The Talks
Lachlan Bailey: “Just focus on that moment”
Mr. Bailey, it’s pretty rare for you to give interviews — I only managed to find a couple online. As a photographer, are you simply the type of person who prefers to be behind the camera?
I think so, yeah. I've never felt that comfortable in front of the camera, even though I'm expecting a lot from other people when they're in front of my lens. I've always shied away from it, to be honest, it just doesn’t come naturally to me. But recently, I'm changing my point of view. And I think at the end of day, talking about the work or talking about myself as a person and as an artist, it’s all part of the practice. So I've changed my direction, you know, this year I did a talk at the Sydney Opera House and I have a new book coming out for Louis Vuitton that involved photographing strangers… So it’s all been a great challenge for me. It’s refreshing.
You mentioned that it doesn’t come naturally to you, but being a photographer also means taking charge on set, no? There’s not really time to be shy or soft spoken. Has that part of your job been challenging too?
Actually, no! It's funny… When you're photographing someone, or when you're on a set, it's a little bit like a performance. I have a very different personality on set, on a job, than I do outside of that. I definitely feel like it's a performance sometimes because I'm really not someone that wants to be around a hundred people every day, but on set, it’s the job. I do have to build myself up for it, and at the end of these shoots, I really am exhausted, mentally. You have to balance all these roles as a photographer: if there's a client involved, you're talking to them a certain way, then you have models and you work with them a certain way, you have assistants so you have to be a boss. You have to be a technician, you have to have knowledge on all these different facets, you’ve got to be a fashion expert, you’ve got to know about hair and makeup, and then you also have to be an entertainer and a charming person. It’s a lot! So often when I come back from weeks of heavy shooting, I just retreat and spend time with my family.
“I think all the roles of my career have presented me with opportunities for my own personal growth. Roles that really push you out of your comfort zone, it really helps you to grow, and it then brings you greater capacity for love within yourself and love for others.”
“I’m surviving. I do everything I can to speak out and make sure that I keep my humanity.”
“I struggled a lot. That was the reason I became a champion. A lot of people give up, a lot of people feel sorry for themselves. But I didn't.”
“If I pass away one day, I am happy because I tried to do my best. My sport allowed me to do so much.”
“The journey is everything! It’s a cliché, but I have really felt it in my own life, in the 25 or 30 years I’ve been in this… The goal is the process, really enjoying the process.”
“It's important for a novelist to use the imagination like a musician, a composer or a painter would, in a kind of non-logical way. I think it’s very important for me to not just become a kind of intellectual writer.”
“Architecture is something that you should be inside and absorbed by. It’s something which convinces you by experience more than impresses you by image.”
“I’m using my skills to create architecture that serves humanity. I’m talking about creating space for you so that you can feel comfortable, space that supports your work and activity.”- “In the moment when you’re designing a building, it’s the subject. One year later, when you just go back and see it, it’s the object. It becomes part of the city. It starts to sit where it should be sitting.”
“I think it’s just been a long slow burn. I’ve worked fairly consistently, and I’m really grateful — even for the years of not getting so many acting jobs because that means I really appreciate being able to do what I love now.”
“For the first 20 years in my career all I did was add things; more courses, more silverware, more ingredients, adding, adding, adding. Only like three years ago or so I was able to really start focusing on removing and felt confident to do so. I finally created a dish where for the first time I felt like I achieved what I tried to do for 23 years.”
“Somehow at the end of the day doing something that actually resonates with people is quite rewarding and keeps me going.”
“It’s everything you need, but nothing extra. It’s what's essential. It’s a minimum state which you achieve when you can't add or subtract… It’s sort of this perfect state, that’s what I'm looking for.”
“I live from my heart. I am not a cerebral person. I will never be. I am 55 years old. I will continue doing things the way I have done them my whole life.”
“I am Valentino. I live in my own world. I love to create clothes, I love beautiful things. If they want to call me an icon, okay, then I am an icon.”
“For me, success is having integrity and really staying true to my own voice. When I was younger, maybe it was more about the big spaces and getting awards. But now I’m prioritizing more this idea of having a beautiful process.”
“I think the best you can do for yourself is let your subconscious drive you, instead of doing things because you want to achieve some sort of glory.”
“Art is about finding creativity in the normal gutter next to you. To see the potential in something where there is no potential in terms of how society sees it is often where art or creativity is a great tool. It’s about making the impossible possible.”
