll work on this scale again, or do you think you’ll be avoiding it for a while?  You never know what is going to connect with people. You can do something small, like The Blair Witch and it connects with everyone. You do something big and it may or may not connect.  For me, it is just about the stories and what they take to get made. Taking on something like Noah’s Ark you know from the start it had to be epic in scale with epic actors and epic effects. That was always clear, if you’re going to do Noah, it’s got to be big.   I obviously have to ask you about Patti [Smith] and how and why you wanted her to write the lullaby for the movie?   Well I think it happened when I was on the jury [at the Venice Film Festival]. About a year before we started the movie, Patti was there and we had been friends for a little bit and we watched a few movies together. Then one night we were walking around Venice, it was late at night and the streets were abandoned and we were just getting lost and I was telling her that there was this major plot point in the film about a lullaby in the movie. Patti told me how she has been writing lullabies for years and that she studied them and she has made songs out of them and she told me how much she would like to be involved. Do you like rollercoaster rides? You always talk about your films being like rides.   I grew up right near Coney Island and one of the most famous rollercoasters in the world, the Cyclone is there, which I’m surprised I didn’t take you on, I usually take most of my actors but we were in Iceland in the summer. Next time you come to New York I’ll take you on it. But it’s this old, wooden rollercoaster from 1929 that’s still standing and eight people have died on it in its history and for a guy to have grown up in South Brooklyn it’s legendary. Because of it I kind of became a rollercoaster fanatic. Whenever I was in a town that had one of those great amusement parks that is the first thing I would do. My parents are really big rollercoaster riders too. We’re not into the spinning rides, you know, the ones that make you vomit, we’re really into the adrenaline rides. pg.165 DARREN ARONOFSKY MICHAEL WILKINSON Director of Noah, screenwriter and film producer Costume Designer on Noah Michael costumed the films Party Monster, the final installment of Twilight, Sucker Punch, and most recently American Hustle. That answers my question then, why you made that analogy.   I always talk about the Cyclone because its structure has a great narrative. I think the ride lasts a minute and a half but it takes you through all these different emotions and different types of thrills and it was definitely an inspiration always when I make films just to keep things moving.   In our conversations together, we have spoken a lot about the meaning of happiness and I’m just wondering what that means to you just at this specific moment in time?   We have? We’ve spent time talking about happiness?   Yeah!   Oh, ok, good, well that makes me happy. Talking about happiness makes me happy. It obviously had a profound impact on you [laughs].   I mean, I don’t know, I’m a pretty optimistic guy even though I’m pretty pessimistic about the state of the world. I think I like to have a good time and I’m happy when I’m deep in my work and I find myself happy when I’m with my friends, when I’m with my son, and when I’m with my girl. I find myself happy when I’m drawing and doing art. I don’t know.   Of course I enjoy filmmaking but filmmaking has a lot of pressures. Mostly I enjoy working with actors on set, that’s always the most fun. It’s between action and cut when we’re actually doing our work together, that’s the most exciting time and I think that’s the thing that brings us all back, that gets us through the hours of sitting in the make-up chair and all the studying and all the rejection and all that stuff, is that moment between action and cut, when it’s game time it’s really a lot of fun. 1 Your parents are really a presence in the making of the movie. They’re awesome.   I really can’t keep them away.   What’s the best piece of advice they’ve ever given you?   They say, their basic attitude in life when it came to work was always “Don’t work too hard” and getting permission from your parents not to work too hard I think is an important lesson. It’s interesting, in some ways the less hard I’ve worked, allowing the stress and pressure out of my life and having the confidence to sort of relax into it I think has made me a better filmmaker. That makes perfect sense. Your films consistently feature very obsessive and driven individuals, you know, almost to the point of self-destruction. And I’m just interested in, how do you relate to your heroines. Do you see yourself in your heroines or heroes?   I think when it is at a script level, it is a sketch for an actor to take and figure out how to create it for themselves and hopefully you communicate when you’re writing something in a screen play, the general direction of where you want the character to go and how to get there.   So it’s probably something I can relate to but I think it’s important to allow the actor to make those connections themselves and so it is often that the character becomes something hopefully more connected to the actor than it does to me in the end. Sometimes you can see the director in every character but you know, my biggest success was to bring Natalie alive as a ballerina and Micky alive as Wonderland a wrestler, two totally different characters with similar stories but through their own emotions and performances.   Why did you cast Russell as Noah? What was it about him as a man and as an actor as we have known him that you thought would make him interesting to audiences as Noah?   Well, if you really think about it, it’s a really fucking hard role to undertake, it’s scary and it’s hard to make convincing that you are a Biblical character of that scale, and there are just very few people who can do that. The list was always very short of who we thought could do that, and I’ve always thought Russell was a talented actor. It was just how we would work together, how our personalities would mesh and after I met him a couple of times it seemed like it was going to be fine. pg.166 Darren and I wanted to create a unique look for the film, one that combined lots of different influences, from ancient history to cutting edge modern couture. The idea was to create a world that reverberated with lots of associations, but was not specific to one time or one place. So as well as researching the clothes from biblical times, I was inspired by contemporary fashion designers such as Rick Owens, Raf Simons and Helmut Lang, by African and Middle Eastern traditional clothes, by video game characters and by contemporary artists such as Anselm Kiefer and El Anatsui. 2 I think for me the challenge was to get the balance right - I wanted to create memorable, striking costumes, but at the same time I had to make sure that they were 100% believable, that they had a reason for looking the way they did, that they didn’t distract the audience, but gave them insights into the details of the characters’ lives and personalities.  3 I try to be like a good parent, and not have a favorite! But I’m really proud of the costume I created for you - there was a talented knitter in the costume department who did many samples until we found the right look. We created an interesting technique where we dropped a stitch and it created a wonderful loopy distressed texture. Wonderland 4 There are so many amazing memories from this project - almost being blown off the side of a mountain in Iceland in gale-force winds, dressing 400 soggy extras under rain towers in Long Island on my birthday, unpacking a box of incredible fabrics that we had commissioned from Morocco that were woven together with plastic straws, bottle tops and electrical tape. I think my favorite sight was coming back to the costume trailer late one night to find my entire crew hand sewing the Noah vests together - each vest required about 50 hours of hand finishing, and it made my heart soar to see my crew so invested in the look of the film.  pg.167 MATTY LIBATIQUE MATTY LIBATIQUE Cinematographer on Noah Cinematographer on Noah Oscar-nominated for his work on Black Swan. Has also collaborated with Joel Schumacher, Spike Lee, and Jon Favreau. Has worked on music videos for Jay-Z, Tracy Chapman, Moby and Justin Timberlake. 1 (i)How did this come about? Yes. The track was Gimme One Reason.  (ii)Did you keep your cool?!! (please excuse my massive fan girl moment) I was fortunate at the time to be working with a director named Julie Dash who was awarded the video. Obviously I was a massive fan of her first record so I was more than excited to get the gig. Truth be told I WAS nervous.  I was in my 20’s and had only been a DP for a couple of years. 3 4 2 The allegory.  This is me and I do not want to speak for Darren but the film is ultimately an indictment of man for our misuse of the planet.  Hopefully the film finds the right audience and its statement on environmentalism is heard. i) What kind of visual metaphors did you use? A great deal of inspiration comes from conversations I have with Darren about palette and how they’re articulated in Production Design and the colour of light. It’s really the first meeting of imagination and practicality for me.  For instance, having a predetermined light source like fire will dictate the creative choice in colour. ii)What kind of lighting did you want? I wanted to convey a naturalism in the quality of the light but also had the intention of stylising it through a relationship with shadow.  (iii)Did any other artists or movies inspire you? what most stood out to you? I realized that we were making the greatest road movie ever told.   It was not until the ark was being built did we actually revisit spaces.  This was comforting in that it afforded a great deal of freedom visually because I wasn’t bound by matching the light. 5 (v)What kind of prep did you do? I spent about 14 weeks of prep which is typical when working with Darren.  As you can tell he is a meticulous craftsman.  I wish I could say that it was all spent creatively but the honest truth is it’s discussion after discussion about logistics and compromise.  I’d rather get on with it. That’s an interesting thing to think about and a difficult thing to articulate.    It’s all I know how to do because I’ve been in love with the craft of cinematography for 25 years.  Although I serve as the visual articulator of words I find the creation of atmosphere in a film the most rewarding.  I wish that every film I photograph could be spoken of as art in some circles but sadly I know this is NOT always possible. Cinematography is a strange craft in that there is a sense of authorship but no ownership. I usually arrive at every film with a great deal of reference in many forms… films, photography, painting, sculpture, music, etc…. Somehow I did not find anything particularly useful as I thought about Noah.  I fell back on some influences that I’ve collected over the years.  Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Jon J Muth, Bill Henson, Alec Soth, Andrew Wyath. (iv)When you deconstructed the film, Wonderland The most inspiring thing to me was the light in Iceland.  It inspired many scenes to have a visual tone and feel that was far better than I imagined them to be in prep. pg.168 Wonderland pg.169 Wonderland pg.170 Wonderland pg.171 MIKE AND DOUG STARN PATTI SMITH Their major work ‘Big Bambú’ formed the scaffolding for Noah’s Ark. I got to speak to them on Lake Oscawana, on the outskirts of New York, last summer. Author of Just Kids, William Blake enthusiast, co-wrote Because the Night with Bruce Springsteen, poet, musician, visual artist, singer, genius, legend, icon. Artists Songwriter on Noah What is your relationship like with Darren? Although I don’t see Darren very often I feel I can count him as a friend. He is easy to talk to, honest and thoughtful. We are both workers, preoccupied in our tasks. I can trust that time and distance does not alter our friendship. Why do you think he is an important filmmaker? How did you first become involved with Noah?   I think it mainly came from one of the assistant art directors. Erica is a friend of a friend and she had our contact info. I think they had designed a bamboo scaffold and they didn’t know how they were actually gonna build it so they contacted our studio. We were away somewhere and once we saw the plans we thought, ‘this is kind of dull, rigid and not organic and not about people who are in a hurry and not just trying to do something and make something happen.’ So we asked Mark Friedberg if he wanted us to do it and he said yes. Mark has known our work for a long time, we’re around the same age, and I guess it just worked out perfectly.   So how do the bamboo structures which are in the film differ from, for example, the one you put up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art?   What we did for Noah is all pathway and platform so no sort of dense chaos. We did make a functioning scaffold. Cinematically we were thinking about the characters in the story and how they were going to be able to use it.   It looked amazing. It looked like nothing else. I think that was Darren’s biggest challenge. For example, those rock monsters, the Watchers. Originally he went to a special effects company and they produced something that looked like everything else he’s seen. So again, he had to outsource and go to an artist with an original design.   