Transcript of interview - Nathaniel Kahn, Susan Behr 4th August 2004 at the Bonham Hotel, Edinburgh, Interviewd by Alan Dunlop.

AD        The film itself was full of great set pieces which I thought were very enjoyable, one in particular for instance was you rollerskating in Salk Institute.  Now, was that something you had wanted to do for ages, or did you just happen to have a pair of rollerskates with you at the time?

(Laughter)

NK        I think there are two answers to that, one is that you know, yes, I've always wanted to roller by the Salk, I mean, sure, absolutely, you know what a great place to do that, and also what a great way to use a father that everyone feels so reverential toward, it's hardly the kind of place you kick off your shoes, right?

AD        You usually hardly see anybody in it.

My Architect

NK        Actually the scientists do, you know, walk through it, but it's very… it's such a serene place, it also seems like - what a great place to just let it all hang out and go rollerblading!  I think Lou would have liked that idea, to be honest with you, because I think he was a playful guy.

AD        And do the scientists feel reverential in the space?

NK        No.  I think they use it.  I think some of them do…

AD        Do they recognise the quality of the building and how influential it has been.

SB        Oh yes.  Oh yes.  They say 'can you imagine coming to work here every day!'

NK        I think one of the great things about it too, part of the reason I wanted you to have Susan here, is because we made this film like architecture - filmmaking is a group effort, it's a collaborative effort, And though I was bearing the battle flag and saying 'We have to go over this hill', I had people with me and I think it's important to kind of… it's more helpful to talk about that way about it….the relationship between films and architecture.  But I think that the rollerblading question... well the scientists, I think that one of the things I was interested in finding out was:  Do my father's buildings work?

AD        And do they?

NK        By and large, very, very much so.  So I guess the Salk is one that's so enormously effective.  I mean, designers will tell you that because the building is so flexible, because it has uninterrupted, completely flexible space with these interstitial spaces that allow you to pipe what you might need in terms of heating and cooling and chemicals and such, exhaust, either up or down, at any particular point in the ceiling or the floor.  A great structural system, because it works because radial trusses are kind of holding up that space and suspending that space, but it works from a technical standpoint, they really can create for the demands of a modern lab are very different from the demands of a lab 10 years ago.

AD        And do the scientists and people who use the building use the courtyard?  I mean in photographs,  you never see anyone in the courtyard.

NK        They use the courtyard in a contemporative way, mostly – I think there are plenty of people who just cross it because they have to get to the other place.  Absolutely it is a contemporative space, and many of the scientists also…… one of the first things Lou thought about when he designed that building, in listening to the scientists and what their needs were, he realised that they were very much, on a certain level, the same needs that artists have, they had to work on something very intensely and then they had to get away and think about it, and so he created the study.  That delineation between the lab space where you're working very intensely, where you don't necessarily need light flooding in all the time, you don't need it but then you need to get away from that, walk away, feel the breeze of the Pacific, go into your study and have a totally different space, is fundamental to the design and the success of that building and each scientist uses… you'd think that all of them just have an office – not so.  Some of them have taken up painting – there are some scientists there who use it literally as a painting studio.  One guy has a piano in it – there are people who keep them completely empty as a kind of 'zen'-like meditation space, other ones of course have cluttered offices, overrun by books and that's where they meet….

AD        The interesting thing about what you're saying is although I've never been to the Salk Institute, I have been to the Philips Exeter Library, that is one of my favourite buildings, the thing that's disappointing about how people photograph your dad's buildings is that there's never anybody in them.  You never get a sense of the life -  they're always people-free.  Your dads buildings are very tactile, very approachable, and the Philips Exeter library - it's amazing in your film just how much its like the warehouses in Philadelphia,  I never made that connection until your film, I thought it was to do with the scale and location – it's very tactile, and very approachable, and very warm, and very human. 

You said something quite interesting about the reverential attitude people have towards your father and your fathers work and I find that is a constant thread running through the whole of your film.  Every architect that you spoke to seemed to hold your dad in very, very high regard. Do they all wear those Le Corbusier round glasse by the ways, is that something that's a trait for famous American architects?