“I think the final circle in being an artist is connecting, making some conversation to the world you’re in. I think if you have that feeling of why you need to do something, you’ll find a way. And I think that really takes you forward!”
“I think I will stop working when I am finally satisfied… And I cannot see that in the foreseeable future. The urge to do better and even better than that is what pushes me forward.”
“Happiness for me is just being; just being at any given moment. If you are searching for happiness, you are not happy. It’s the pot at the end of the rainbow.”
“It’s the rollercoaster ride of doing something creative: when it goes well and you enjoy the process then it’s a high and you just want to keep on doing it.”
“If I want to make a movie and I can at 62, I will. But I want to leave the ring triumphant. I want this guy, this guy you see right now, I want him to be the guy who makes the movies, not the autumn dude.”
“If I should be fortunate enough to make another film, it would be exactly what I have settled upon as what is right for me. I feel that these days, I understand a little more what the cinema is.”
“I dreamed of winning the Olympics since I was nine years old. That was definitely the most memorable race of my career. But the next day I woke up, and I wanted to win the next race.”
“I’ve been very fortunate, and I don’t know why, but my shoes don’t have a special time period. I don’t design them with that in mind but it happens: timelessness. I have been absolutely gifted by that.”
“To do something no one else has ever done, it’s satisfying, but the thing is nobody else is really playing the game of free solo climbing, so it's easy to win when no one else plays, you know?”- “I’m 80 years old now, and little by little over your lifetime you begin to understand things that you didn’t understand earlier.”
“Every time you hear a piece of music that you’ve written, you remember the joy of it. Even if you don’t remember exactly what the writing process was like, there’s a moment where you hear it and your heart is full. It’s a similar emotion like when you are in love with someone, you feel that internal joy.”
“I would like to think that someday I will be content enough with myself and feel good enough about myself to think I don’t need to do all that sort of shit and I’ll just go and watch tomatoes grow or something.”
“The guys who are real artists are people who have figured out the art of living; their art is art because they live. They have made living an art, they have made an art of living. They are constantly inputting life as opposed to expressing life.”
“The game of basketball means everything. This is love. Definitely love. I had to practice and I had to make sacrifices, but basketball has given me so much.”
“There’s only one of you in the world. No one else is like you and that's a superpower.”
“I don’t pander to anybody. I don’t care who it is. I just do the picture I do.”
“I can’t make people happy if I’m not happy myself. That applies to anyone who tries to achieve something in their life: if you’re not happy, you can’t transfer any happiness”
“When you keep yourself open, you just might get to know yourself and know the good things about yourself. And that's why I always come back to songwriting. It's the way I kind of try and make sense of my life.”
“Art is something that you do – you can't not do it. If I made money doing it, I would do it; if I didn't make any money, I would do it.”
“I started a very nice career, became quite successful, and at age 40 I won this prize. But when I got that prize, I realized that I hadn’t yet found my own language of cooking. So I got on my knees and gathered all the tools from my childhood and started working very hard on that. And that’s how it started.”
“I’ve learned not to look at sales reports. I used to, but if I had listened to sales reports at the beginning, I would have given up on things that are some of our biggest successes now.”
“The bottom line in the end is to grab the heart of the audience and talk to them directly and tell them: "I share with you my soul and my heart."”
Kate Hawley: “It’s the push and pull”
Ms. Hawley, the blue dress you designed for Mia Goth’s character Elizabeth in Frankenstein is quickly becoming one of those iconic film costumes — it’s even being recreated on social media. How is it when your work takes on this big life outside of the film?
It’s so funny because you never start out going, “I'm going to design something iconic.” But the blue dress is one of those pieces that’s not just something pretty to wear, it’s something that audiences became very emotionally involved in. They talked about the feeling that the clothes created for them, the emotions. And that’s how it felt to make it. It was an emotional journey, and it was an emotional response as much as anything. I think the fact that people responded to it… That was the intention when we went in. We spent so long trying to find that alchemy, because that's the journey we're all on, whether you're a painter, a filmmaker, a costume designer… You’re chasing that magic. And the blue dress was an example of that.
Sandra Barclay: “Light is essential to life”
Jessie Ware: “I trust myself more”
Harvey Fierstein: “We all grow from one another”
Claudio Miranda: “Make it as real as possible”
Tony Cragg: “Where do you want to go with it?”
Gary Card: “I’m doing it on my own terms”
Russell Tovey: “This is for everyone”
Rose Levy Beranbaum: “That was my epiphany”
