Mike Nichols: The placement of the camera is obviously different for every event, but when you’ve found it you know it and you can’t start shooting until you have found it.
Marina Abramović: Yes, it’s very simple. You have to have this kind of conviction.
Nichols: You say, I know this person, I knew this person before, we understand each other.
Abramović: But it took me a long time to get to that point.
Nichols: I really can’t tell you why.
•••
Abramović: For a few months, they sit for two hours a day at a table with 1,000 pieces of blank white paper and write down their ideas.
Nichols: They’ve come home drinking and discouraged and bugged with each other.
Abramović: Then they take the next canvas, and in two minutes they made a masterpiece.
Nichols: Throw away the conventions and the assumptions: when this happens in life, what is it really like?
Abramović: Everybody is scrutinizing.
•••
Nichols: I love them both, and going from one to the other, and back again.
Abramović: I don’t. I just expose all of them.
Nichols: That’s drama, that’s what we’re looking for.
•••
Abramović: I was taped with a microphone for one year, and the crew could come anytime.
Nichols: If you do it right, nobody will think about dialogue.