How did you first come up with the idea of the Big Bambú Project before it got stolen by Darren for Noah?   Our work has always dealt with an idea of interconnection and how nothing stays the same. It’s always growing and changing. It’s part of our philosophy for life and a while ago it just occurred to us that this philosophy could be a physical object that you could be within and inhabit, that you could make the structure that dealt with that same principle and idea and then we got to thinking about which material we could use. And bamboo is flexible, cheap and just the fact that each pole has its own character. It’s about how things grow and change. Things come together randomly; life isn’t planned, as much as you do plan. We all swim through this chaos every day, you’re working with moments Wonderland and everyone else’s trajectory and that affects yours, it gives you a medium in which to live your life.     You must get asked to be part of all sorts of weird and wonderful projects – what made you say yes to Darren?   Well, he is a great film maker.  Getting the chance to do something different and out of the art world is fascinating. Movies are a place where fantasy becomes something so engrossing. I love movies so it was great to have Bambú be part of a movie. We wouldn’t have said yes to just anyone.   What kind of movies do you like?   We love Harry Potter. My daughter is now 19 going on 20 and was the perfect age for your movies. It was one of the films that my kids really loved that I really loved too.   That’s so great! It’s funny because my dad doesn’t really like films at all but he read those books to me. So if I had been part of any other children’s movie he would have had zero interest but the fact that it was those books meant we were able to have this special experience together.   Anything else you want to add?   I don’t know. The Bible is such a weird book that has done so much damage and so much good in the world. But the story of Noah’s ark is the cheesiest craziest story ever. What is he going to do with it? I don’t know. When I first heard it I was really surprised but knowing him it will be something amazing.   I felt the same way! The rainbow and the dove and everything… but I think people are in for a shock it gets pretty dark and bloody. . .  pg.172 Darren has vision. Noah is a visionary film. A commentary on the complexities of being human and what we have done to our planet. He has had the courage to use Biblical material to make a modern statement. We need our artists to step up and counsel as well as enlighten us. Noah is such a film. What inspiration did you draw on for Ila’s lullaby? I read the script and had a strong sense of the meaning of the song to Noah. His father sang it to him, a song of the creator, the ultimate father. I imagined Russell Crowe as Noah singing it. I imagined you. The words had to be a comfort to him as a boy and to you as a child. You had lost your father and Noah chose to sing you a song. A song that promises that the Father is with you always. When Darren called and told me I had been cast as Ila I had just arrived in New York two hours before.  After having been searching for an apartment for over six months the moment I hung up the phone with Darren I walked straight into an unknown building, which said it had rooms for rent. I was immediately taken to apartment ‘11a’ which is where I lived for the duration of the shoot. It was and still is my dream home. Two doors opened and they both spelt ‘11a’. Similarly after a particularly grueling few days I was faced with a big scene with Antony Hopkins. I was nervous. I set my desktop background on my laptop as you. To give me inspiration in the make-up trailer. As I walked out of the bus you were the first thing I saw standing there, looking for catering. I had no idea you would be in Iceland. In short, I believe in signs or a certain poetry/magic that relates to the workings of the universe. I think it is why I am so drawn to your writing and your world view. You see poetry in everything. Every thing or moment has significance. And that is really beautiful to me. Of course the way writing is interpreted is so subjective but.. Does any of what I have said have any resonance with you? If it does do you know when or why or how the world speaks to you in this way? Has there ever been a time when you have felt it has stopped? I like the James Joyce line in Pomes Penyeach. The signs that mock me as I go. I live with these signs. Sometimes they are everywhere and validate my every move. Sometimes they are cruel. But I embrace them nevertheless. I believe each of us is his own master, but nature is also a master. There are patterns everywhere - in our palm and in a leaf. The other reason you inspire me is for your strength. You have the conviction of a prophet and yet modesty and “relatability”! When you doubt yourself is there someone or something that gives you the strength to believe in your words, artistic path, and purpose? A reminder that keeps you on track? Wonderland Being an artist sends one back and forth across the emotional poles. I guess the simplest way to say it is this: I am an artist; that is what I do. I have ecstatic moments and barren ones. Like a ship Captain negotiating all kinds of weather and states of the sea. Through good and bad weather he is still the Captain. If one is blessed with a gift, no one can take it away. In barren times we must believe. Sometimes it is necessary to put aside our work. Walk by the sea. Help another. Run through the forest. Sleep beneath the stars. Then go back to the work, with new air in our lungs, new ideas. You don’t shy away from the darkness in the world but when I have watched you on stage or met you in person there is almost a ‘youthfulness’… a giggly, girlishness to you. (I hope you don’t mind me making this observation) What helps you keep in touch with or gives you the courage to be both sides of yourself? I contain all sides of myself, all ages. The eleven-year old girl who walked with her dog. The girl who kicked a hole in her Fender Twin amplifier in 1978. The mother. The widow. The beach bum. I don’t leave any of them behind when I am on stage. Then I feel more ready to negotiate any situation. Has becoming/being a mother changed your relationship to your art? I was always a tomboy. I didn’t like having to be conscious of my prospective womanhood. When I had children I loved them. I still felt I was an artist with a somewhat rebellious heart, but I gained something else that was very special. Empathy. An oneness with every mother. A sense that every child was my child as well. You have such a specific sense of style. What is your definition of femininity? How does it relate to masculinity? How do you find a way to feel good being YOU. I don’t have any definition. I don’t really think about things in a divided way. I am aware I possess both masculine and feminine rhythms. I don’t analyze which is which. I’m grateful to be alive and to have an imagination and possess good health. As long as I can do my work and move about freely I am happy. I love to see new actors and actresses. They give me great hope, as I love the movies so much. Certain films I watch again and again, just to see their work. Saoirse Ronan in Hanna. Mia Wasikowska in Alice in Wonderland. Andrea Riseborough and Sam Riley in Brighton Rock. Casey Affleck in The Assassination of Jesse James. The only thing that scares me, in any field, would be a lack of imagination. Who would you really like to collaborate with that you have yet to? What great dreams have you yet to live out? I would love to collaborate with my daughter Jesse. I think if I am meant to collaborate with anyone it will come. My great dream is to write a detective story. I am working on one but it will take a while. I would have loved to have played a detective. I don’t see that happening but that would be a dream job. A detective in a remote dreary town by the sea with an equally dreary church, a dusty library and a pub filled with suspicious fishermen. The song “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger” Would you write that song today? How do you feel about it now in comparison to when you wrote it? Does meaning—of words, of songs—change along with historical/temporal context? On a related note, why is it important to be profane, to push boundaries, to do the unexpected and the perhaps unsavory?  Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger was a declaration of existence. I had the great hope and hubris to think I could redefine the word, give it a new fearless connotation. I wrote it with a sense of abandon and still access that feeling of optimistic rage when I sing it. I can’t say whether it’s important to push boundaries. It came naturally to me, that’s all. When I sing it I can feel my young self, kicking through a Fender Twin amplifier, turning the tables at a press conference, pulling the strings off an electric guitar. Then scrambling off the stage and going back to the tour bus and reading T.E. Lawrence. Do you stay abreast of contemporary music? What do you think? What scares you? Or what other sorts of artists— dancers, actors, novelists, painters, whatever—inspire you today? pg.173 CLINT MANSELL MARK FRIEDBERG Previous work includes Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, The Fountain and Black Swan. Performs with the Sonus Quartet. Mark has been production designer on, amongst others, Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, and Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven and Mildred Pierce. Composer on Noah elements into play. You can feel the presence of another character even if they’re not on the screen. Really it’s a lot of experimentation once you’ve got the thematic ideas. Then you can say we’ll juxtapose things against one another and then see how that helps with the story and the emotions. I really wanted to ask you about inspiration and how it comes to you. How does the music manifest itself usually? Do you hear it in your head? Do you just suddenly get an idea? Hey, How are you? What are you out in LA doing? Finishing Noah. Wow. Yeah, tell me about it. I mean the film is nearly two and a half hours long and there is about two hours of score in it, so it’s pretty complex. There are so many subtexts and sub-connections between the characters. Tubal-cain is an overall presence, along with the destruction of the world. So audiences might be focusing on some other elements of the story but you can always feel this sort of evil, or this horror of man, that is always in the background. So once I’ve written everything, every character has a different theme and different locations have different pieces of music. Once that’s done I go back and sort of cross pollinate. My overall plan for my music in any film is that even if you don’t have the dialogue or even if you’re not watching the film but you’re hearing the music you’d still know what was going on story-wise; you’d still be being pulled through it. It’s a huge tapestry, and we’re going back over it to find out which bits of music work well and where. You can start off with an intellectual approach, so you go bad guys on screen with bad guy music and then good guys and good guy music, but then when you start moving things around you can really bring other There really isn’t any set way. I would describe it as a process of me getting out of my own way. It’s a very subliminal thing. I don’t know where it is. At the risk of namedropping, I met with David Bowie once, as he was going to work on ‘The Fountain’ but it didn’t come to pass. He said his wife told him: “Your job entails a lot of looking out the window, doesn’t it?” That’s kind of what it is. For me, it’s almost like meditative, you know? I try and get a rhythm of the film. That’s the first thing I look for, the pacing and what the overall groove of the film is. Then I just keep playing and writing. The first two things you do will be shit then and then you do something and say, “OK, that’s interesting” and then I keep going until I find something I know really sticks to the picture. Has the connection ever escaped you, because I definitely have this as an actress all the time, I get panicky around the idea that there will be a moment where I need to feel great joy or great sorrow and I just worry that I’ll just go numb or I’ll just feel blocked and I won’t be able to feel anything. Does that ever happen? All the time [both laugh]. I’m fortunate because I can move around the film and I can go, ok, I’m not feeling that today and I’ll go off and do something else. Sometimes that difficult part can really be informed by other things around it. If I’m not feeling something I just try to move on. I’m a firm believer that nothing is ever wasted. I’m interested; to write some types of music, do you feel a certain amount of pain? Do you feel like it’s cathartic? When I have to go Wonderland Set Designer on Noah through a really difficult scene, I can’t go and have a laugh or chat with someone in the middle of it. I’m just not that type of actress. I’m just interested in what kind of space you have to be in to really write something that… I think undoubtedly your experiences in life can be channeled or exploited, but I don’t know if you necessarily