"NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY SERIES" Part of this is me trying to understand some of the bigger picture stuff. How to tell your story beautifully. And before that, what is your story anyway? Turn on the camera. I was thinking about how we would do the documentary. In my current state of anxiety, I came to the question: Is this movie about me, or was it directed by me? You don't even see me drawing, do you? We don't see you, we just see the top half of your head. So, you can act with your eyes. When I design the experience for the viewer. Of course I want to get there as best I can. Because we are arrogant, and we should be. If the work is about me, there will be a struggle between how much you make me reveal and how much I reveal about things I do n't want to reveal. But in the end, it's not about me. Be an artist. Be an artist. "Illustration (Christoph Niemann)" "High concept - Low resolution" "(Berlin) - (Germany)" I 'd say that everything that happens between 9 and 6 is about work. I work alone, mostly. So, I sit at my desk and I draw and design. So there I am with my art supplies, my computer, and my coffee maker. So, I'm on my own. I'm such a control freak that I would always sit and think of the perfect equation to create art. But it doesn't work that way. It's a painful process. Because in the end, it's very much about staring at paper. And I have to trust that crazy moments will happen. I can say that abstraction, for me, is the most important concept of art. “I paint a simple box because I like things that aren't precious,” she says. But it's the idea that I start with a thousand different ideas. Then one by one, I start eliminating them until in the end there are 1, 2, or 3 that are essential to the question. But abstraction, for me, is this idea of getting rid of everything that is not essential to making a point. This thing here is called "good form" or "good composition." So, I take this flat metal shape and start making shapes out of it. Men, women. Toilet, strongman, nuclear power plant, cowboys and Indians, all kinds of sports. So, what did your teachers think of you? I had a very difficult teacher, Heinz Edelmann, who did Yellow Submarine, the Beatles film, and designed amazing posters and books. He's a great designer, but let's just say he didn't learn by encouragement. The highest compliment we could have hoped for was... "We have no problem with that." And we'd say, "Wow!" When I grew up in southwest Germany, I was always drawing. The most important thing was to draw the movement and proportions correctly. I was drawing very dynamic things. That was the goal. To get there, to this amazing hyper-realistic drawing. This is the concept I went to art college with. But my art professor, Mr. Edelman, explained to me that he didn't like the work I was drawing. So I was drawing hundreds of pictures on letter-sized paper. And every week he would come and browse it. And basically he kept saying, "No, no," "That's okay." Because that's what we did in college. We would take a subject like a clown's red nose and then kill it and draw every different shape of it. Eventually, I realized it was n't something as simple as a black square or a single line. But every idea requires a certain amount of information. Sometimes there is too much detail, too much realism. Sometimes it's just one line, or one dot. But every thought has one moment on that scale. So, let's say you want to draw the idea of a heart, as a symbol of love. When you draw it as just a red square, which is the ultimate abstraction of the heart, no one will know what you mean, so the drawing will fail completely. When you use absolute realism and draw a real heart of flesh and blood, beating, it will be so disgusting that the last thing anyone will think about will be love. Somewhere between that abstract red square and the real heart filled with blood is the pictorial form that looks like this, looks like that and is apt to convey this idea of a symbol of love. "The Scale of Abstraction" New Yorker covers are the most important thing for an artist, in my opinion. When you see the cover of The New Yorker. You see the history, you see the artist and I think the most important thing is you see the cultural impact. This was the first one. What was the date? July 9, 2001, my wedding day, which is especially special. What I love is that this is what they publish in the magazine. No address. There is no story even and this was on July 4, 2001, and it was about the missile shield. Crazy generals like Dr. Strangelove characters who start World War III. There is no story about this idea inside the magazine. It's almost as if the theater was evacuated, and this was the picture for a week. The second cover might have been...this. Oddly enough, this might be the most exciting because the first cover of The New Yorker is Eustace Tilley, this New York dandy in a top hat. And we said, "Let's try to design an icon for an icon." Drawing a butterfly as just a blue square has no meaning unless you know the original drawing. I think I designed 22 covers. The thing is, I didn't even think about 22. One would think that when you make 2 or 3 it would suddenly feel like just another process. It 's not, because it's very exciting, but it never gets easy. So, tell me about the New Yorker cover you're working on. I'm designing a cover for virtual reality which is more like augmented reality. So, the idea is that I have this magazine open on the front or the back. Now, I approach it with my cell phone or my tablet and out of it comes this 3D drawing and you say to yourself, "Impossible." There are many levels of metaphors and graphics to think about, three-dimensional and two-dimensional, give and take, which is physical and... I also learned that I can't plan. I could n't have had a single idea to do the whole process. I had to start somewhere, and then say, "Is this strong enough or flexible enough to move to the next step?" So, theoretically, the magazine opens this way. But I don't look at the magazine that way. I do n't think anyone looks at a magazine that