(Laughter)

NK        Yeah, well, I mean, you know, Corbusier certainly started that.  My guess is that Corbusier designed those glasses probably because he wanted to design glasses that would be totally suited for him, part of it was also probably the thickness of his lenses, required they be round.  It became a signature of the artist.  At one point, my father thought he ought to replace his glasses, and he basically commissioned a pair of glasses that looked like Corbusier glasses, round, and he had them made in an opticians in Philadelphia.  He was unable to pick them up.

And eventually they lay in the window for a time - of the opticians store saying 'Louis Kahn's glasses' – and he never picked them up.  And I remember he once took me by as a little boy, and he said 'Those are the glasses I am going to replace these glasses with.'  And I was completely shocked.  And I said 'Oh, Daddy, please don't do that!   You won't be you anymore.'

AD        You'll look like every other architect.

NK        And I think that he had needed me to tell him that, you know.

AD        The architects that you meet, are very reverential towards your father, without exception.

NK        That's true.  Though Robert Stern said: 'Don't put him on a pedestal'.

AD        Aye, but everybody else does.  The point I'm trying to make is that… I watched it as an architect, and I asked my wife to watch it with me afterwards, just to get a non-architectural point of view.  I didn't really get a sense until the end, until you were interviewing your mother in that beautiful house, about what she felt about the situation she was in, that was the only time that I got the sense that you were beginning to question her, and to question yourself.  Do you think from that point of view the journey you went on has actually had the effect you hoped it would have?  I mean, do you feel much more satisfied for instance with who you are…?

NK        Yeah, yeah, I think it had more of an effect that I had hoped for.  In the beginning you set off not knowing how these things are going to go with a story with this, a documentary.  I myself was very reverential towards him, and I think that's part of the reason it was great to have other people on the journey with me….  because they were often sort of your know… you're going to have repercussions from that, you know.

AD        And they were right, weren't they?  I mean he wasn't really a very nice guy.

NK        No, I think he was a nice guy.  That is a very interesting question.  I think 'nice guy' would be the wrong way to put it.  I like him as a person.  And I think he was honestly likeable.  So he really was a nice guy.  He was a nice guy in the sense that he was enormously generous to people, he helped, in the same sense that he put these women in difficult positions.

AD        And these were clever women, extremely attractive women, who wouldn't take any shit normally, would they?

NK        Well, I mean I think it was a different time, I think in general you are right, these are very driven people who wouldn't bother with certain things, you know.

SB        What is so frustrating is, I think that you forget when you get caught up in the drama of it, how much he gave these beautiful women who were very young and very inexperienced, and they had the opportunity to work on tremendous projects and it was up to them to take that and run with it, and continue, even after he was dead.

AD        So the price that they paid for that, that they were willing to pay for that, the relationship never coming to any conclusion.

NK        The women in my father's life didn't know it was going to go that way, that is was going to go in that direction, I think it would be wrong to think of him as something who planned it that way, he didn't think 'I'll get what I need from these people and move on.'  I don't think that's the way he thought about it at all.

AD        Do you think he thought about it at all?

NL         I'm very wary…. I think he did think about it… I think he was the kind of person who thought he could have, he tied to keep all the plates spinning, keep every plate spinning, and that was enormously… it's impossible.  I do think he thought it out, I know that.  We have interviews that didn't quite fit in the film, we couldn't quite fit them in context, which absolutely indicated that he very much was torn up about the fact that he had caused.. that things were not working out for a number of people who he cared about, in his life.

AD        He was, for me, a man driven by his architecture.  I get a sense that he has a limited amount of time, and he was designing buildings within that limited amount of time.  If he were to come back now, for instance, and he was reviewing his life, do you think he would change the direction of his life, do you think he would spend more time with you guys, with you in particular, or would he just be as driven?

