Bruce Weber and Kathleen Turner

Bruce Weber and Kathleen Turner on Becoming Mentors
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The fashion photographer Bruce Weber and the actress Kathleen Turner both have generous spirits and take obvious pleasure in their crafts. So they were perfect candidates to become mentors to talented high school students...

Q.
Who were your mentors?

A.
TURNER: I don’t think I have any real mentors who were actors, necessarily. I think I’ve taken more from some of the extraordinary directors I’ve worked with, particularly Coppola. And Huston. And Kasdan. And people with whom we’ve done, you know, before the films, we’ve done some real rehearsing, real delving. I don’t feel like I really have ever learned from anyone telling me what to do — it’s the doing of it that I learned from, and that’s also the way I teach.

WEBER: Kathleen, you know, I went to N.Y.U. film school. I was, like, the worst actor, so I have such utmost respect for you and for your profession. When I started, I was broke. Richard Avedon used to photograph me all the time and Diane Arbus was a friend of mine, and they turned me on to Lisette Model. She was an extraordinary photographer who taught Diane. Alexey Brodovitch, who was at Bazaar then, hired her to go to Coney Island and photograph bathing beauties. She went out and there was this woman who was totally huge, not like what women are supposed to look like in fashion magazines. She did these gorgeous, sexy, beautiful pictures of this woman, smiling in a bathing suit, and he ran them huge in Bazaar, and it became, like, a sensation. She was my teacher and really freed me from a lot of things. I agree with you, Kathleen, it’s the act of doing something or having a big life or experiencing something.

How did you approach working with your students?

WEBER: I decided not to just take photographers. I wanted filmmakers, because I’m a filmmaker myself, but also painters or writers. It seemed like a lot of the people were also writers. And I learned so much about looking at things in the world through books, you know I grew up in a small town —

TURNER: Oh, absolutely.

WEBER: You grew up in Missouri, right? Was it a big town?

TURNER: No, I didn’t, actually. I was born there and I went to school there for three years. But up until college, my life was overseas. My father was with the Foreign Service, so I grew up mostly in Canada, Venezuela and London. But reading was a constant comfort, especially when we first moved to South America. What I do with students is they come in, they have to have two contrasting monologues prepared. Either a comedy and a classic or two very, very different characters is what I want to see. We work them, and it’s pretty exciting to see when they get it, you know, when they go, “Of course that transition has to be like this,” you know, and then they do it! And you go, “Yes!”

Goodman
WEBER: I think sometimes you almost have to be like an actor to get a photograph or a piece of film that you want. And one of the things that I really loved about my students was their openness to experiencing things. We went up to see this wonderful photographer in New York. His name’s John Dugdale, and he’s blind and he photographs with a large-format camera. And they just loved the experience. This girl who was with me said, “How do you know what you’re seeing?” And he said, “Well, I have the photos already in my head.”

TURNER: Oh, excellent. I like that. The other thing I really enjoy with the kids is it reminds me of the passion that you start out with. You know, when I first came to New York, the lack of questioning — it’s like, well, of course I was gonna have a career as an actor for heaven’s sakes! You know?

WEBER: As a photographer, you know, I think we’re always starting out, aren’t we? I, strangely enough, since I’m talking to a great actress — I took my whole class, as a lesson on New York City, to an acting class.

TURNER: Aha, good!

WEBER: I wanted them to see people their own age, of all walks of life, get up there and make a fool out of themselves.

TURNER: Well, this whole willingness to make a fool of yourself, I think, again, is common ground for all the arts.

Goodman
You both seem to emphasize movement and physicality and an awareness of your body. Is that one of the core principles of all of the arts?

TURNER: Yeah. I encounter people who seem to think that they have separate parts of their lives. In other words, O.K., I’m going to sit down and think now, so I’m going to make my head work, as opposed to getting up, breathing, stretching. Thinking you can cut up your body functions is such nonsense. You know, Bruce, one of the things I think of to help them is, I think of air like water, so that every move through it, and every gesture, it creates these waves, you know, that go out from you, and where they overlap into another person. To me, that really works in terms of what happens when a good actor has a great effect.

WEBER: I look at dancers, I look at athletes, the physicality of a person. I try to show with my assistants that feeling of, “Don’t be afraid to have that physical connection to, like, nature or to what’s around you.” Sometimes I’m photographing a girl and she’s, you know, in the middle of nowhere and all of a sudden, it’s crazy, I’m, like, photographing the tree ‘cause I like the shape of it, or I like the clouds, and then I photograph my dogs. What I try to show the kids is that you do have to have that physicality.

TURNER: Yeah, I’ve always felt that dance is such a huge, huge mystery. I keep thinking that to really dance well must be one of the greatest highs because it costs so much to do it, you know?

WEBER: We’re both dealing with the idea of giving up a lot of things to do something you love. It’s one of the things that I try to show my students a little bit is that, that’s something you do need your strength and your courage to do that, like when your friends are all partying and doing things, maybe it’s better you have the safety of the camera and you’re recording it. You know?

TURNER: Another thing I want to do, and I hope I do, is to pass on a kind of ethics, you know, a professional ethics: Don’t be late. Your job is to be physically able to do this, the role that you have taken on. Don’t keep people waiting. Treat people with respect. Whatever aspect of the work they’re doing, you, you know, an actor is the last person who gets to do their job. You need everybody else before you to do theirs, you know? And I try to erase this above/below the line nonsense and just find how wonderful this kind of independence is.

Do the kids today approach creativity differently than young artists of your generation did?

TURNER: They seem almost more sophisticated. But I think that’s probably due to the different access they have to life altogether as opposed to when I was that age. They don’t come with arrogance or presumption.

WEBER: I think my students came to me in a way, where they were in my hands, and I just felt responsible for them. It was a weird thing. I don’t have any kids of my own. I’m married, and I have, like, six dogs and I have assistants who are like my sons and daughters. But there’s so much disappointment that happens once they step out into into the world, and I wanted to really give them a lot of support.

TURNER: Yeah, I think perhaps there’s more common ground in photography and acting in that as a discipline, as an art form, there isn’t any set rule. It’s not like you have to be able to pick up a violin and follow a particular passage of music or be able to execute these specific steps as you would in dance. Everything is so open to interpretation. I have always felt that it was rather wonderful not to have those kind of restrictions placed on me. On the other hand, there is a kind of validation, I suppose, by having a more specific discipline.

WEBER: And discipline is something that you learn really early on. I’m late for everything in my life socially, but never late for my work, you know? But I used to be like five or ten minutes late for my work, and one day I just woke up and I said, “Wait, I can’t do that to my crew and to everybody,” you know, and so I tried to show them a discipline of purpose, of doing something that, you know, means something to you.

It seemed like the single lesson that you had to impart to your students was about the importance of being fearless.

TURNER: I would agree. I think fearlessness is essential. You don’t get to these extraordinary places by following someone else’s path, you know?

WEBER: Right. What she said is so true. I think that’s the hardest thing to learn.