way. So I said to myself that when I had a magazine, I might as well look at it that way , seeing it as an inner and outer world. And I wondered, "What expresses an interior and exterior scene in New York?" I realized that in the subway, I have the windows, I have the people sitting inside, and then it could be the entire subway... That's the idea of the magazine. This is the plane that a person walks through. And you can see it from inside or from outside. It's a New York City taxi, out of service. And you can see ... It's out of service here. Let's make it busy. This one's busy. But it looks better, in black and yellow. My two favorite colors. It's the limitations of using Lego. It's the limitations of... It's very low resolution, almost like a pixelated drawing, which I enjoy very much. Why did I do so much work about New York? It started with my connection to it. It was the first city I went to by myself, and I think there's only one city in a person's life that you go to by yourself and you have that experience. I didn't have an uncle, there were no parents to pave the way for me. It was like my own place. (New York) I moved to New York in 1997. A dead end. What struck me was When I went there and presented my book, I realized that people understood 99 percent of my work. When you go to a country a few thousand miles away and everyone understands everything, it's amazing. In a very strange way, I felt at home just because I was so immersed in American culture as a kid. From the music to the art, to "Magnum P.I. " The Flatiron Building, the South Face, the East Face, the North Face, the Statue of Liberty, the subway, the Empire State Building, the Empire State Building on St. Patrick's Day, the Staten Island Ferry— if you've ever ridden the Staten Island Ferry, you know that's it. That's the epitome of that kind of first tourist moment. For me, this approach is built on culture, on shared experiences. That's more interesting than inventing a new, forward-looking way of speaking that people then have to decode. There's a Starbucks, and I love sitting in front of that window. That was a place I've been sitting in it since the first time I came to New York. And I've always said to myself, I want to sit here and look out. A few times, I've tried to work there because I imagine myself in that position, in the sense that the artist is connected to the city. Then we have this kind of emotional exchange. People walk past me. It never works. The effect of the work is nothing. It's kind of confusing, actually, and I can't concentrate when I'm sitting there. That's the moment when I realized that my real life and my work life don't really mix. I understand what you're saying. I'm trying to solve it from a visual storytelling point of view. I think the way I see some of these things is almost like a montage of snapshots that are very close together and shown very quickly. Going through the day, the ritual of it, like brushing your teeth. I mean, again, we could try... The idea of putting a camera in our bathroom makes me uncomfortable. Well, I don't want to. So, we could do it, but it would be painful, and I can't imagine how I would want to see that. I 'd rather paint it than exhibit it. When I started working, I was often restricted. With deadlines. In the first 10 years if I had to divide my work... 30 percent of it was, "We want Christophe to draw a nice picture of this and that," and 70 percent was, "No! A serious error has occurred. We have 12 hours, so let's call this guy and he'll find a solution that's not embarrassing and he'll save us and make us meet the deadline." And I love that, I love that kind of tension, especially in the opening, but a lot of the calls I've received have been out of desperation. I think Chuck Close said, "Inspiration is for amateurs." We professionals go to work in the morning. What I love about that saying is that it takes away a lot of the pressure. It's not about waiting hours for that moment when inspiration strikes. It's about showing up and getting to work. And then something amazing happens, or it doesn't. The point is that you create the opportunity for something to happen. And for that, you have to sit at your desk and you have to draw and you have to make and you have to make decisions and you have to hope . It's a very scary thing when you have half an hour to do something. But of course, creating a process that allows you to do things that aren't embarrassing on demand is the only way to keep going. If you create a shield of craftsmanship around yourself. The only dangerous thing about focusing on craftsmanship and hard work is that it can prevent you from asking the really important questions. I'm trying to be good at something, but is this thing I'm trying to be good at the real thing? It's the subway rail and the bumps on the sides of the rail. I'll put... a person standing here. When you stand there in the middle of the night because you missed the last G train and you just look at objects. And at your friends and your enemies at the same time. Yellow is The perfect color for New York. It's the color of taxi cabs, it's the color of the sides of subway platforms. The contrast is so perfect. I met my wonderful wife, we got married, and we had kids. We have this system, we wave to each other when you come and go. Have fun. We wait for you to step out of the frame. Never mind. I'll see you in a minute. I think it started with me and my wife. Then we had one, and it's more like this. Then you have another one. And you think it's like the first one because you do the same thing you did with the first one, but the second one turns out to be completely different. But then the third one is more like this. "First comes the breeze..." " Then the roll of thunder." "Wow!" " Here's our first train today." I wrote a book based on riding the subway with the boys and how they totally got this idea. And I think what they loved about the subway, and what I love about the subway, is that in a weird way you're in this vast city, but it's the one thing where you're in control. Sometimes we're like this. Sometimes