NK        That's a great question.  It's an open question.  And a certainly think that he had regrets, I'm certain of it.  Would he choose a different path and not be an architect – no.  Would he come back and perhaps re-evaluate his life – I think yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.  But I think one of the things I learned from this film is that you want to know certain answers.  You want to know what did he really think, what happened when he died, what was he planning, you want to know the answers to those things.  And you end up not being able to answer, not being able to find out the truth, you are left with as many questions as you started with, maybe they're different.  But one of the things I'm left with always is, the question you've just asked:  if he came back, would he do things differently, and we'll never know.  And I think that's one of these things that, that you know in the end, part of what I wanted to do, what we wanted to do in making the movie, was to really confront head on, the human condition is such that you can never know, we'll never know.  There is a fundamental ambiguity there, that in fact is in his architecture, it's part of what makes his architecture as good as it is, a building like the Salk Institute is a great example, it's so many things, it's not just one thing.  Is it one building; is it two buildings?  Now is it that the space in between the building is a building, is it.  And you stand in that courtyard and you feel both that the building is big, and that it's small.  So you feel all this conflicting - it's both intimate, and it's monumental.  It's, grand, it's playful, it's romantic, it's harsh, all those different things.  And I think that one is left with what we really wanted to do with the film too, to represent the fact that this was an enormously complex man, and that life is such that we'll never know the answers to those questions.  I'll never really know who he was.  And perhaps, he was, what we were saying, was a mystery.  A father is always a mystery, on some level, to a son, a parent is always a mystery to a child and on some levels some people are mysteries to themselves.  Lou was a mystery even to himself.

SB        Well more universally, how well do you ever really know someone?  You think you know someone very well, and you find out further down the road things that are surprising, not necessarily bad things, but surprising.

AD        The making of the film, the voyage of discovery about who your father was and about who you are, is it not quite an unusual thing to make a film about that and actually put it out into the public realm, is it because you are a film director?

NK        Yeah, one looks for stories, look at the stories Jim shared and told in his wonderful film, 'In America'.   Clearly a very personal story to him.  He changed things around a little bit.  He worked with his daughters on those films.  The best films are often those which come from very close to the heart, Just like the best buildings, they have to come from inside you, right?  They can't be external to you, they have to be something that you really feel strongly and for me obviously rattling around with this story since I was a little boy, I've always wanted to tell it.

AD        And is that what pushed you into film direction, the idea that you wanted to do this storyscope?

NK        I'm not sure what it is about you Scots, but it's the first time I ever actually thought about it that way, was storytelling something that came to me because of the story that I was left with?  Maybe.  I never entertained the thought before but you're asking me the same question, maybe the deep Scottish mind is getting at it…

AD        Well, I don't know if it's deep, but it's furtive!

(Laughter)

NK        I think that when you grow up with a lot of secrets, and a lot of hidden things…

AD        And were there secrets?  Did no-one talk about it?  Did your mum not talk about it?

NL         I don't mean secrets, like the overt secrets, like 'how many children?', I mean the mystery of the man, the mystery of the human being, the mystery of the circumstance, and the secrets that certainly I had in the sense that….. not understanding exactly the geometry of  my father's relationship with his wife, the complexity of his life, it was filled with areas I had to access to, they were secret worlds.  I think when you grow up with that kind of thing, you somehow want to express that.  You're somehow playing around with it.  Now maybe you want to tell a story with it, maybe you want to be a painter, be a writer, I think that somehow art seems like a good way to go because you have this desire to investigate that secret, find out more about it, and perhaps to tell the story.  I think that when you grow up with a life with a lot of secrets, you want to find a way to…..

AD        We talked about the interesting set pieces, one of which was you rollerskating at the Salk and the other one was the meeting with your dad's cousin who was the Rabbi, you were talking about being an architect and being world-famous, but the Rabbi measured his life by but how much money do you earn, very very funny indeed, and with your aunts around the dining table – you kind of get the suggestion that this has been hovering about for some 30 years and no-one has ever spoken about it, you know, and also the interview with your mum's aunt who said she couldn't quite see what people saw in him, and I could quite understand.  I was sitting with my wife and she couldn't understand what anybody saw in him either, he wasn't the most good-looking of men, in fact he was quite a freakish-looking guy.  But he must have had a real depth of personality, I would guess.

SB        Unbelievably mesmerising charm, I had been told before I ever met him.  That I have said to him, right up front, that I don't get the attraction.  But then I started talking to people, beautiful 22-year-old women, who said to me, 'You don't understand, I'd have gone off with him in a heartbeat'.  15 minutes of talking to him, you would have no idea, that he wasn't the knight in shining armour.