had to have been through these things. I don’t know that writing has ever really been cathartic to be honest. I play live with a nine piece band as well as doing my film work and that’s sometimes cathartic, the volume and the emotion when you’re playing some of those pieces. Writing is much more of a craft than an art and you ultimately get a little bit desensitized to it. interconnecting needs are vast. It’s been a little difficult to get my head around it all. Most films have a sort of forty-five minutes to an hours’ worth of music, and Noah has twice that. A piece I first came up with was for a piece we’ve just called “Apocalypse”. It now plays when the rains come, and I sent it to Darren and this was early on and he played it really loud and his son Henry was listening to it and he ran across the room screaming “It’s so dramatic, it’s so dramatic”. How old is Henry? Seven? Something like that yeah. A 7-year-old boy getting really excited I think is a good barometer. I’m a collaborator at heart. I am inspired by the power creative people can generate by combining their reserves. I was a fine artist who studied at Brown (where you are at school!). I accept the unpredictable elements of filmmaking. Sometimes I have opted to do movies for all the right reasons and they have turned out terribly. And then sometimes the questionable ones turn out to be brilliant. My allegiance is to directors, who even with the most unsure of scripts can make something beautiful. Filmmaking is a bit like a symphony. The director points his baton and all the different departments try to create a sense of harmony. (Laughs) I’ll definitely take that. What is it that keeps you going? Well I don’t know because I’m always thinking about quitting [laughs]. But Darren won’t let you! [More laughter] Let’s see if we’re still speaking at the end of this one. Right, so I’m going to be really self-interested for a minute. When you were coming up with Ila’s [Emma’s character in Noah] theme, what did that end up being about? It’s not so much about Ila, it’s more about what Ila represents to me. Obviously there’s the connection between her and Shem (Douglas Booth), also with Ham (Logan Lerman) as well. You don’t want to get into this horny teenager area, you know? But at the same time there is a real passion. To me she represents the good of the world. She became about this representation of goodness really, but there’s also pain given her unique circumstances. I can’t wait! Is there a part of the score that you’re most pleased with that you came up with in Noah? I am right in the midst of it at the moment. It’s been a very difficult score because there is so much music and because the pg.174 The legendary Nephilim. according to Genesis 6:4, they were the “Offspring of the sons of God” and the “Daughters of men”. Numbers 13:33 said they were giants inhabiting Canaan. Why do they have to look like football players? Why do they even have to have a human anatomy? We ended up using ‘sticks’ as inspiration. Artist Sam Messer became the de facto designer of The Watchers. Early on Darren was unhappy with all the images coming back from the Hollywood creature designers. I reached out to Sam who is just about the most talented person that I know and also the most true. He does what he does and does not try to impress. Darren responded to his work immediately and he became a key player in the Watcher design. He is one of my closest friends and he is a great artist. Wonderland We wanted the ark to creak and breathe. We wanted there to be a sense that it may or may not hold together. We wanted the ark to be a clash of art and industry. Survival and family. A dark, brooding, ominous coffin. There had to be a sense that they were trying to build something as big as possible as fast as possible. The straw on the outside of ark looks like it has been thrown to give it a sense of urgency. I used Anselm as inspiration because I like the mix of brutality and beauty in his work. Anselm works with materials that are industrial and put together with haste and emotion. He works with industrial materials in a fine art setting. It’s poetry and nightmare.  pg.175 ARI HANDEL LOGAN LERMAN He has worked on Darren Aronofsky’s latest four films and is also president of Darren’s production company, Protozoa Pictures. He also has a PhD in Neuroscience. ‘Charlie’ in the The Perks of Being a Wallfower. Starred in 3:10 to Yuma with Russell Crowe (protagonist in Noah). About to star with Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Bernthal, Michael Peña, Jason Isaacs, Scott Eastwood and Alicia von Rittberg in Fury. Intends on directing one day soon. Hates mosquitos. Producer, co-writer on Noah Actor, ‘Ham’ in Noah 1 You’ve worked on almost all of Darren’s films as a producer. Can you remember the first time you met? What were your first impressions? I’ve known Darren since before either of us had anything to do with movies. We met in our sophomore year in college. To me he was just a tall skinny red-headed kid from Brooklyn with a big mouth and an attitude. If you had to tell me in a sentence… Why is Noah an important film? Why is a Biblical story still relevant to a modern cinema going audience? The Noah story, and flood narratives in general, have resonated with human beings around the world for centuries. Why should modern audiences be any different? There’s something about the purifying and destructive properties of water, something about a world ending and being restarted, that has a lot power for people. Why is the story important to a religious audience and why is the story important to a secular audience? These two questions are a tricky pair. I wouldn’t presume to say the movie is important to anyone. I also don’t love feeding the divide between those who self-identify as religious and non-religious. It’s unfortunate that ideas and issues get polarised across that divide. For instance, we’ve seen a lot of self-identified religious audiences react negatively to the idea that there might be an “environmental” theme in our telling of the Noah story. Somewhere along the way the notion of environmental became viewed as anti-religious. So I’d love it if our film was a reminder of how central the idea of good stewardship over all creation is in the Bible. On the flip side, it’s amazing to see how many self-identified nonreligious people are put off by the very idea of a film that derives from the Bible and immediately attack the logic of whether Noah could ever build a boat big enough to fit all the animals, or where the water of the flood could ever go, or what have you, as a way of evaluating whether the story is worth telling. I’d love it if our film was a reminder that these stories tap into strong and powerful human concerns. That you don’t have to be a believer to find value and entertainment in Biblical stories. They’re some of our greatest tales. It’s a shame that we can all embrace The Clash of The Titans and Thor but hold back from doing the same for the Bible because of a religious divide. How does Noah compare to Darren’s other films? It’s obviously much bigger in scope than anything else we’ve done. More visual effects and bigger sets. But if you put that aside it shares a lot with the other films. Like the others, it recasts a familiar genre in a new way. Except in this case the genre is Biblical Epic. Wonderland How do you feel about your and Darren’s work being referred to as ‘controversial’? If that means that people feel strongly about it, positively and negatively, that they don’t always agree and they want to talk about why, then I’d like nothing better. Were there any texts other than ‘Noah’ itself that you found useful or inspiring whilst you were writing Noah? What was the most surreal moment for you working on Noah? But yes, we read a lot. I’m a reader and so whenever I’m thinking or struggling with ideas I root around in source material. So I read the Dead Sea scrolls, St. Augustine, all kinds of biblical exegesis and commentaries. I was particularly interested in what Jewish mysticism, myth and commentaries had to say about some of the more obscure parts of the story – who the Watchers were, how the Ark was built, the garments Adam and Eve were given when they left Eden, the life of Methuselah… I hunted down as many clues and stories about those things as I could find. There were many great moments. Seeing Mark Friedberg’s Ark in the middle of a field in Oyster Bay, Long Island for the first time and walking up to the top was a pretty mindblowing moment. The most surreal moment might have been in Iceland when we were shooting a scene from the New World. It was a green mountainside where the Ark was meant to have come to rest. In the valley below we’d set up the beginnings of a few huts that Noah’s family were building. The sky was full of grey clouds and an old Icelandic crew-member turned and said, “Rainbow’s coming”. And sure enough, 10 minutes later, out of nowhere, the clouds blew off and a perfect 180 degree rainbow leaped from one side of the valley to the other framing the spot where the Ark had landed and family was starting again. That was pretty moving. I sneakily stole a peak at one of the books you were reading during Noah that was on your chair. I think it was a philosophical text - to do with good and evil. Oh that worked? I usually just held it up to block the view of me playing Angry Birds. I remember walking through the interior of the ark and being amazed by the scale and detail of the production. I had never seen anything like it. The ark was ginormous and the production designers created all of the hibernating mammals, birds, insects and spiders and placed them all around the different levels of the set... there were so many beautifully detailed creatures. It was incredible and definitely the most surreal moment making this film.  2 Collaborating with Darren and observing his process is a privilege. He is hands down one of the greatest and most inspiring filmmakers out there. I’m proud to have worked with him.  We were also very interested in trying to look at Noah as a human. Once you start to look there are many plays, novels and stories taking a glance at early Genesis that were inspirational. Kierkegaard has a great examination of Abraham walking up the mountain to sacrifice Isaac. And Elie Wiesel delves deeply into the character of Noah. Then there are books that don’t have anything to do with this story on the surface. Something I read early on that inspired me a lot as a character study was Cloudsplitter, which is a tremendous novel by Russell Banks. pg.176 3 Noah is an important story because it reminds us that we have to respect the environment and the animals we share this planet with... or else! ! Wonderland pg.177 TAVI GEVINSON Writer, magazine editor, actress and singer In her current incarnation Tavi is Editor-in-Chief of Rookie Magazine, the online publication for teenage girls with a huge and obsessive international readership. As you can tell from this interview I think she is pretty great. She agreed to talk to me about feminism, fashion and Beyoncé. Photographer BEN RAYNER Fashion LAUREN BLANE Words EMMA WATSON Hair and Makeup Lisa Trunda at Ford Artists using DIOR. All clothing by MIU MIU SS14. added one that said like, “making male journalists butts’ hurt” or something. That’s brilliant. Which brings me to one of the questions that I sent you, you said being an editor and an actress are not too dissimilar and I’m curious about that. I definitely approach them differently but I think at the root of both is empathy. With acting you go into it trying to find a point which you can relate to an experience, that may or may not be like your own, and then with editing a lot of it is about saying this might not be something that relates to my life directly but someone else could benefit from it. You’re still in Chicago right? Where it is freezing right now… Yes I saw! You are in the middle of a polar storm or something?! Yeah it’s negative 10 Fahrenheit. That is crazy, that is so cold. So, where are we at? You graduate this summer and you go to university in the fall, is that right? I’m actually taking a gap year before I go to college. I think the attitude here is very ‘go go go’. Everyone goes straight to college, even if you don’t really know what you want to do, so I just thought it was important to take some time off. I have so many friends coming out of college who, even now, after their three or four year process, don’t have any idea of what they really want to do. Absolutely and I’ve never heard people regret taking a gap year, I’ve only heard people regret not taking one. It just makes so much sense, like it is in England, it should be standard for people to take that time out and realise what they are going to spend all this money and time on. So have you decided where you are going to go to college? I applied to Barnard and NYU. I want to be in New York but I don’t know where I’ll get in or where I’ll choose or whatever yet so I’ve just sent my applications. Trying not to stress out, there is nothing more I can do at this point. So, what are you up to at the moment? At the moment there is no school but yesterday, we had a piece go up on Rookie where one of our writers, she’s 19 and she is studying journalism, wrote this piece about how frustrating it can be when male journalists, especially in music, discount a young woman’s opinion - you know, all those attitudes that girls who like indie music are posers, or that pop music meant for girls is vapid on account of its demographic. So now, some of the writers we called out are responding, and it’s very amusing. [Both laugh] It’s great that you are able to stand back far enough from it and find those kinds of comments amusing. Is she having trouble doing that or is she taking it all in her stride? I think she has taken it in her stride, she has made it an event, like you know on Facebook on your timeline you can make like a life event, she That’s really interesting. I watched yesterday the talk that you gave most recently in Sydney and you said that it was important to kill your idols. That’s interesting. Is that how you find acting – being able to put yourself and your own original work out there in the world because you realised you had a place amongst the people you admired? It’s definitely challenging.  