Tuesday, March 13, 2007

MY ARCHITECT A Son's Journey


The mystery of Louis Kahn's life was as compelling as his buildings. Thirty years after his death, his filmmaker son goes in search of the true Lou with the documentary My Architect.
Was it the sort of film you always knew you were going to make but kept putting off?
No, I kept trying to do it in other ways. I wrote a screenplay about a son who discovers that the father he thought was dead isn't--which of course was always a dream of mine. It sort of reverberates throughout the film. As a little boy, I never quite believed that Lou was gone. I would always look for him in crowds. I'd see a white-haired man turning the corner and think maybe it was him.
One morning fifty boxes of tape arrived. My producers and I went through the film and put it up on reels. And it was like Christmas morning! Now another kind of filmmaker might look for Lou speaking cogently about architecture. But I was interested in the way he moved, the way he walked, the way he talked, the way he looked confused, things that revealed his personality. I couldn't resist using those shots. We use Lou a lot like a ghost. He's someone who appears and then is gone. So for quite a while you see little glimpses of him, which was always the way I saw him. In a way, the film was like conjuring him, bringing him back from the dead for two hours.

They say a work is never really finished, it's abandoned. It was true for Lou. He was constantly drawing, being convinced of it, and the next day realizing he could do it a better way. It drove people nuts. They'd think: "Let's just build the damn thing already!" but he wasn't ready.

1 comment:

flo' said...

fain filmu' asta