AD        That leads to the question that I really want to ask you about your father;  You can divide his life up into two parts.  I mean, before 1950 he had built really nothing, and yet he's a Professor of the University of Pennsylvania, he's won awards from the American Institute of Architects, everyone is crediting him as being a great architect and a great teacher, he's a visiting critic for Yale.  But on what basis, is it the force of his personality?  As far as I understand it he was working on social housing projects, he built nothing, it's not until he goes to Rome…

NK        Well, he built some things.  He was a good architect.  You can see some of those early projects, he was a good architect.  He did not find his own distinctive voice until he was in his fifties. And I don't only credit that with Rome, I want Susan to tell you the story about finding the early Buildings.  I think people mature at different rates, and we live in a world that is so obsessed with youth and early fame and money oriented,  and you're a loser if you've not built a great building or directed a great film by the time you're thirty.  You're a loser.  And it's so unbelievably wrong, I mean any architect will tell you this, Frank Geary will tell you that.

AD        Well, you don't get in your stride until you're fifty.

NK        Yeah, well, right.  And I think you'll find that architecture itself, it strikes me that there are different kinds of imagination that people have, a spacial imagination, the ability to actually conceive a space in your mind and control it, through materials, and be able to talk about it and represent it in a proper way so it can get built the way you're imagining it, takes an enormous amount of time, much as a think making good films takes an enormous amount of time, to be able to control all the factors you have to control.  So I think that architecture is an older person's game anyway, to start with, but in Lou's case I do think that it was quite extraordinary that it took him until he was in his fifties to be able to express himself and luckily, and very luckily, he had a kind of confluence of events and one of them was that he was teaching at Yale, and he had a great friend at Yale, George Howe, was a wonderful fellow architect, and very close friend.  Exactly the opposite side of the tracks, Lou was a poor immigrant Jew, George was 'establishment', brought up in it basically, but George loved Lou. George was at Yale, and basically pushed them choose Lou Kahn to design the Yale University Art Gallery, to give him that commission.  And it was the first sort of – Susan has often remarked about this – this was the guy who built, in the end it was public buildings that he loved, as he called them 'Institutions of Men', I think part of that was that as an immigrant, coming to this country, he had nothing.  A house is not very important, they moved 17 times in the first couple of years, you know, you saw the neighbourhood, we found the neighbourhood in which they lived.  The home was not so important; what was important was the places he could go for free – the libraries, the art galleries, the institute where they did their music, the universities, those kind of places, - the 'Institutions of Men'.  The first real commission that he got that was like that was the Art Gallery in 1951. 

Now at the same time, that trip, going to Rome where Lou did get a scholarship, well actually Lou never quite got a 'real' scholarship, he had to teach at the same time, because he never had any money so he had to teach to make his keep.  But basically they had allowed him to be in Rome at the Academy, and to take a trip to Greece, and to Egypt, in 1950/51, and I think trip is what absolutely opened his eyes.  And I think more than the forms even, although he talked a lot about the forms - and quite eloquently.  It was the feel of these places, and I think having worked as a modern architect for quite a while, trying to incorporate your feel for modernism, with all these things, these great revolutions that were happening with Mies and Gropius and Corb and to a degree with Corbusier and also with his own work….  But modern European architecture coming to America -  that stuff never quite fit right with Lou, it didn't work.  Johnson said, very wonderfully, when I ask him would he like this house, he says, 'well no'.

AD        Johnson is a prime example of that, his architecture just seems so changeable.

NK        Well you know, The Glass House is a masterpiece, it's a wonderful building.  But when Lou went to these ancient buildings, it was very clear that he thought 'I want to build modern buildings that have the power and the presence of these ancient ruins. Something has been lost here.  Architecture has gotten too fancy for itself.  Let's go back to the fundamentals.  Let's go back to the – as he used to call it – the Drawing Zero'.

AD        Yes, you are right – his work has a monumentality, but it also has a drama to it.

NK        No, no, you are right, it does have a drama to it.  But let's talk about specific things about drama – how you get into a building, tremendously dramatic.  The Yale Art Gallery is so wonderful, you can't just get in, you have to turn a corner to get in.  Great thing.  I think that at that time in his life also Anne Tinman was in his life, and she also, in addition, gets this great commission.  They get this great commission, he's seeing the ancient ruins, and he's already starting to design the building at this point.  And she said to him, 'Look, if you're going to design here, go all the way, make it different.  Make it your own thing.'  And you see, in that building, him changing.  Part of the building is almost a museum.  I think the one absolutely magnificent room in the building, is the stairwell.  The stairwell is 100% where Lou is going with his architecture, just this incredible, monumental power.  He got it.  And once he hit that….