We talked about imposter syndrome when I interviewed you, and there are real shades of that in writing and journalism. So many of the actors in “Enough Said” are people I really admire so that was intimidating too. But I had to remind myself that even though I’ve been really lucky, I also work really hard. I auditioned for the part and I got it, and I started Rookie myself. Girls are taught not to take up space and it holds a lot of us back, so I am all for conquering imposter syndrome. It was interesting because when I was doing my research on you, I thought, “Gah! I would love to see Tavi as a young woman, as an editor of Vogue one day! ”, like a Diana Vreeland, and then actually I wonder whether, for you, Rookie is a space where you have all this freedom and I would hate to see you having to conform in any way? I have thought about that where I’m like, do I want to, not exactly use Rookie as a stepping stone, but is the goal to get to that position where these ideas can be more widespread? But I am just too accustomed to my way of doing things and my creative control and freedom. First of all, I have a better understanding of how journalism should look in a daily website than a monthly print magazine but I also, I’m just too used to what we have. We have the best of both worlds, I love that we can do a book once a year but also think that for the sake of our community it is really important to be this online accessible publication and I don’t think that I would ever want to be, I mean not that anyone is knocking on my door right now, but I don’t think I’d ever want to head a magazine that has this legacy that goes back for so many decades. I’d maybe rather be a friend with that editor-in-chief and send them links to things. I completely understand. I don’t actually want to be that person. I really hope you don’t mind me saying this, and I say it as a compliment, but there is this really very interesting almost Benjamin Button-esque thing going on with you in that when you were younger you portrayed this much older person and then I was looking at pictures of you recently and you look really young and fresh and it’s really interesting to me that you have kind of done things the other way round; you have gone back to front. I know it’s so difficult to look at yourself from outside but I was wondering if you had any insight into yourself on that? I love how you say that and I think that is so interesting and I definitely think that is the case. There is that Bob Dylan lyric which is, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now” and I think that when I was younger I felt like I had a lot to prove. I felt like I had to really challenge beauty standards and I had to show that teenage girls are really smart and only talk about music and fashion and whatever in an intellectual context and since then it’s been different for me. I have nothing to prove and I want to write about pop music, not prestigious fashion shows, and I think I have just become more open minded in terms of my style. I love that you look at it in that way, for me it would be so much more tragic if I had kept my more eccentric style of dressing up just because it had gotten me so much attention a few years ago, because it’s genuinely not my impulse when I get dressed now in the morning or when I get dressed for something when I will be photographed, it is genuinely not my impulse to do what I did before. I’m glad I had that time in my life and it made me extremely happy but it’s just not…I have my energy in so many other places right now that I don’t really use fashion as an outlet in the way I used to. I remember when I was a freshman, at the end of the school year I wrote a post about feeling like, maybe I do want to wear make-up and feel pretty and feel girly and that doesn’t have to be so evil and that doesn’t have to be detrimental to my other issues as a writer and as a person who is interested in other things. I love that you look at it that way and thank you because it’s frustrating to see it simply dismissed as selling out or something like that. It shows self-assurance, it shows a kind of nakedness. It looks as if you have come to a place where you just feel very ok with yourself in a much simpler way. For a long time I utilized fashion to be reflective of myself, so that who I was on the outside would match who I was on the inside. I still believe it’s a powerful tool, but not one that I need anymore. When I gave my talk at the Opera House I just wanted people to focus on what was inside, I wanted to wear something simple, I wanted to put my ideas out there and not feel like I was delivering them as some kind of eccentric. I think what you said is a really great way of putting it. I mean I knew I felt these inclinations now but I hadn’t thought about it in that way, when I get dressed now for an event or whatever I just genuinely feel like keeping it simple and whatever I’m comfortable in and I feel less of a need to make a statement or whatever and draw attention to myself. So one last question, it’s a big one and I’m quite nervous to bring it up because I still haven’t really formulated my own ideas about it but [both laugh] Beyoncé’s new album. I don’t know whether you have spoken to anyone about it, but my friend and I sat and we watched all the videos back-to-back and I was really conflicted. I so admire her confidence to put her music out in that way, in amidst all these very sensationalist MTV performances, I was so psyched about that. On the one hand she is putting herself in a category of a feminist, this very strong woman - and she has that beautiful speech by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in one of her songs - but then the camera, it felt very male, such a male voyeuristic experience of her and I just wondered if you had thoughts about that? That is very interesting and I have definitely been thinking about this since the album came out. I don’t always buy that “it’s empowering” argument when it comes down to a female pop star being explicitly sexual. For me, it takes a lot of convincing. But I actually found this album very inspiring and feminist and, overused as this word is, empowering. The first thing is that she released it as an album all at once. They are not singles, so you have to consider them as one big self-portrait. There are lots of songs about sex, but also songs about being a mother, and being her own person. And I don’t think there’s tension between these different parts of her life - instead, they seem to inform one another, you know? I also think seeing these images of her help to change the standard of what we think of as beautiful or sexually desirable, and she expands it to include someone like herself, a woman of colour. Girls who feel underrepresented now feel less so. She definitely shows off for her husband a lot in the videos, she definitely performs for him, but again, it’s so much her choice. It also shifts the male part of it from a male audience to her husband, and I’m happy that she shows off her marriage in a world full of stereotypes about what monogamous relationships look like for African-Americans. The album is not perfect and Beyoncé is not perfect but I think it is very generous of her to let us watch her relationship to feminism evolve publicly. I know I’m getting into the nitty gritty here! It’s just been on my mind so much. I would say two things. One is that in her position, and for a lot of young musicians, actors or people in our industry, it’s as though you get a memo: don’t be seen with your boyfriend or your wife or your child because you still want your audience to believe or male fans of Beyoncé to believe that they could possess her; that in some alternate universe they could be with her. So by publically exposing her marriage, that she is in a committed relationship, that she has a child, is probably really against that kind of memo and she does make it clear that she is performing for him. And the fact she wasn’t doing it for a label, she was doing it for herself and the control that she has directing it and putting it out there, I agree is making her sexuality empowering because it is her choice. The second is that I would say you do get sense of, “I can be a feminist, I can be an intellectual, I can be all these other things, but I can also be ok with my femininity and being pretty and with all these things that I thought might negate my message or negate what I am about”. That really is the most interesting thing about the album.  It is so inclusive and puts feminism and femininity and female empowerment on such a broad spectrum. Absolutely. I hadn’t thought about the celebrity part of it either - that so many pop stars sell us a fantasy of getting to be with them, and by featuring her husband in her music, Beyoncé doesn’t let anyone feel like they own her. I think she also makes it as known as much as she can without putting it in her music that her dad was her manager, she fired him, she started her own company, and she calls the shots. When I watch this album I feel like she is truly displaying her own sense of agency and it is hard to look at a lot of other pop stars right now and say the same. I don’t mean for that to sound condescending, and I’m obviously not one to argue that young women have no self-awareness or autonomy, but it makes a difference that Beyoncé is the head of her own empire. And, because I’m such a fan of hers, I was also able to compare it to old Destiny’s Child videos and just be blown away by how much more self-possessed she seems now. Anyways, I am so glad you asked me about this because I want to be Beyoncé’s scholar and just talk about her all the time. [Both laugh] Moving on, and this sounds like a really silly question on the back of quite a complicated one, but… dealing with a bad day or a bad situation, do you have a go to thing? For me, it is going to sound really old womanish but I like a hot water bottle and Joni Mitchell. I was just wondering what your comforting equivalent is. Do you have a cat, do you knit…. what do you do? Joni Mitchell is a big one. I think you do just have to listen to Joni Mitchell and all this sad music and really wallow in it, after that I don’t have to look back. I just try to make sure I don’t let things linger and I really try and face them and not just face them but think about them too and then I move on. At the time [me and my boyfriend] broke up, even though we got back together, I was listening a lot to Joanna Newsom, I listened to Taylor Swift and Stevie Nicks, a little Beyoncé, but also at the time I had to go to my friends’ wedding and I was travelling for Rookie stuff so it was really good for me to be reminded of other things in my life. I think it would have been harder if I was just at home by myself. Throwing yourself into work is always a great comforting method. And I ended up being able to use it in my talk. You don’t have to turn bad experiences into art and put that pressure on yourself, but that experience did spark the idea of the talk for me. I couldn’t make or write anything good, so I talked about what you do when you can’t turn your experiences into art. You have been doing what you are doing for so long, and you have to be incredibly mature for your age and I know this is a really annoying question to answer but do you have an opinion on what expedited that? The environment you grew up in? Your parents? Or was that just a natural thing? I think being a writer makes me very aware, even to a point of paranoia, about how I speak and how I express myself. It’s weird because there are some people who grow up giving interviews and everything and you can really tell in that. For some reason I was watching all these old interviews with Lindsay Lohan and she sounds like a young adult, but she doesn’t sound necessarily self-possessed. So I’ve always told myself to let myself sound like a kid, that’s how I’m feeling, but also to make sure that there is maybe substance behind what I say and I’m not just trying to sound fancy. I think all of this happening from a young age, and my spending a lot of time reading other interviews, my brain has just been shifted to be extra cautious. Reading, always a good answer. Thank you so much Tavi. J.K. ROWLING Author and Philanthropist Jo Rowling wrote Harry Potter, the best-selling book series in history, yet she still manages to be funny, kind, warm and real. She spends masses of her time supporting charities such as Comic Relief, Multiple Sclerosis Research through