Sketches of Frank Gehry

Director: Sydney Pollack

January 22, 2009
Little Theatre, National Centre for Performing Arts, Mumbai

A look at the life and career of architect Frank Gehry, this is the first documentary film directed by Sydney Pollack, who has been friends with the architect for many years, and completed the film over a period of five years, starting in 2000. Frank Gehry loves to sketch; it is the beginning of his architectural process, and it is his love for the sketch that gave Pollack his first clues to the style of this documentary film. Beginning with Gehry’s own original sketches for each major project, the film explores Gehry’s process of turning these abstract drawings, first into tangible three dimensional models, often made simply of cardboard and scotch tape, then into finished buildings of titanium and glass, concrete and steel, wood and stone.

As a counterpoint to the informal sketch quality, Pollack painstakingly captures on film the grandeur of Gehry’s architecture, from his earliest building, a hay barn in California to some of the greatest buildings of the modern era, including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The dialogue between Pollack and Gehry, as intimate of any two friends of long standing, courses like a melodic line throughout the film and the intimate quality is also felt in the other conversations with the other participants. This is not a film about rarefied architectural theory. On the contrary, Pollack’s ability to pierce the skin of architectural theory allows him to draw deep insights into the life of an extraordinary architect and his architectural process.