AD        Yes, I agree.  The stairwell in the  Phillips Exeter Library is a fantastic work of art too.  Whenever you ask students of architecture to name their favourite architect, it's usually someone current in the architectural press, Leibskind, or whoever.  You have to be of a certain age, I think, to appreciate Lou Kahn's work.  You can't quite understand the subtlety of the thing, for example the British Art Building in Yale, which looks to be like a very simple box on the outside but really quite wonderful inside.  So you have to be of a certain age to appreciate the work.  So there's a simplicity to it.  And I was wondering whether what you had done as far as your approaches to looking at his work – you mentioned for instance the Richards Medical Building at the University of Pennsylvania – you couldn't quite 'get' it, you couldn't quite 'get' why this was a significant building.  Are you able now to actually think why it's a significant building?

NK        Oh, yeah.  Sure.

AD        So it's a learning process that you are going also through?

NK        Let me explain this too, which is when we set out to make this movie, we wanted to make a movie that was not for architects, but we hoped that architects would want to come and see it.

AD        Well, you've done that.  Absolutely.

NK        What we wanted to do was make a movie that would grab everybody.

SB        This was on theatrical release in movie theatres across America, with the regular, non-….. just the general public, because the movie was so good.

AD        You're right, the story is good.  But do you think the architecture – the architecture is brilliant, don't misunderstand me, it's taken as said it's brilliant architecture - but it's a subtle architecture, so for people who are non-architects…

NK        Well, that's the point.  One of the biggest dangers with making a film like this is if you film too much for your audience, you'll lose them, and once you've lost them you'll never get them back.  The greatest way to grab them and hold them is to articulate something that they themselves may be feeling, which in the case of Richards Building is: 'I don't get it'.  It looks like a brick 'whatever'.  I think part of what I wanted to dramatise was, even when we went to make the film, I already liked the Richards, I liked it very much, but I think that when you first see it, it's hard to get what's great about it, before you understand it intellectually, the towers are the service spaces, and all the connections and it's very complex in a way.  But when you first go look at it, how can you get an audience that's never seen a building in a way…., that's never really looked at architecture before necessarily, to see that? It's too technical.  Their first reaction is 'I'm not sure.'

AD        It was funny, the set piece with the helicopter pilot during the building of the Kimbell Art Museum said that 'It looks like a Texas cow-barn'.

NK        And that was the attitude.

AD        Another thing I noticed that throughout the film – I hope you don't mind me asking – you never refer to him as your father, you always refer to him as 'Lou', – is there a reason for that?

NK        Sure.  Part of it is, first of all, everybody calls him 'Lou'.  Even people that never knew him, they call him 'Lou Kahn', right?  And because he died when I was so young, I never really had a name, an adult name for him.  I called him 'Daddy'.  So I never got to the point as a teenager, you  know, drop the 'y', so it becomes 'Mom and Dad', or 'Pop' or something like that.  All of those things seemed artificial, and in a way he was a more distant figure.  I wanted to have some distance.  There are times I call him 'My Father', I refer to him as my father, which is important, but I do feel distant from him, he's 'Lou' to me, he's not always my father, he is also just 'Lou': this man I'd like to know but don't know so well.  There is intention implied when a son calls his father by his first name.

AD        Was it deliberate to keep him at a distance?

NK        No, I think I was trying to be truthful about how close I really was to him.

AD        So why then call the film 'My Architect'?  That suggests that he's something other than the Lou Kahn, Architect that we know, he's actually 'Your Architect'.

NK        Well you know… the word 'architect'.  When we were trying to name the film we tried lots of different things, but we kept coming back to the feeling that the word 'architect' was fundamental.  Partly because it was how Lou identified himself.  He would say, 'I am Lou Kahn, an architect', right?  John Kerry turns up and says 'Hi, I'm John Kerry, I'm reporting for duty.'  Lou turns up and says 'I'm Louis Kahn, I'm an architect.'  So that was his identity.  That was his identity.  And the word seemed enormously important.  But 'architect' is also an objective word; it's not that intimate.  I'm saying 'My Architect'.  I'm just explaining, not justifying.