the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic and her own children’s charity Lumos... More recently she wrote novels The Casual Vacancy and The Cuckoo’s Calling (a crime novel under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith). I wanted to ask you about the script that you are writing for Warner Bros for Fantastic Beasts… Warner Bros. came to me ages ago and said they wanted to do something with Fantastic Beasts. I could see the potential in it. I knew something about Newt [Scamander, the fictional author of Fantastic Beasts] having written a little something for Comic Relief. I had imagined a little bit of back story for him… So when Warner Bros. came to me and said they wanted to make a film out of the book I had this simultaneous feeling of “it has a lot of potential,” and another feeling of slight panic that “I know some things about Newt and I don’t want you to ruin that for me!” because I knew who he was. So then I went away and sort of dwelt on what I knew about Newt, not intending to write a script but just trying to collect my thoughts so that I could at least give them the backstory I’d imagined, so that their vision was true to what I knew. Then I really did have one of those moments that always make you phenomenally excited as a writer; but also that you know is going to end up being a ton of work. I thought, “Oh my God, a whole plot’s just descended on me!” But I wanted to do it as I was really excited about it. I wasn’t really thinking about writing the script myself, I thought, you know, I’ll give them this plot and then – fatally - I sat down and thought “I just wonder what it would look like…” and wrote a rough draft in twelve days! Ahhhhh! It wasn’t a great draft but it did show the shape of how it might look. So that is how it all started. Wow, Warner Bros must have been so excited. I think they were kind of stunned. I didn’t tell them I had written it in twelve days. I’ve never written a script. It truly wasn’t that I thought I’d be good at it, I just wanted to get the outline of the story down, and that’s obviously given me a lot to work with going forward. Do you ever worry when you have a great idea, when a piece of inspiration strikes you, that you won’t ever get it down quickly enough? Yes definitely, although I do work on the convenient premise that if it is worth keeping you will remember it. I don’t think I have ever lost or forgotten anything that was really worth remembering! Does inspiration ever strike you at really inconvenient moments? Like when you are driving the car or you are taking the children to school and you just think, “not now”?! Harry Potter musical. I didn’t really see Harry as a musical so we said no to all of that, but Sonia came along with a very thoughtful, very interesting idea. I’m quite excited about that. Will Hermione be in it?! Well Emma if you are offering to play Hermione… [both laugh] I tell you what I really want. I want you and Dan and Rupert in really heavy make-up in the background of a scene in Fantastic Beasts, and I’ll join you and we’ll sit in a bar room having a laugh for an afternoon. Do you not think that would be fantastic? That sounds like the most fun I can imagine having! That is why I don’t drive, I swear to God. I cannot drive. People look at me and think, ‘how can you be a woman of forty-eight and not drive a car?’ But I know myself and I know how detached I am from my physical surroundings. And we can mess around as extras in the background. My husband has taken to warning me from three rooms away that he is getting closer, so that I don’t scream. It’s ridiculous because obviously I do know that I live with my husband, but that’s how jumpy I am. He’s gotten used to the fact that I’m a long way away in my head and that I get disconcerted when someone sneaks up on me. GENIUS! But that tendency does have its advantages because I’m able to concentrate to a degree where I can totally shut everyone out, write it down or really commit it to memory, and then, you know, I’ve got it in the bank. I do think my apprenticeship writing the first three Harry Potters when I was a single mother and didn’t have a lot of support meant that I learned to be very efficient at using the time that I have. You also announced that you’re going to collaborate on a theatre production. Yes, that was a really interesting idea that Sonia Friedman came up with. I’ve been so resistant for a long time about theatre productions. Quite a few people wanted to do a Wonderland And then we can see if anyone can spot us. I personally would like to be in drag, just to make sure no one can spot me at all. There are so many things that you could say you have achieved, what is the most meaningful to you? What is your greatest triumph? Of what I’ve written, Deathly Hallows was a phenomenally emotional experience and my favourite of the Potter series by a mile. It wasn’t just about the writing, it was wrapping up a story that had taken me through seventeen years of my life and had meant as much as any literary creation can mean to any writer. I mean, not just because it transformed my life materially, which of course it did, but that comes a poor fourth or fifth compared to the other things that Harry Potter did for me. But, I hope that the best is still to come. Nothing will ever top Potter in terms of popularity, I’ve accepted that, but on my death bed I may look back on one of my least popular books and it may well turn out to be the one I was proudest of, because different things matter to the writer. I thought we should discuss Hermione… I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times but now that you have written the books, do you have a new perspective on how you relate to Hermione and the relationship you have with her or had with her? I know that Hermione is incredibly recognisable to a lot of readers and yet you don’t see a lot of Hermiones in film or on TV except to be laughed at. I mean that the intense, clever, in some ways not terribly self-aware, girl is rarely the heroine and I really wanted her to be the heroine. She is part of me, although she is not wholly me. I think that is how I might have appeared to people when I was younger, but that is not really how I was inside. What I will say is that I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment. That’s how it was conceived, really. For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione with Ron. Ah. I know, I’m sorry, I can hear the rage and fury it might cause some fans, but if I’m absolutely honest, distance has given me perspective on that. It was a choice I made for very personal reasons, not for reasons of credibility. Am I breaking people’s hearts by saying this? I hope not. I don’t know. I think there are fans out there who know that too and who wonder whether Ron would have really been able to make her happy. Yes exactly. And vice versa. It was a young relationship. I think the attraction itself is plausible but the combative side of it… I’m not sure you could have got over that in an adult relationship, there was too much fundamental incompatibility. I can’t believe we are saying all of this - this is Potter heresy! I know, it is heresy. pg.184 In some ways Hermione and Harry are a better fit and I’ll tell you something very strange. When I wrote Hallows, I felt this quite strongly when I had Hermione and Harry together in the tent! I hadn’t told [Steve] Kloves that and when he wrote the script he felt exactly the same thing at exactly the same point. Exactly. I love Hermione. I love her too. Oh, maybe she and Ron will be alright with a bit of counseling, you know. I wonder what happens at wizard marriage counseling? They’ll probably be fine. He needs to works on his self-esteem issues and she needs to work on being a little less critical. That is just so interesting because when I was doing the scene I said to David [Heyman]: “This isn’t in the book, she didn’t write this”. I’m not sure I am comfortable insinuating something however subtle it is! I think it makes sense to me that Ron would make friends with the most famous wizard in the school because I think life presents to you over and over again your biggest and most painful fear until you conquer it. It just keeps coming up. Yes, but David and Steve - they felt what I felt when writing it. That is so strange. And actually I liked that scene in the film, because it was articulating something I hadn’t said but I had felt. I really liked it and I thought that it was right. I think you do feel the ghost of what could have been in that scene. That is so true, it has happened in my own life. The issue keeps coming up because you are drawn to it and you are putting yourself in front of it all the time. At a certain point you have to choose what to do about it and sometimes conquering it is choosing to say: I don’t want that anymore, I’m going to stop walking up to you because there is nothing there for me. But yes, you’re so right, that’s very insightful! Ron’s used to playing second fiddle. I think that’s a comfortable role for him, but at a certain point he has to be his own man, doesn’t he? It’s a really haunting scene. It is funny because it really divided people. Some people loved that scene and some people really didn’t. Yes, some people utterly hated it. But that is true of so many really good scenes in books and films; they evoke that strong positive/ negative feeling. I was fine with it, I liked it. I remember really loving shooting those scenes that don’t have any dialogue, where you are just kind of trying to express a moment in time and a feeling without saying anything. It was just Dan and I spontaneously sort of trying to convey an idea and it was really fun. And you got it perfectly, you got perfectly the sort of mixture of awkwardness and genuine emotion, because it teeters on the edge of “what are we doing? Oh come on let’s do it anyway”, which I thought was just right for that time. I think it was just the sense that in the moment they needed to be together and be kids and raise each others morale. That is just it, you are so right. All this says something very Yes and until he does it is unresolved. It is unfinished business. So maybe life presented this to him enough times until he had to make a choice and become the man that Hermione needs. powerful about the character of Hermione as well. Hermione was the one that stuck with Harry all the way through that last installment, that very last part of the adventure. It wasn’t Ron, which also says something very powerful about Ron. He was injured in a way, in his self-esteem, from the start of the series. He always knew he came second to fourth best, and then he had to make friends with the hero of it all and that’s a hell of a position to be in, eternally overshadowed. So Ron had to act out in that way at some point. But Hermione’s always there for Harry. I remember you sent me a Wonderland note after you read Hallows and before you starting shooting, and said something about that, because it was Hermione’s journey as much as Harry’s at the end. I completely agree and the fact that they were true equals and the fact that she really said goodbye to her family makes it her sacrifice too. Yes, her sacrifice was massive, completely. A very calculated act of bravery. That is not an ‘in the moment’ act of bravery where emotion carries you through, that is a deliberate choice. Just like her creator, she has a real weakness for a funny man. These uptight girls, they do like them funny. They do like them funny, they need them funny. It’s such a relief from being so intense yourself - you need someone who takes life, or appears to take life, a little more light heartedly. Definitely so important. Thank you so much for doing this. pg.185 JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT Joseph Gordon-Levitt - Actor, director, screenwriter, producer and editor Lincoln, Looper, The Dark Knight Rises, 50/50, Inception, (500) Days of Summer. Joe keeps choosing interesting movies and playing great roles all whilst running HitRecord, an online collaborative production company. I love that he sings and dances every chance he gets. What gave you the idea for HitRecord? Do you like that it helps connect you with the world outside of the traditional film industry? It’s true, I don’t give myself much time off.  And, even when I’m not working I’m always making things — songs, voices in my head… I started saying this little turn of phrase, “to hit record” (like, are we recording?) in my early twenties.  The red circle REC button became this personal symbol for me to self-motivate, make things, push the button. The open collaborative production company that it’s become? I really can’t take credit for having that idea all by myself.  It was more of an organic evolution within a feedback loop between me and the community that gradually formed around the HitRecord.org website my brother and I set up. You’ve described yourself as a feminist. Why do you think it is an important issue? To me, the term feminism just means that nobody needs to be boxed into any kind of identity based on their gender, male or female. Is there anyone you think has spoken particularly eloquently on the topic recently? My mom. Do you ever struggle watching your younger self on camera? You’ve taken HitRecord to TV. So cool. What is the best thing for you personally about being involved with HitRecord? Everybody gets a bit freaked out at the sight of their own face or the sound of their own voice.  