we're like this. I think we hope to be like this more. It seems This is a realistic expression of family life. I'm trying to think of something for The New Yorker. I'm designing a cover about virtual reality, and basically, this is something I've never done before. In this case, you're not just working in 360 degrees, but you're working in 360 degrees in all directions so you can look at it from all angles. "Quality - Inner Peace." For anything good I've done in my life, I distinctly remember being in a tense and angry mood. What's worse is that I get suspicious when I'm having too much fun while working because I know it doesn't bode well for the result. When you're drawing in two dimensions, you can cheat. You can hide anything you don't like behind a wall. In this case, you can look behind the wall and you can see all the chaos behind it. It's like an infinite compromise. The elements aren't this kind of highly illustrated, three-dimensional world that I hate visually, where everything has bright spots, and everything looks like smelly plastic. I want an ink drawing. I want a flat ink drawing that you can walk into and it surrounds you. There are too many lines on that side. Add something you think you You might regret it, and that's usually the most exciting part. When everything else fails, draw some water tank towers. That's always a great trick. And that's so wrong with this dry brush. I wish I could tear up the rest of the drawing and do more of that. Obviously, I'm just messing around for the camera right now. Okay, next scene. I'm convinced that you should always change direction when things are good. I was in my mid-thirties, and I was very busy. I felt satisfied, but I was exhausted. I still think New York is the best place to work, but I feel it's not a good place to refill your creative tank. And I find it more difficult to reinvent myself. I felt the only way to grow was to relax. In the mid-2000s, my wife and I agreed that the only place we could imagine moving to was Berlin. There are so many crazy galleries doing things that make absolutely no economic sense, and it's a completely different mentality. Berlin makes it easier not to worry about whether an idea is feasible. So, the most serious phase in my work happened when I moved to Berlin. In a world Ideally, in this documentary, and often, this will make you sick, there will be a moment where there's a sense of pure reality, just a glimpse. I would... I would feel that would be completely out of place. It would be the furthest thing from my nature to show anyone how to brush my teeth. When you show the real thing, you kill it. You make it impossible to later look at these things in abstraction. Like in the cartoon, "Charlie Brown," you never see the adult characters. You only hear these muffled voices, and that's perfect, that's amazing. In a moment, you pull the camera back and show these adults, and they could be perfectly designed, their dialogue perfectly written, but everything else would fall apart. So, in a way, I feel like we've actually pulled the camera back and shown the... although I'm not sure if you're an adult, but that's too much of a camera pull. And if you pull it back further there... but so much of your daily routine and your life inspires your work. It feels like we should see it. Yeah, I think so. Well, honestly, nobody wants authenticity. Authenticity is something like changing your kid's diaper. It's an idea. Funny in the abstract sense, but the real process is... I only care about what happens on the page because I want people to actually think for themselves. And it didn't take much to create the art. But people want to see you in real life. We can't film you sitting at your desk the whole movie. Whatever happens between 9 and 6 is the gist. But some things have to happen outside the studio. Like going to a museum. The addictive thing about that is not creating art, it's experiencing art. To have the entire world interpreted, or better yet, turned upside down. Just looking at a few strokes of an oil brush on a canvas is the greatest thrill I know. If experiencing art is that amazing, how amazing is it to make these things? And that's how they lure you into art school. Everything I do is create information, create images that do something with what the viewer already knows. It's really the idea of their experience and mine coming together, and the images are the catalyst. But the big problem with the routine is that everything starts to look the same. So I'm constantly trying to reinvent how I approach making pictures and how I approach telling a story. Because the audience changes all the time, and I change all the time. When I was 12, I taught myself to juggle balls. At any given moment, there's a ball in the air. And that's something I hate so much, this idea of not having control. But that unplanning approach opens new doors. It's very difficult, but it leads to magical moments. I started an Instagram project called Sunday Drawings. In terms of the response it got, it was some of the best work I 've been doing. But on the other hand, it was some of the most useless work I've been doing. There's almost no control there. For professional work, I need control because I need to be able to adjust, to tweak, to plan. But these Sunday Drawings are unplannable. All good design just happens, by me staring at something. Like I'm moving around the light, and suddenly I see a bright area or a shaded area, and I'm like, "Now, something's happening." You can't draw that. I've never been a reader because I don't want to escape anything. I want my real life to be Interesting. But I happened to read a book. I think it was called "The Invention of Slowness." It's about a man who's so incredibly slow at processing things that he can see shadows moving. It's a good fiction book, but the amazing thing I remember about reading that book is that when I looked up from the pages of that book, I felt like I had this view of the book in my real world. That book made my life more interesting. This is in art too, and it's something where you don't create