AD        If he had lived longer, where would his architecture have gone, do you think?

NK        It's a question I ask myself all the time, and I'm not the person to know.  But I think, honestly, nobody knows.  Lou didn't even know.  And this is the wonderful thing about art and about architecture – maybe in many ways especially – it is very evolutionary.  And one of the things I really admire about Lou – I'll talk about him as my father now – one of the things I really admire about my father as an artist, is he was willing, with every building, to reinvent it from the very beginning.  There are no two buildings the same.

AD        There are similarities.

NK        Yes.  In the materials, the kind of detailing, the approach to windows and openings, but each building really is enormously unique, there are similarities, but unique.  And he was willing to – you know, the Kimbell Art Museum, the structure is in service to getting light into the space, enormously different from the Salk Institute, which to me is an outdoor building, which is very different again to the Capital in Bangladesh, it's a monumental building, perhaps more of a castle.  But in each case he was willing to go back to the very beginning and ask himself 'What really is the programme for this building?'.  And designing a library – not needing 20,000 sq ft,… you know… what is a library?  What does it mean to build a library?  He'd think about that.  And of course it's probably a story you know, he said 'Mmm, a library is a place where you bring a book from the darkness into the light'.

AD        And one of the most beautiful architectural set pieces in the Philips Exeter Library, is where you sit individually and read a book, that is lovely, lovely space.  At the same time he's building this monumental building, he's building single houses.  The Fischer House, again the most wonderful place, when you met your two half-sisters there, did you deliberately choose to meet them there?

NK        Absolutely, I think one of the things I wanted to do - and this goes back to the challenge for all of you architects – is  how do you present your buildings, to non-architects, who are always your clients, right?  How do you present them in a very human way?  How do you give them humanity?  You yourself said, we talked about the photographs and about the lack of people, yet they're meant to be inhabited, right?  That's structure, or at least that's supposed to be.  Sometimes it is inhabitable structure, something that is happening now, it's very sudden.  But fundamentally it has to work.  So how do you communicate these human qualities to people?  To clients, in your case, or to me, my audience?  How do you do that, you can't just film the building, it's not enough.  So that is why in each case, for each building, I tried to find a  human way to give you an access to the meaning of the building.  In the Fisher House it was the same thing, moving through the spaces, it was a building that had fallen upon hard times, and yet at the time that it was built it was everything to their relationship, and to my fathers' architecture, and it's very emotional to me, a very emotional scene.  In the Salk Institute, me rollerblading on the plaza was a way of humanising this space and you see a son playing in his fathers plot.

AD        And it worked very well.

NK        Right.  In each case you try to find something like that.  So the big challenge is, how do you make architecture emotional for people?  How do you make it emotional?  It is emotional, you walk into Chatres Cathedral and you are very moved.  And that was the question, in making this film, again and again we had to come back to.  How do you make it emotional?  And I think that in the end, the story is about a son looking for his father, and his father was a architect so you want to see those buildings, but how the buildings represent him, what of him was in those buildings, and how do we as an audience feel something from those buildings?

SB        Did you talk about the way the film was structured?  I think that is fundamental to the evolution of the story.  I mean the film was a documentary, but it feels like a feature film, it is very unusual for a documentary.  But there's the way Nathaniel told the story.  Not like a traditional documentary which has 'cut and paste' where you go back to the person you are interviewing maybe five or six times they cut back to you.  But in this film, when Nathaniel goes to speak to someone, it is a scene; they have a conversation, and then he moves on, and the only time he speaks to someone more than once is his mother, and they were very different times, once was her as the professional (she was a landscape architect and she was very professional) and then there was the personal conversation.  But everyone else, he meets them once and then we never see them again.  So that gives the film a tremendous amount of emotion, it changes the way…. It's not an academic experience, it's not a documentary, it's a journey.  And you can't go back.

AD        And the scenes with your mother, powerful scenes, but you are quite hard with your mother in comparison with the conversation you have with other people.  Do you think so?

