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How we work: Edward de Bono, psychologist

Caspar de Bono on his father, Edward, who keeps his things sorted into piles, by importance:

He's very frugal in his day-to-day needs, he doesn't splash his money about and he keeps absolutely everything. His mantelpiece is crammed with clockwork teeth and plastic dinosaurs. Toy shops are a passion; everywhere he goes he seeks them out and emerges with a new toy, something with a trick or a dual purpose which fascinates him. Though his surroundings look chaotic, his life is very structured. His flat is filled with piles of stuff, but on top of each is a white tile with a number, rating it in importance.

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How we work: Martin Scorsese, director

Scorsese is driven to make film; can't write, hates shooting film, loves editing:

Scorsese enjoys the money and the effects it enables him to create, but not the ensuing commercial pressures that demand films with so little dialogue a Hispanic illegal with six words of English can still follow the plot. "I'm drawn constantly to projects that need a sizeable budget. For that money, what can I give them? Everyone is on a tightrope."

He admits he became "obsessional" about Gangs of New York in 2002, which went over its $97m budget and lost millions; no other director would have been so indulged. Much as the film world loves "Marty", some will tell you privately he can be a nightmare to work with: "Tinker, tinker, tinker," says one. [...]

"You say 'I've got to make a film, it's what I do'. And when you make one, you want to be allowed to make a few more." [...]

There is no hint of retirement, because he is obsessed, just like Hughes [whom his 2004 film The Aviator is about]. "I wish I did know something more than movies so as I could make a living, I wish I could write; I envy Woody Allen that. But I do have an obsession with the actual moving image. I hate shooting, there are too many people on set and too many things can go wrong." But alone in the editing suite is the nearest he feels to life having purpose.

(You wonder what his long-term editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, would make of that "alone in the editing suite".)

More: Times: Oscar blues. Compare to Walter Murch, who stands when he edits.

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How we work: Karl Weschke, artist

Updates 2005, 2006: The accuracy of the quoted paragraphs was questioned both by Lucas Weschke, Karl's second son, and Rachel, his daughter. They're directly quoted from a page at notabledeaths.com that is, annoyingly, no longer found at that link. The "Cornish light?" line is also found elsewhere, in the Times and Independent newspapers, but may also be apochryphal. Rachel (the older or the youngest) corrects the biographic detail, noting that Karl had five children: "1.rachel the older , 2.Benjamin 3.Lucas 4.Lore ( not Laura) 5. Rachel the Youngest".

*

Weschke came to Britain as a prisoner of war and settled in Cape Cornwall, near Land's End, painting German Expressionist-influenced scenes and landscapes. He took pride in "pitting himself against nature: not taming it, but cohabiting with it, if not always amicably". But the oft-told anecdote about Weschke working in artificial light seems to reflect his desire to put his family's needs ahead of his art's, rather than an artistic disavowal of the natural:

The view from his studio was over the desolate moors with their crops of bracken or gorse, to the long rollers of the Atlantic. He loved and respected the sea, both as diver and artist, and painted it in many moods. He was a great debunker.

When asked once by a student whether it was the beautiful Cornish light that had inspired him to live where he did, he snorted dismissively, "Cornish light? I've got a 60-watt light-bulb and I keep the curtains closed." [...]

He was the father of four children - [Rachel,] Benjamin, Lucas, Laura [Lore] and Rachel - and, when relationships didn't work, had no hesitation in bringing the children up on his own, while still continuing to paint. (Their needs came first: painting was done at night. Hence the crack about Cornish light.)

 More:
Times obit: Karl Weschke, 1925-2005
Telegraph obit
Times: Last Word (quoting The Independent on the "Cornish light?" line. Perhaps here at the Independent.)
Weschke at Tate St Ives, Feb-May 2004
Works in the Tate collection

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Solaris: No other film is so rooted to the ground

Jonathan Jones on Tarkovsky's Solaris in the Guardian:

It is the landscape of Earth that haunts you most throughout the film. The views out of the space station are of swirling clouds and a boiling sea, but there is that painting of the hunters in the library - exactly the painting you would want with you on a space station light years from Earth. [...]

Mud, water, scrub and monasteries. The landscape of Andrei Rublev is, from the beginning, a singular view of Earth. The shot from the flying pig's bladder is curious. It scrolls the ground past you - a landscape is experienced as if the land had been tilted up so fields and marshes and bits of hills are seen as a vertical arrangement, a frieze. The flyer falls, and from that moment the film is earthbound. No other film is so rooted to the ground. There are scarcely any glimpses of sky; the camera keeps its nose down and Tarkovsky constantly finds views in which Earth seems to rise up, filling the screen. This snuffling of the landscape comes from paintings, from Uccello's Battle of San Romano - or from Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow.

Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano (probably about 1438-40, National Gallery, London)
Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Hunters in the Snow (1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna)

Melvyn Bragg: signposts all over the empire

In the In Our Time newsletter (recommended) this morning, Melvyn writes:

I'm just passing Eros in Piccadilly Circus.  If I remember rightly (did I say that - what a terrible phrase) this was the centre of London to which all signposts all over the empire referred.  Therefore, when you are at the Cape of Good Hope and it says a great number of thousand miles to London, it means that if you travel like an arrow you hit Eros ...