an artificial world. You take the things you know and then you break them down into little elements. You rearrange them, and suddenly you're expressing something. Not with a monster or a dragon, but with a pencil. I came from print media. You felt it would always be there, people would always need pictures, and they always needed to be drawn, and if you got the idea, you were good. And suddenly, it wasn't. It was about long-form photo essays, it was about animation. Of course, our job was to see if there was a relevant way I could contribute to this new angle. So, that's all of us, all the time. This is an app I made. In the last four years. I wanted to do something interactive, but the important question is, at the moment when I give the viewer so much decision-making power over what might happen, and the viewer often has different opinions, you want to be surprised. That's the point of books, you want a surprise, something unexpected to happen. But here, in my literature section, I have all these literary references like Don Quixote, Kafka, Moby-Dick, a little bit of Jane Austen and Homer, and I hope that children enjoy that scene as much as adults do. Some people like it and some don't. Some people do. Some do n't. That's life. I 'm wondering, it's almost as if your creator and you, as your editor, are two different people. Yes. I need to be in control, and I need to have a clear sense of the direction I'm going in, and why something works and doesn't. On the other hand, I've also realized that having a freer spirit is essential. I've found that I have to develop these two characters separately. To be more aggressive. As an editor, and as an artist, I find it physically exhausting, but there are good things happening there. I take a very specific amount of time off for that kind of free-form creativity. Because I know it's impossible to do on a deadline. I literally sit down in front of a piece of paper and just do things, and I'm not afraid of anything. There's something there that I need to go back and investigate further. Creatively, I rely heavily on these ideas. And that only works if you're relaxed, without a task, without a deadline, and just creating and not worrying too much about where it's going to go. But I think it's never occurred to me to try something new on such a crucial deadline. And what's the deadline for the New Yorker cover? Two weeks. It would be crazy. I'd be so nervous. I've seen a lot of virtual reality work and I'm always like, "Wow! This is so exciting." And then 25 seconds later, I lose interest completely? And that's the big challenge now. This isn't like being coy and saying, "I don't think I'm talented." This is real, like being acutely and painfully aware of how inexperienced you are to do something on demand. Your general perception is that designing something beautiful makes you more confident. When it comes to ideas, I often find the opposite is true. With every new idea you have, it gets harder, actually because it's harder to repeat the process. Of course, you can't repeat the same thing. This is where the pain comes in when I talk about not being skilled enough, or my fear that my ideas have run out. You're measuring yourself against a moment when you were lucky. And that's very painful. You had a brilliant idea three years ago, and then the client asks you to repeat the process, and you say to yourself, "How can I do that?" “ I had won the lottery then. How could you ask me to win the lottery under pressure, with a gun to my head?” And that’s something, before I could even consciously think about it, I realized it and said to myself, “Oh my God! I'm miserable. But when I realized that my fears were threatening to affect my work, I decided I had to deal with them. (Christoph Niemann) - (Abstract City) " Calm down, don't be so hard on yourself. Actually, I completely disagree. You have to train and get better. Every athlete, every musician, trains every day. Why is it any different for artists? " (The New Yorker) " Sometimes I imagine what would happen if I had to face the 2006 version of me in some kind of creative barroom brawl. I may have lost some of my youthful spark, but I'm sure I would have beaten myself to a pulp. The assignment was to design a hyperreality cover. In a way, we have this hyperreality cover, but this is a hyperreality cover because you can look at the same view from two sides, and I'm inside the subway. So, basically, what I do with the iPad, I do with the actual magazine. It's like the magazine is the portal to the subway. So, this is an extension of that, not the other way around. I know how complicated it is to bring these different things like photos and animation together." So much so that it amazes me how close it came to what I had imagined. The idea of pop music is not to invent a new story but to tell the same story again in a new and interesting way. We don't buy pop records and say, "Someone's singing about love, nobody else has dared to do that yet." People have been singing about love for 500 years. And it's the idea of making it different and being like, "Actually, it hasn't happened yet... nobody has mastered that." I love the idea of bringing back these familiar scenes but making them feel completely backward. And new and real. In the best moments, what happens is that the design celebrates the world. When I look at a piece of art that references my fears, my anxieties, my hopes, and I can say, "There was that drawing that made me realize that I'm alive or that I love other people, or that I'm afraid." My goal is to speak the language of images like a pianist speaks the language of the piano. It's as if someone is controlling the keys and can convey different ideas, different feelings through that language. I have to constantly struggle to try to improve the act of speaking. Taking the world and putting it into images and conveying them. And in order to do that, I have to produce in a way that Ongoing. It's not complete, because the idea of it being complete is the opposite of what I'm trying to achieve. Good evening. Translated by Hisham Heikal