“I told him ‘I do my best work when I don’t know anything about it,”’ Gehry laughed, then quickly added that lack of knowledge going into a project isn’t a bad thing if you learn along the way.“You worry more about things in a deeper sense (if you don’t know),” Gehry said. “And there’s models out there and other stuff you can look at as you try to understand what people did wrong and people did right.”Because both men have busy schedules and live on different coasts, much of the film had to be put together on the run.

• Sketches Of Frank Gehry 2005
• Sketches Of Frank Gehry

Sketches Of Frank Gehry 2005

As a result, the director would at times follow Gehry around with a handheld camera. At other times he’d drop by the architect’s Santa Monica home with a small film crew and the two would sit around a table talking about movies, art, architecture and other subjects. Among other things, the Canadian-born Gehry reveals that he changed his last name from Goldberg at the insistence of his first wife, who feared anti-Semitism might be holding back his career. He also acknowledges that behind the “ah shucks. Nice guy” persona is a 77-year-old architect who strives for greatness.As to be expected, the film also contains ample photos of the odd-shaped, colorful buildings that have changed the face of modern architecture and led to comparisons between the architect and pop artists like Ed Ruscha, who also appears in “Sketches of Frank Gehry.”“Now that I’ve done it I feel I not only learned a lot but I enjoyed making it,” Pollack, 71, said recently from his home in New York. “It accomplished something for me, and that was taking a real look into Frank’s particular creative process and attempting to talk about how an artist feels at various stages.”Arming the critics?Gehry, a friendly but shy man, says he enjoyed the process as well and likely wouldn’t have opened up as much to another filmmaker. “People have interviewed me on numerous occasions on film, but I’m usually so guarded,” he said.

Sketches Of Frank Gehry

“You don’t know the people, so you sort of hold back.”Even now, he frets that one particularly revealing moment in the film may have armed critics like Princeton’s Foster with more ammunition with which to lampoon him.In it, Gehry is seen cutting up pieces of silver-colored cardboard with a pair of scissors, folding them this way and that, then placing them on the dollhouse-sized model of a museum he’s designing. He had to do that, he explains, so he could judge how the light would reflect into the building’s galleries when it was completed.Still, he worries it will prompt comparisons to an episode of “The Simpsons” cartoon show in which Marge implores him to design a music hall for her hometown of Springfield.