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Right around the time Sydney Pollack directed his Oscar-winning film "Out of Africa" in 1985, he also got to know architect Frank Gehry through a most unusual party circuit.
To hear Pollack tell it - and somewhat frankly - his wife belonged to a therapy group for creative people led by psychoanalyst Milton Wexler. Turns out Gehry was part of that same group. "They had parties a lot, and I got dragged to the parties," Pollack recalls. "And Frank and I gravitated to each other because we were big complainers."
The fruits of that friendship emerge in "Sketches of Frank Gehry" (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, $24.96), due out on DVD next week. A film Pollack describes as "my valentine to Frank," "Sketches" does not go to great pains, as some documentaries might, to present a balanced portrait of its subject. And that's hardly the point, Pollack insists.
"It was like a home movie to me; I want to know what makes Frank tick," Pollack says. "I didn't want it to be completely a puff piece, but I wanted to see the beauty of his work, especially Bilbao."
Bilbao, of course, is the Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, considered by many to be the crowning achievement of 20th century architecture. In the midst of a busy European traveling schedule, Pollack made it to the building's opening. He says he "was shaken" seeing Gehry's marvelous collision of twisting sheets and shapes, meant to resemble a ship astride the Nervion River. "I'm saying to Frank, This looks like Don Quixote got stoned. Where did this building come from?' And he says,I don't know.'"
Pollack's epiphany compelled him to make a the film about his friend, though it took three years of thinking it over and some coaxing from Gehry himself.
He may be a top-notch director, but Pollack sounds self-effacing as he considers his qualifications for making "Sketches." "It just seemed to me a dumb idea; I just had reservations and I didn't think I was the right guy," Pollack says. "But Frank felt comfortable with me. I didn't know documentaries and I didn't know what to do and he said, `That's exactly the point.'"
"Sketches" is shot simply, employing Super 16mm film to highlight Gehry's architecture and a mini-DVD camera, operated by Pollack himself, for interview segments. "There's something liberating, working with a crew of two as opposed to 200, and spending $10 a day as opposed to $350,000, and a (studio) guy with a gun to your head," Pollack he says.
In exploring Gehry's mad-hatter creativity, Pollack says, he picked up riffs he thinks will inform his future cinematic projects: "I've spent all my life working with a script, and with a documentary, you go where the interview takes you. I wish I could find a way to bring that looseness to my future work."
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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