NK        I think…. Well, one more word about what Susan was saying, I think it's really important to note that the film itself has an architecture to it.  It is, if you will, a series of rooms, it's moving through this castle that was my father's life, and trying to open as many doors as possible.  But room led to room, and we didn't necessarily even come back through those doors again.  So it has a structure to it, and the structure is very important to serve the emotional experience, of a son on a journey to find his father.  And along the way of course there are some people that you can really get more from.  And one of them was my mother, and she was the closest person to me, to each of us, easier to talk to in terms of a son wanting to know certain things from her, I wanted to ask her those things.  I think those are difficult scenes, almost uncomfortable, but at the same time, they were necessary. 

SB        I think Nathaniel has every right in the world to ask his mother, or his father, technically, hard questions as they made some very unusual choices that most parents wouldn't make if they affected their children.

AD        But you weren't as hard on Anne Tyng for instance – I don't mean 'hard' hard, I mean you didn't ask her as difficult questions.

NK        In a way, I felt… that's interesting that you should bring her up.  I mean, honestly, her own life, was not as much entwined with my life, but I think she's a remarkably giving person, I think it's something that really strikes you in this film, how much the women who were in my father's life still love him so much.  And then when she says 'When I left him, I didn't really want to..' and she starts to cry.  In a way, that's giving a great deal, I didn't feel that there was any need to ask another question.  So eloquently, without even being given a question, the statement is there: she still loves him.  But with my mother – it was hard to ask those question, although maybe as Americans, we have an easier time pushing at someone like that, whether that's true or not, I don't know.  They are hard questions, but in terms of genuinely wanting to know the circumstances under which I came into the world, I had to ask them.  In a way, the context of making a film, much as when an architect is making a building, allows you to ask questions about life, that's what is really exciting in the end about our picture, you get to say 'What does it mean to go to school' – what a great question to ask.  As a film-maker, I get to ask questions, and if I wasn't making the film, I wouldn't be able to ask them, so in making the film, I reached this point when I could say that all of these stories that I grew up with, giving the things I've heard from other people that don't quite add up, I have to ask my mother the hard question that I began with: 'Do you really think Louis Kahn, my father, the man you loved, was really planning to come home and live with us, do you really think that?'  And her response was yes.  And who am I to judge that?  I'm not here to judge that; I'm not here to tell you that wasn't true.  I'm here to say I don't know if it was true; my own senses tell me – probably less likely.  But I don't say anything.  So I think in a way it is that a man's life, perhaps especially life as an artist, is enormously complex and confusing and contradictory and mysterious.  And you're never going to solve that mystery.  You have to learn how to live with that mystery.  It's like the mystery of not knowing when you're going to die.  There's things we don't know; you listen to Lou in the film (we found this great archive of footage of him walking around).

AD        Where did you find it?  No-one even knows what he looks like!

NK        That's what I wanted to represent.  I wanted to show him not just as a talking head.  This is the guy I look like; this is a man walking along the street.  We found this footage in the Museum of Modern Art, we found some stuff in Philadelphia, we found audio recordings in Saudi Arabia.

SB        The images of Lou – Nathaniel doesn't have just all 'talking, talking' alone - it was because you have to remember he was eleven – I don't know if you've ever lost someone that you cared for but you do end up alone and pull them in again, and so by showing these images – that's how he walked, that's what my fathers legs looked like when he walked.  Look at his hands,  look how he held a piece of charcoal and drew.  But these are the things, when you love a person, that you want to see, not what he was saying but physically, what was his presence like?

AD        I don't feel though as if I'm any clearer about your dad in life.  I mean, obviously you do, you've gone on the journey.  I want to know a lot more about him.  I have a sense he must have been a very charismatic teacher, with all those students gathered round him listening to every word he spoke, I'm only sorry there is not more archived information.  Anyway, you must be very tired; I won't take up any more of your time.

NK        Not at all; you raised an interesting question, I'm sure architects out there ask this, and artists out there ask this:  To appreciate the work of somebody, do you need to know about his life, does it matter?  A lot of people would say it doesn't matter.  You have the work, you have the buildings, check them out, you figure them out, look at the plans.  I believe it does help enormously to understand who a person was; I think architecture as with any other art is a very personal expression.  A personal expression of how you talk about things in the world, how we talk about love, how we talk about anger, how we talk about beauty, how we talk about all of those things.  It's all there in the building. 