I was no exception.  However, just through sheer repetition, spending tons of time recording little things, pointing the camera at myself, and watching it back, I think I’ve gotten used to it. Everything about HitRecord On TV is very personal to me, largely because of its origins.  And as grateful as I am to be able to work within the established entertainment industry, I’m equally excited to get to collaborate with artists from all over the world, who don’t necessarily have an established career in Hollywood, but who are just as talented as plenty of the people who do. Who or what taught you the most about acting? Had you always wanted to take it to TV? When Jared Geller, my producing partner, and I wrote down our goals for HitRecord back in 2009, “TV show” was the one that rounded out the list.  Since our start we’ve been able to accomplish most of the goals we set — we’ve put out books, gone on tour, screened work at festivals.  And now we get to make a TV show.  Seems like it’s time to set new goals! :O) What is your favourite film role to date? The one you are most proud of? Oh, I couldn’t pick one!  But how about a lesser-seen movie called Hesher.  I play a diabolical Mary Poppins of sorts, if Mary Poppins smoked a lot of cigarettes and listened to Metallica.   Wonderland Which directors are you still dying to work with? I only ever had one acting teacher.  His name was Kevin McDermott, and I took classes with him when I was quite young, starting when I was eight, and he and I have kept in touch over the years.  One of the many things I remember he emphasized was “commitment”.  You have to commit all the way to what you’re doing.  If you’re hesitant or uncertain, all is lost. There’s so many.  I know you just worked with Aronofsky, and he’s one of my favorites that I’d really love to work with.   What do you do when you aren’t working (although it sounds like you work a lot...)? pg.186 EZRA MILLER Musician, activist, actor, band member of ‘Sons of an Illustrious Father’ We met making The Perks of Being a Wallflower. He might have scared the life out of you in We Need To Talk About Kevin’. He has one frost bitten toe from his escapades in the Arctic for Greenpeace. “My life was altered by the trip to the Arctic in a number of ways. There are small things, like a bit of frostbite in the tips of my digits that ache a little when chilled or my redefinition of “cold” as a relative concept. But the real changes were in my perception of our relationship as a species to the planet. You see, a big part of my trip to the Arctic was concerned with trying to learn as much about our changing climate and the Arctic’s key role in this. I talked to Columbia scientists, environmental activists and indigenous residents of the Arctic Circle. What I discovered is that the process by which humans are releasing carbon into the atmosphere and heating it (98% scientific consensus worldwide is now that climate change is, in fact, anthropogenic or man-made) is moving at an alarmingly speedy rate. The melting in the Northern Arctic offers us a troubling physical representation of this warming in that since the beginning of satellite records in 1979, somewhere around 3/4 of the originally visible sea ice is gone. The truth is that climate change is moving faster than any scientists predicted it would, and it now seems that we may have only a matter of decades to seriously mitigate our rates of fossil fuel combustion before we are on an irreversible road to an inhospitable planet, like all the other planets in our known universe, incapable of sustaining life. In terms of small changes people can do to affect climate change... Well, all the things we’ve heard about how we as individuals can halt climate change (shop locally, travel with mass transport, recycle and compost our waste etc.) are all good and important things to do. However, at the end of the day, a large percentage of our carbon output is not personal, or even municipal. It is industrial. Corporations are responsible for the massive outputs of carbon as they are Much, it seems, is timeless. Hearts keep falling in love and getting broken, that does not seem to change at all. I like period pieces. It’s a bit like building a time machine. I’m looking forward to traveling to other times. Hopefully I can visit the future soon, or perhaps the 70’s to improve my roller disco skills. The first role of clothing in my life is to warm and comfort and cover my body. The magic of clothes these days is that, of course, by putting clothes on your body at all, you are already involving yourself in the artwork of fashion. Oscar Wilde said that it’s an “art form so ugly we have to change it every three months or so” and I strongly identify with that sentiment in my fashion choices. Often I think I am fleeing the ugliness of the innate vanity and the conformity of it, towards the beauty and absurdity of it. Lots of fake fur and bright color and pajamas.  simultaneously responsible for the maintenance of a fossil fuelreliant energy economy (for a reference of what I’m referring to, check out the documentary, “Who Killed the Electric Car?”). Corporations are doing this because their obligations are to their shareholders, and their responsibility to do everything they can to raise profits every quarter. The only way that they can make the change to cleaner energy is if government creates a taxation system where cleaner energy is more profitable. Now, how do we convince governments internationally to see the light? That’s where we come in. We need a Wonderland global movement to rally public demand for this governmental action. Composting and recycling and shopping locally are critical as well, though, don’t get me wrong. I play Leon Dupuis in Madame Bovary, the third failed romance of Madame Bovary. Leon is that boy who starts an affair with a married woman and then runs when, months and months into the affair, the woman talks about leaving her husband. Essentially he is a boy with a surplus of romantic vision, but some shortfall in terms of follow through. What was my favourite Perks memory? I’m sure you could understand why this question is difficult to answer. We had so many magical and formative experiences but I think ultimately, it was talking to all the audience members, especially younger folks, who identified so strongly with the film and found watching it to be a positive life experience. There’s something that continues to be so rewarding and confirming about that. We had so many magical and fun and mischevious times but I’d have to say that when I was having such a hard time and you took such good care of me and kept me healthy and let me rest in your better-smelling room. It often seems the harder times are even more critical in the formation of a friendship.   pg.187 Lorde Musician I first heard Royals on the radio in San Francisco last summer and almost had to stop the car. Lorde’s lyrics have been providing biting social commentary on the pop scene ever since. Gutsy, clever, original, and in control… I am really excited she exists. Hi lady, where are you right now?   I’m in my recording studio.   What are you working on?   I don’t have any specific projects, I’m just kind of getting into it.  It is just good to be in the studio I feel.   So I was being a crazy stalker today and I was reading as much as I could about you which I know sounds awful.   You’re weird.   I know… No it’s really cool because the only thing I knew about you was your music, I know your song lyrics by heart, but other than that I don’t know much about you. I saw that you kind of got into music because you love poetry and that is how I got into acting because I won a poetry competition.   How does that take you into acting?   Well I guess it didn’t other than that I did these poetry recitals and then I was on the debate team, so those were my kind of experiences of performing. And then my drama teacher kind of convinced me that I should try acting, and then purely by coincidence I got the part in Harry Potter and … the rest is history. But anyway, back to you, I wondered if you remember the first poem you ever memorised or if you have a favourite poem purely for a nostalgic reason or if you have a poem that you love?   To tell you the truth I would say that short fiction is more my place. Like I’m really into poetry and I’ve always written it but my mum is a poet and I kind of feel like you stay away from the stuff your parents do, you know?   So short fiction, what have you read recently that you loved?   Oh, I am trying to think of one specific story... The first Raymond Carver, which is called ‘Tell The Women We’re Going’ and it’s just really spooky. It’s not really Raymond Carver’s best story but what he is good at is making something really intense and really emotional without anything really happening. That was the first story I read where I was like, woah, short fiction is the coolest thing ever.   I love the androgyny, by the way of ‘Lorde’, I think it is a great name. I know you’re fascinated by royalty. Have you ever read Tatler, that English magazine about English aristocracy? If you are into that stuff it’s royal aristocracy mecca so if you ever come to England it’s definitely worth checking out.   Is it current aristocracy?   Yes and every six months or so they put Princess Diana on the cover or Grace Kelly, you know, they are repeated quite a lot.   I think I need a subscription, this sounds important.   I thought when I read it, ‘Ah if she doesn’t she should’. You seem like you have really been at the helm of all of your enterprises so far. It doesn’t seem like you were manufactured or that you had received media training or anything like that. How much was pre-conceived in terms of not just your look but your whole ethos? Or were you just there and that was it?   The artists that I relate to, you can tell their public persona is just an extension of who they actually are. I think that is the most authentic way to do it and it just works out. If I’m making this shit up everyone is just going to know.   Definitely.   I try to be as true to myself as possible. Everything I wear is a slightly more high-end version of something I already own or something I would have cut out of a magazine five years ago. I think the good thing about having your finger in every pie, which I do with my music, is that I’m involved on the marketing end and on the creative end. I pretty much do everything and it doesn’t feel like it is coming from a huge record company hopefully.   Is there anything that you have said that got interpreted in a way that was really…   Yes. This is honestly like eight or nine months ago, when I had 5,000 twitter followers, when I just spoke about pop culture in a really frank, uncensored way because it interested me. I said something about pop stars having this unattainability that I didn’t think was right and I mentioned Taylor Swift’s name. I don’t regret much that I have said but that was one where afterwards I was like, of all the people why Wonderland would you mention Taylor Swift?! There is so much about her which is awesome. I totally approached that one wrong and I apologised for it on my Tumblr and made sure that people read that because I felt so bad.   To a certain extent she knows after the marketing and manufacturing and styling she comes across as unattainable. I mean I know that I do and I get very frustrated by it…   I don’t know whether you do, I don’t know about that   I try not to but by the time I’ve had a stylist, I’ve had hair, I’ve had make up, amazing lighting, I’m wearing the most beautiful dress you have ever seen in your life, of course I look like … you know. And I get really sad because people tweet stuff to me like ‘I just want to die because I don’t look like Emma Watson’, and you just feel like screaming noo! It’s all a construction, you know?     It’s the worst thing and I get that all the time. I try and break the barrier a bit by looking normal. It is a weird thing for sure.     What is your one item that you put on and you just feel yourself?   When I wear black I’m in my zone. I’m safe in it. A label I like to wear a lot is Acne.   I love Acne, such a good choice.   And their spring/summer stuff is mental so I wear Acne a lot when I can afford to, it’s just a nice power thing. I feel very powerful in their clothes.   Yeah. Did you see the Comme des Garçons spring/summer collection?   Don’t even talk to me about Comme des Garçons. It’s my favourite.   It is so good, so good.  That collection really blew me away. I sometimes wish I was a performer so I could wear all these crazy dresses.   You could just rock it.   Just rock up to the Golden Globes in a crazy black number… I’ll consider it, I’ll definitely consider it. Your fame is still a relatively new thing for you to be dealing with and I’m interested, does it stress you out that people who are close to you become involved in a way that you wish they didn’t? How do you feel about it?   That is always a concern for me because, and you’ll know this, I’ve put myself out there so I expect it, I can take it. But my little sister she shouldn’t have to deal with that. I mean, it’s not bad, my family has been ok but people are just too curious these days. They love to know everything. In some ways I wish I could just take it all and have no one else affected by it...   Did you have an instagram account before your album came out for example?   