Perhaps London has many centres: on the pavement, behind an equestrian statue of Charles I that sits on a traffic island just south of Trafalgar Square, there is a plaque marking where the original Queen Eleanor's Cross (well, one of them) used to stand. Mileages from London are measured from the site of the original cross. It's unclear whether this refers to mileages within England, or everywhere across the empire...

More centres of London: of measurement of mileages and latitude, of population (the centroid), of transport networks,  historic centres (the basilica, the London stone)...

How we work: writing standing up, in bed

In the 19th century it was common to write standing up at a writing desk, leaning on a high stool. Thus we find that (presumably amongst many others) Lewis Carroll, Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway*, Thomas Jefferson, Fernando Pessoa, George Sand and Virginia Woolf all wrote standing up. And Philip Roth does today.

Conversely, Marcel Proust, Mark Twain and Woody Allen wrote in bed.

* despite the fact that his first rule for aspiring writers was "Apply the seat of the pants to the seat of a chair".

Sources:
mjones (thanks) and: Lunatics, authors, and getting black on white, The Hemingway Lifestyle, "Conversations with Ernest Hemingway" edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the J Peterman furniture collection (!), Mimesis: Representing the Arts in Western Literature (Woolf), Guardian profile of Philip Roth, Ferdinando Pessoa Meets Lord Oxford, and A blank page, which picks up many more eccentric approaches to writing, culled from Hendrickson's The Literary Life & Other Curiosities.

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How we work: Mohamed al-Fayed, retailer

Mohamed al-Fayed, owner of Harrods, apparently uses interrogation techniques to reinforce an astonishing culture of fear and mistrust. These from The Times, 13 Feb 2005:

[He] uses a system of "anonymous sources" in the iconic Knightsbridge department store to keep tabs on his executive directors, according to internal documents.

Employees, nicknamed the "chairman’s ladies" internally, feed Fayed information, which he then uses to write memos imploring his management team to make changes.

And:

Directors said they are often grilled when Fayed returns after a spell away. His executive suite includes a row of six smaller ante-rooms. When the chairman sends word, directors are made to wait alone in individual ante-rooms.

One former director said: "The system is designed to be intimidating. Fayed will wander in and out of the rooms, but you never know who is next door. If you answer a question, he will say that someone else - always anonymous in the next room - has said something different." [...]

Sometimes "informer’s memos" are delivered to executives. Arriving in brown envelopes, these begin: "I have been anonymously informed..." [...] One insider said: "Sometimes Fayed just sends the memo to the person concerned. Sometimes he sends it to everyone. It’s his way of exerting his control." [...] Others tell of a staff corridor called The Walk of Shame, where Fayed displays photos of all those who have been fired and catalogues their alleged wrong-doings.

(For the opposite approach, see Ricardo Semler.)

More how we work. (Want to contact al-Fayed? Click here.)

How we work: Bill Murray, actor

Bill Murray has replaced an agent with a freephone number and an insistence upon asynchronous communication. From The Times (link may expire so here we are):

By definition, Hollywood stars must have agents and publicists. Not Bill Murray. He has never had a publicist and, five years ago, he fired his agents. "I said I didn’t ever want to speak to them again, and I never did," he says. "I like to cut my own lawn now. I don’t need a landscaper."

Now Murray’s only contact with the film business is through a freephone number. If people need to talk to him - perhaps producers who want him to star in a film - they have to call the number and leave a message. (Of course, they have to find the number first.) If he feels like it, he will call back. Often, he doesn’t. Sometimes, he’ll go for weeks without even listening to the messages. It took Sofia Coppola hundreds of phone calls and seven months to get him to look at the script for Lost in Translation. Even then, she wasn’t sure he was going to make the film until he appeared on the set on the first day of the shoot in Tokyo. Other directors have apparently been told to leave scripts in a phone booth somewhere near his home outside New York, up the Hudson River. On a recent film, a production assistant who needed to contact him was told to call his freephone and leave a number for a phone that she would not pick up, so he could call her back without having to talk to her. Of course, he doesn't see this as strange or eccentric. He likes to be accessible, he says, but on his own terms.

Also: The New Yorker's Anthony Lane on Murray in Rushmore (from Nobody's Perfect):

If you want to pick one shot from this year's movies, try the look on Bill Murray's face as he shakes hands with Fischer senior: puzzlement, disbelief, a speck of outrage, the quiet rush of truth, and, last of all, a gentle settling of kindness. The entire thing takes maybe four seconds: this is known as acting.

More how we work. (Want to contact Murray? Click here.)

Words for me are tangible bodies

Fernando Pessoa:

I enjoy speaking. Or rather, I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities. Perhaps because real sensuality doesn't interest me in the least, not even intellectually or in my dreams, desire in me metamorphosed into my aptitude for creating verbal rhythms and for noting them in the speech of others. I tremble when someone speaks well.

This is from Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ed/tr Richard Zenith, Penguin Books, 2003, p224, and cited by Rafael Moneo in his discussion of the work of Alvaro Siza in Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects, MIT Press, 2004, p201.

Siza is the replacement architect for the 2005 Serpentine summer pavilion in London, MVRDV's mountain scheme (alt. 23m) having been abandoned, or at least shelved.

City of signs, city of tokens

Some photos from Las Vegas, January 2005. Just how Vegas is the New Frontier's sign (Cold beer... dirty girls)? Very.

(And, elsewhere and taken during daytime, almost the same set of photos. Good work Dadams.)