SB        And when you see where he came from, and when you really think about each of those points, what became a part of being a tiny boy, scarred beyond belief, Jewish, Bavarian.  How did he even survive those grounds, being taught in a school in a foreign language, in a very unfriendly place, and getting himself to the University of Pennsylvania, I think that tells you a lot about Louis Kahn as an architect and as a person.  I think we learned a lot about the strength of his will and his ability… really that's the hardest thing when you're an artist, is when you start something to finish it, a lot of people drop out, they throw up their hands, they say it's no good I'm not going to do this.  Lou Kahn… God… he just got that focus going and he could build these buildings that were absolutely extraordinary, and many people other people would have stopped; they may have had the same ideas.  Lou Kahn said there was no such thing as a great idea unless you do it, and I don't think he was a genius; I think he was just really about believing in his idea and just doing it and 'sticking it out'.  Of course he was terribly bright, and could think outside the box, but he just did it.  Everybody else might throw up their hands and give up but he kept going because from a very early age, he learned he could always count on his family.

AD        So listen, thank you for everything.  What is your next project?

NK        Oh well, you know, actually this is very hard….

AD        But it won't be a documentary?

NK        No, it will be a feature film.  But I think that one of the things that is very humbling about the story about Lou is that real life itself is more fascinating in many ways than fiction, it's incredible.  And I think that documentary films, and this is certainly one of them, audiences really embrace them.  Of course, we hope that people like it here too.  But I think people have responded because real life is so fascinating.  And people are so fascinating.  And you realise during the documentary, it kind of changes the way you want to make feature films.  You want them to be as interesting in fiction as they can be in non-fiction.  I think audiences are coming to demand that really, they don't sort of get a lot of the very stiff, beautiful camera moves with stiff people walking along the street talking, when only ten years ago, hey we all loved it.  And they have their place.  And they're wonderful, but right now, what is happening is documentaries are actually changing the way, they're pushing film in a new direction; I don't know where it's going to go, I just want to be there.

AD        And you were up for an Academy Award.

SB        Yes, we were nominated, but we did not win.

AD        Listen, I forgot to ask you about this fellow Ed Bacon, he seems to be harbouring a deep resentment?

NK        There is a very specific reason why Bacon is there; we'll talk about Bacon for a minute, because one of the things we did talk about and two things I'd like to say, to architects especially is that Lou was about buildings, he wanted to build things, and his dream was the Planning of Philadelphia.  Because that was the city that offered him everything.  It didn't work out for lots of reasons; some of them were practical, some of them were social, some of them were personality conflicts, he and Bacon really clashed in a lot of ways, they had a lot of big ideas, but it didn't work out.  That's what I loved about it of course, that Ed was really honest about how he felt about Lou.  Not everyone said great things about Lou and you got both sides to it:  not only was it about a great artist, it was about hey, look it didn't work out.  I think the combination didn't work.  I think Lou's ideas were wonderful, but some were impractical, and I think he needed to have a really good client who could say 'No, that's a little too much.'  And so he would go and change that.  What he needed was the client, you've got to have that, but I also think that it's important to include that too, because it showed Lou's desire – he wanted to build cities.  And that's the reason why

            And that's what I really wanted to say:  as architects, you have so much power, to really transform the world and shape the world, and we have such a limited view, we talk about politics:  right now our various governments, certainly our government in America, is trying to push democracy on the rest of the world by force.  But when I think back to this little Jewish guy, who came from Estonia, might have passed through this very port here, we know he came to Liverpool, come to America, had nothing, managed to become an architect, and is given this commission to build a building, and designed this city, and it becomes this symbol of democracy.

            The point being, you architects have so much power, to transform our world, and it's not easy.  It's not the kind of power that statesmen wield, or big businessmen throwing their money around and everything, your power is much more subtle, it has to go through so many channels before it gets approved, exercised, built and opened, yet you have this incredible ability to change the world.  And that's part of the reason I wanted to make this film too:  I wanted to show that art, also, really can not just make a difference – it's not a luxury – it's a necessity.  Architecture is the beginning of life – you create the environment in which we live, in which we grow – in so many ways it's up to you. 

AD        I could not think of a better way to finish the interview.  Thank you both very much.  I'll do everything I can to publicise the film and make sure everybody goes and sees it!