No. I made tumblr, twitter and instagram for the music. Having not had much experience with that kind of interaction, you don’t know about crazy people who hate you. It’s definitely good to get off twitter for a while.   Definitely. Did you see Jimmy Kimmel, where celebrities read horrible tweets that have been said about them?   (Laughs) Yeah   I love them. It puts it into perspective, it is so funny and in a really sick and twisted way you have to try and laugh because otherwise you’ll cry.   People are so weird. Often it’s like, “oh, you know I want to get a rise out of Emma Watson, if she blocks me she has noticed me”.  That’s an interesting mentality, a horrible mentality. The fact that you can bully someone and there be no accountability whatsoever, that there be no way of tracing or tracking, and all at the click of a button, I think it is just going to make growing up…   It makes young people have to be fearless.   You’re just in the studio right now but are you taking a break, are you going on tour, what are you up to at the moment?   I’m on tour for most of this year which will be fun. I’ve never toured for extended periods so it will be fun to take the music to people. I think my mum and my sister, who is 19, are going to alternate being with me. My sister, she is super smart, she is on an exchange in Germany with university right now. She is a pg.188 really big Harry Potter fan, she said “IF anyone from Harry Potter ever tweets you or gets in contact with you, I will do your laundry for a week - you just have to talk to them!”   That is so crazy!  OK. Tour Food…  Do you have marmite in New Zealand?   We do, we are big marmite people here.   Ah amazing, so do you like marmite?    I do, I’m a big marmite fan.   Great, that’s good news. Have you ever had marmite and apple together?   No! What?   I am telling you this is something you really need to experience. It is so good. A little piece of sliced apple with a tiny bit of marmite on it is life changing.    I am going to try this, you are insane.   Really, really, really good.   Anyhow, what is the song you are most proud of from your last album?   The song I am most proud of is a song called Ribs, which is about ageing and transitioning into adult responsibilities. I was just starting to take music seriously and I was missing out on seeing my friends and stuff. It was a crazy thing but I like that song because sonically we made it warm and comforting. It was an issue that was freaking me out a bit at the time, so when I listen to that song I can feel comforted by what I am listening to, which is cool.   Do you find it difficult to be ‘young and carefree’ when you are under so much pressure to ‘perform’ in every sense of the word?  How old were you when you were signed?   I was thirteen when I signed on for development, where you can leave if you don’t want to do it. Then a proper record company signed me last year when I was sixteen. I think youth comes through in different ways! I definitely try to be me all the time and you can see that when I perform or in my interviews. Sometimes I feel like I should act grown-up because people are watching, like when your parents have friends over for dinner or something.   Is there anything other than music you would like to try?   YES! I want to direct and I want to get into photography and cinematography from a technical side. I want to make clothes. I want to run my own record label. I want to start a magazine!   Do you direct your own music videos?   Yes! I write the treatments and run casting and write endless notes. I’m a super visual person, so it’s fun for me.   Wow. How do you stop people trying to tell you that you are too young to be doing things like this?   I just don’t listen. You couldn’t say dumber stuff to ambitious young people.   Have you always been comfortable or felt okay with ‘taking up space’? Sorry for the strange question.   No, it’s good! I actually felt very uncomfortable with it for a long time. But basically the past year has made me a confident person.     That’s good. I’m glad you have that. My parents always treated me like an adult.   Yup mine too! Which is such a cool way to treat young people. I try and do it when I meet people younger than me as well. I remember always loving teachers who gave me adult books to read, too.   Do your parents help you with this?   I come from a Croatian/Irish family, so everyone else is super loud. They’ve always encouraged doing drama and speech contests and that stuff so yes, they definitely support me when I feel low about something I’ve read.   Wonderland Me too. I think kids are often smarter than adults anyway.   YES. They are creative because they aren’t limited, which, to me, is a kind of magic.   What TV shows do you watch?   Well my favourite is The Sopranos. I love Boardwalk Empire and Mad Men too. But also Tim and Eric and this web show called Nathan For You, and my bandmates want me to watch The Office with them.   English or American?   English. I’m told it’s the best.   I presented at the Golden Globes this year and met Tina Fey. Have you read Tina Fey’s book Bossy Pants?   No! But I really want to.   The book is amazing, I’ll send it to you as a thank you for doing this.   Oh!! Amazing, I would love that.   She has a great chapter about how stupid and ridiculous photo shoots are.   I need to read that.   Nobody has ever expressed the true awfulness of photoshoots so perfectly. Have you gotten used to them yet?   I kind of have. I have like one face I do. And I can’t smile and people always ask me to smile in them. So I’ve made it my thing, the fierce face.   Do they ever ask you to ‘smile with teeth’?   YES!   I’m so bad at it.   Big smiles! I loved you in The Bling Ring by the way. I thought that was a crazy thing for you! I mean crazy as in how you embodied Nicki and her mannerisms.   Thank you. It was so freeing. I left myself behind completely. I want to do more parts like that. You’ve been so generous. Thank you Lady. Good luck with it all. pg.189 SOFIA COPPOLA CHRISTOPHER RAEBURN Screenwriter, producer, director Fashion Designer Previous work includes Somewhere, Marie Antoinette, Lost in Translation and The Virgin Suicides. Sofia had the imagination to write and then offer me the most complex and challenging female role I have played to date, as Nicki in The Bling Ring. I am grateful to her for seeing me outside of the box. I am also just happy I got to watch her from afar for six weeks. Understated yet incredible. “My Vogue Italia cover I remember being a very 90’s fashion moment at Industria I think. Steven (Meisel) was nice and saw me in a way I didn’t think of myself. I wouldn’t bring back my clothing line Milkfed. That was a fun project when I was in my early 20’s trying to figure out what I wanted to do, but it was such a different time and it made sense then. I wouldn’t do a TV series. I’m more interested in the idea of a mini series... but a TV series could be fun, but I don’t have any plans to. I’m a bit out of it with new bands, but I like Sleigh Bells and what Julian Casablancas does and Phoenix of course... I like a song by Tennis called Mean Streets. I love the song Vienna by Ultravox, which I listened to a lot in the car when we were shooting The Bling Ring in LA. My favourites are Roxy Music and Elvis Costello.” I love the south of Italy, my family has a place that’s a small hotel in Basilicata, and I love the Amalfi Coast... I also love Marrakech, which feels exotic. JONAH HILL Actor Jonah came into public consciousness as Seth in Superbad and has since proved himself to be one of the most talented and versatile actors of his class. Oscar-nominated for Moneyball and The Wolf of Wall Street… he is still humble. And really funny. “Flirting With Disaster and Three Kings are two of my favourite films, so to have the first director I ever worked for be David O. Russell was intimidating to say the least. Thinking back I was so clueless about everything. I had only been in plays and had no idea whether the camera was on me or not. My character in The Wolf Of Wall Street, ‘Diamond’ Donnie Azoff, is someone who values money and wealth over all else. He has no impulse control. No morality. A hard person to feel any love for, but at times, very entertaining.  Wonderland Martin Scorsese is my favorite filmmaker of all time. It was an actual dream to even meet him, let alone work with him for six months. It was beyond dream-like and I miss it every day.  I would say my creative taste would be a collision of Scorsese and The Simpsons. When I got to hear my voice and see myself in Springfield I felt like I was 8 years old again. I have so many nostalgic, safe and warm feelings from The Simpsons. It was beautiful to get to talk to Bart.” pg.190 Graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Womenswear. Christopher has received acclaim for his ‘remade ethos’ and collections that celebrate a particularly British way of seeing things. We met in New York at a British fashion party Anna Wintour threw in 2010. He embodies British fashion with a conscience. Here he discusses recycling, repurposing and a wedding dress made from a parachute. So each season you design an animal alongside the collection and so far you’ve had a hare, a fox and a squirrel join the ranks. Was there any reason behind them? What do they symbolise or represent?   Well we make them every season from our offcuts in the studio and so on the one hand they represent the brand in general, in terms of its environmental attitude and recycling, but then also they’re a little bit of fun, which is really important. I guess they reinforce the quirky Britishness of the brand which we always want to be central to what we do. It’s also our tenth animal this season and we’ve branched out a little bit to a polar bear which is quite fun. What’s really great is being able to develop the animal concept into the main collection, and now animal bags in particular are some of our best sellers. They’re done from organic re-dyed leather, everything made in England, so it’s really about underpinning the message of the brand.   Your work is known for being sustainable, remade and recycled, is that something that has always been a part of your life, or is that something that has evolved?   I’m quite open about the fact that it sort of developed as a really happy accident and in fact the reason that I started reusing particular military fabrics was more from a love of functionality and the original garments and the fabrics that they’re made from. What fascinated me particularly when I was at university was that you couldn’t buy for example a 50 or 60-year-old wool on a roll but yet there were thousands, and I mean tens of thousands, of these jackets that had never been worn, still beautifully wrapped in wax paper. Something really resonated with me, maybe it’s the archaeologist in me and all of that history; it just seemed like quite a natural step to say, ‘why don’t we reuse these?’ I guess maybe it’s also an inherited make and mend attitude. I’ve got an amazing photo of my grandmother who’d married December 21st 1941 outside a church in a wedding dress and it’s made out of parachutes, so I think this may be something quite wonderfully ingrained in me.   Would you argue that luxury goods are more sustainable than high street garments? Do in something that they know is going to be quite special, you’re not going to see it in every shop window throughout the world, so it gives me a lot of confidence I have to say.   With so many companies taking on a sort of ethos as a marketing gimmick, is it better to take on a you think that this is helping to reduce consumerism?   It’s sort of funny because I sight Savile Row traditions as being an amazing example of a completely sustainable design and development process. If you buy a piece from Savile Row, generally speaking, you know that the fabric is made in England, and all of the workmanship is done by local craftsman and local production, but then also you have to be very honest that it’s a very expensive product as well. But in terms of localisation there’s something really interesting there as a sort of general idea about provenance being really important to sustainability, and maybe it’s a reaction to fast fashion and high street brands, we want a bit more connection. I’ve noticed it particularly with Menswear, and with Womenswear to be fair, but people are more prepared to invest quietly conscientious approach?   I mean for me it’s about making the right choice. It’s very straightforward. I think as a young designer, hopefully I’m still young, you have a sort of obligation to what you’re producing, and where, and ultimately what from as well. And if throughout that process you’re doing or making the right choices then it just makes good sense. The other thing is being super straightforward, why would you not do it? Why would you not want to design sustainably? I’ve been really proud obviously since my company has grown, the brands I’ve been able to collaborate and consult with have come to me because of that quite straightforward approach.   Do you think it’s easier for younger/smaller designers, companies and brands to do Wonderland that because they’re starting now when there’s so much education about the importance of sustainability, and when they have greater control over their product versus a huge company?   A smaller start up has more agility within it, but then the opportunity for say the giant sportswear brands, if they reduced their use of resources by say 5% then the impact would be phenomenal. And so my interest as well is that while my own company is growing, and I’m very proud about that, the more that I’m collaborating and working with big brands, the sort of analogy I’ve used before is – being one of the sucker fish on the side of a shark the opportunity to clean the shark and steer it as you’re doing it, is brilliant.   What do you think it would be that makes these larger brands and companies think more seriously about sustainability?   The good news is that I think a lot of them already are and it’s not just because they’re trying to tick the right box because, undeniably, raw materials are running out, forcing us into ways of making better choices, and even if you look at things from a business level, if companies can be ahead of the game, and all of them working in a sustainable manner they know that long term, that’s going to be a benefit for them.  So I kind of hope, well I’ve seen it, and I believe it that there are a lot of big companies out there already making fundamental changes to the way that they operate.   I’ve just done a film called Noah, which is about God’s decision to flood the world because he doesn’t see human beings changing their ways and it’s too late. I wonder if you think these companies will pull themselves round or make these changes fast enough?   That I don’t know of course, but it’s very much a make or break point I think. I worked at NIKE for their summit at Portland for 2020 over the summer, where I was able pg.191 GUILLERMO DEL TORO Director, screenwriter, producer, and novelist King of all things magical, monstrous, horrifying, beastly and poetic. An amazing mind, heart and talent. I wanted to include some of the sketches from his new book, Cabinet of Curiosities, which gives just a small insight into the preparation he does before he starts his films. to meet with a lot of the biggest companies in the world, and was able to talk to them - chemical companies and manufacturers – all in one room, and actually just genuinely talk about how they’re going to make significant changes by 2020. You have to forcefully believe that these people aren’t there to waste their time.   Do you think that consumers can pressurise companies, or is it down to the media? If they see companies that are sustainable and are doing well, and see that there is a demand for that it also helps.   Sure. It does, but my view in the most respectful way, with consumers in general, you have to offer them a product that they want. Change has to be design-led and it’s really important to ultimately offer a product that the consumer wants. They may be buying that product without realising that it’s recycled or made using completely sustainable means, but then to get that product home and to read all about it, that’s kind of where the future sort of has to be. That balance of design and value and fabric choice, but it’s not about having a mission and preaching it on a soap box. It’s about genuinely putting the research in and creating a product that has value to people.   I would love to be able to only wear clothes that I knew were sustainable, where I knew that no one was harmed in the process of something I am wearing being made, that I could always wear and feel good about where it came from, but sadly there aren’t really enough brands for me to be able to do that. It’s still too niche at this moment in time, but my dream would be to be do a press junket for film and say, ‘ok here are thirteen brands who have signed on and do have sustainable manifestos and ethical credentials and I wont wear ones that don’t.’   Again, when I think back, even when I was studying first at Middlesex and then at the Royal College, not that sustainability didn’t exist or anything like that, but there wasn’t that much in sort of the academic circles at that point. Now there are whole modules on sustainability so you’ve got hundreds of students coming out every year that have been specifically trained in something that ten years ago wasn’t there. It Wonderland takes time of course to get done and needs a lot of reassurance, and those big brands now have places for those people, where again ten years ago they really didn’t.   In an ideal world, who is your dream client? Who would you love to see wearing your clothing?  Well I think the reality is that we’re edging ever closer, and when I look at it, I’m super proud. We deal with over 70 stockists in the world, and we deal with the best you know, Barney’s with Colette, and I’m so proud that that customer is going in there that is looking for quality, provenance and something very special they’re not going to see everywhere. So for me it’s not about that celebrity which you’d expect. It is about real people who are actually investing, and I use that word on purpose, as part of genuine desire to do things differently and I hope step-by-step we’re kind of getting there. It’s amazing. Sometimes I meet customers who genuinely know everything about the brand and the fabrics, and every collection we’ve ever done; they kind of know more than I do myself. It’s kind of incredible and can be really inspiring, because it might be an email from someone in Stockholm or Japan who has really taken the time to describe what they like about the brand or why they support it, it’s quite a special thing. While I was at Art College it certainly wasn’t what I was expecting, it really motivates you to push harder.   In terms of the type of client you’re seeing wear your clothes, are they are relatively active and outdoorsy? Would you quite like the brand not to be limited to that?   Well the brilliant thing is, I mean our Womenswear, the demographic goes from early twenties to seventy year old women who buy our parkas, who are really looking for something understated and very wearable but a little bit different. Something that’s comfortable but is obviously going to make them feel good. Which movie of yours do you have the most affection for and why?  score for Avalon, Elephant Man and a few others In many ways The Devil’s Backbone and, strangely enough, Pacific Rim. In both instances I felt I was doing exactly what I set to do when I took the leap - when I went into production. They represent my two sides: the eternal kid and the perpetual pessimist. When did your monsters begin? monsters having what is going on currently?  Do you listen to any particular music when you write/create? Film music, most of the time. I make a playlist for each project. For example, I wrote Pan’s Labyrinth listening, mostly, to Arvo Part's Spiegel Im Spiegel mixed with the pg.192 interest with Do you see relevance to in the world The monsters I love are the patron saints of imperfections. However, we are surrounded by another type of monsters; monsters that look good - that are well-tailored, that have white, shiny smiles. They lie to us and tell us to trust them and tell us that everything is going to be all right. I find that loving the darker side of things makes you less susceptible to being fooled Wonderland by these incandescent liars. Truth lies in imperfection. Perfection is an illusion created to dominate our egos. You have a museum as part of your home in LA cataloguing all sorts of weird and wonderful things. When did it become necessary to have a separate space for these things and why do you like collecting? The only virtue that unifies my life, my house or my movies is that I have an overwhelming passion to arrange and create beautiful things out of genres or objects that people despise. I choose to tell stories utilising ideas or genres that are inherently flawed or frowned upon. I don't tackle "big" genres, "A" genres. I tackle what I love. In the same manner I collect what piques my interest and I may end up enshrining a $3 dollar toy next to an original Arthur Rackham watercolor or a rubber "oily juggler" next to an Edward Gorey. In my family home, these things were out of context and I decide to create my own environment - a place where I could live and breathe and be myself. The house grew and grew and is now 11,000 square feet or so. And, to this day, it’s the place I am the happiest at. pg.193 LENA DUNHAM PHARRELL Writer, director, actor, mogul Singer-songwriter, rapper, record producer, fashion designer, composer and drummer. Lena makes me proud to be a 21st century female. That’s probably all I need to say. If you haven’t watched Girls or read her Twitter… I highly recommend it. The king of collaboration my friend Irial and I fell in love with him when we were thirteen. He is currently scoring The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and singing my favourite song, Happy. If you weren’t playing Hannah in Girls yourself, who would you cast as your dream person to play her? Such a good question: Alison Pill, Greta Gerwig, Lupita Nyong’o, YOU. today I thought: “Well, I get that instinct” but I think it’s so important, if you have strong beliefs, not to be bullied by the media. It’s no different than a mob of angry townspeople in the 1500’s - it’s just terrifyingly impersonal, because it’s the Internet. To inappropriately Could you live anywhere other than New York? My favorite cities besides my own are Havana and Stockholm. Both beautiful, unique, full of gorgeous people, with universal healthcare... Who do you call when you feel unsure of yourself? My father. He’s my harshest critic but also my fiercest supporter and he makes me laugh, which is the best medicine. Also he wears a ski hat indoors like a total weirdo. Favourite on-set snack? Melons and yoghurt all mixed together. NO ONE gets it. Which member of the Muppets do you most identify with? Who or what makes you feel beautiful? Definitely Animal. Animal all the way. A shower, Springtime, my boyfriend, a good night’s sleep, reading for a full afternoon and oddly enough, a stomach virus. As seen in the New Yorker, you were raised almost entirely on take-out. What’s your current go to for home fine dining? What book is most meaningful to you? I order from the same Israeli health food restaurant every night (salad, turkey burger, gluten free pasta if I feel crazy) and the same diner every morning (English muffin, because I am not truly gluten free, with scrambled eggs, avocado and turkey bacon.) I am basically 100 years old. So so many, but my best book friend is definitely Eloise, the little girl who lives at the Plaza. Favourite app? Uber! I abuse Uber. Close second is the New York Times app. I used to read my horoscope every day but I quit. Have you thought of making a ‘Girls’ movie? We were just discussing this! Yes, but only if we shoot it when we’re 77 or older. Do you feel the need to censor yourself after your experiences with the media over the last few years? Or has it made you more determined to speak your mind and continue unperturbed? You know, I certainly have those moments. When Shia LaBeouf announced he was retiring of the bad reviews and pulled back, but I still got bad reviews! So now I’m back to my old ways and I like it a whooole lot more. appropriate a phrase: “We can’t let the terrorists win”. I’ve also realized the only time criticism truly hurts me is when I feel I was wrong, or that I shared a half-baked idea or piece of work. If you’re confident in your beliefs and your art, that’s a kind of armour. Wonderland How do you find the experience of dress fittings and red carpets? Have your thoughts on fashion changed over the last few years? I’ve definitely evolved. At first, I had no idea anyone was even looking! I dressed to have fun, purely. Then I became scared pg.194 What has been the biggest challenge co-composing ‘The Amazing Spider Man 2’ and what has been your favourite part of the opportunity?   Honestly, it’s been amazing to work alongside Hans (Zimmer) as I see him as a mentor. I learn from him when I am around his genius.   Worst skateboarding injury?   Shredded shins...   What did you think of the controversy surrounding Blurred Lines?   I was thankful for those who understood our intent and hopeful for those who couldn’t see it. Either way I am appreciative.   Do you remember when we met?   Of course I do, we actually had dinner with the Newhouses at Cipriani. I knew you were different and had so much to do. I was right, ha!   Is there anyone music/fashion/ design-wise that you are really into at the moment that isn’t getting the recognition he/she deserves?   Maxine Ashley is special.   This issue is a women power issue. Would you consider yourself a feminist? wanted to end our species they could just stop saying yes. Yes, I am.   What has been your favourite recent collaboration?   T.I. Well…also Usher, Ed Sheeran, Busta, Major Lazer, Frank Ocean… all good stuff. I feel so fortunate.   Is there anyone you haven’t worked with that you would like to?   Prince and Eminem.   How do you stay grounded and humble when you are juggling so much and working at such a high level?   Well, Aries, I know where it all comes from and we are all cocreators/vessels. The awareness of such a fact is most humbling for me.   Who or what helps keep you sane?   Remembering what it felt like just wanting a chance every time a new one comes along. And also, keeping God/Universe first.   Favourite Aries trait?   Controlling that inner. We all come from the decision of a woman to have us. If women Wonderland pg.195