Original subtitles

[Es] Over the last two decades of working,

one of the things I've discovered is often things are made to fill voids.

[light switch echoes]

[Es] The impetus to fill that hole with art, to me, is fundamental.

[other-worldly music playing]

[Es] My canvas tends to be devoid of light.

You sort of do need to start without light to find it.

[other-worldly music continues]

[director] Here's my first question, and I've been curious about this.

Do you pronounce your name "Ezz" or "Ess"?

I pronounce my name "Ezz," because my name is short for Esmeralda.

Often it's perceived as being a man's name,

so I do get reviews in Germany, which say, "Herr Devlin's incredibly masculine work

would have benefited from reading the feminine aspects of the text."

So, it's a useful, neutral little name, actually, Es.

I find it quite handy. It's serving me quite well as a name.

Every project starts exactly like this.

Blank piece of paper, blank table, there's usually one other person there.

Could be a director, or a playwright, or the artist, if it's for a pop show.

And a conversation happens,

and I'd normally just start drawing while we're talking.

So, if I were to be having a conversation about my own practice,

it would start with this one,

with a little drawing of a pair of scissors on it.

'Cause you used to get those, and you still do,

on the back of a cornflakes packet,

and it's an invitation to take the piece of the cornflakes packet

and cut it and make an intervention in it

and change it and turn it into something else.

Like that, that will do.

And then you hold it up to the light and you go,

"Oh, there's light just coming through that bit that I cut!"

So I like that one.

I often get asked by people, "How did you start doing what you do?"

I often get asked by young, like, 17-year-old people,

who don't know what to do.

And I always feel very empathetic towards those 17-year-old people

who say, "I don't know what to do."

I was no different to that, I didn't know what to do at all.

But then I did a course in theater design

and I found myself in this room full of people making model stuff.

I thought, "This is good, these people are feral,

and they stay up all night making models, I feel quite at home here."

So, I did that. I just made stuff for a year in this thing

and then at the end of it, I won this prize.

One of the first major shows I was asked to do

was the Harold Pinter play, Betrayal.

Big piece at the National Theatre in London, so I threw everything at it.

And it says it's set in a bedroom, a living room, a hotel room in Venice,

and what I did is I overlaid the ground plans of every scene

with projections.

And at that time, it was quite unusual to use projection and film in theater.

There wasn't really an infrastructure for it to work.

And the point about that particular play is it really doesn't need any of that.

It does not need it. It's a very happy play in a white box

with a few white curtain changes and furniture, it's happy that way.

But that was me, I was doing my thing and Harold Pinter was very sweet about it.

'Cause he was quite excited to see all this gadgetry,

and, as a joke, he, on the first night, introduced me to Antonia Fraser,

his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser,

and said, "This is Es, she wrote the play."

So that was sweet.

[futuristic music playing]

The beginnings of my practice were making small theater.

You know, literally, there's an audience of 78 at the Bush Theatre,

which was where I first started working.

[Bradwell] The Bush Theatre is about the size of a matchbox.

What it was, was close-up magic.

We created worlds in a very, very tiny space.

How do you build a revolve in a theater that seats 80 people?

How do you do projections, television screens?

People were spending a lot of money doing that.

We were spending about four quid doing it out of junk

and Es was working out how to do it, every single step of the way.

She'd paint the set, she'd make the stuff, she'd weld.

[Es] I began to find what I wanted to say quite quickly

and quite quickly,

people who didn't like the kinds of things I was doing stopped asking.

My practice has been following my own paths of inquiry.

And in order to practice, I have found willing collaborators

who I've been able to align my paths of inquiry with.

From pop stars like Beyoncé, through to Wagner operas.

The interesting thing about the process...

I've learned that I don't actually make anything or know what to make,

until I know what the space is that it's going to inhabit.

'Cause as soon as you have a frame,

of course the first thing you want to do is start breaking out the edge of it.

The Faith Healer is a series of monologues

through rain, through sludge, through bleakness.

The interstitial gaps between each monologue

needed to evoke that itinerant bleakness.

The rain fulfilled that need, but also fulfilled a more practical need:

we are in a theater that does not have wings,

does not have a fly tower.

How do we change the scenery?

We are using our rain box like a curtain, practically.

From the actors' point of view,

they enjoy the way that they are revealed and concealed

at the beginning and the end of each of their monologues.

This is a theater which has a brick wall right behind what you see there,

and the audience who come to this space know that brick wall intimately,

they're used to being confronted with shallow space.

So to give them depth and an element that is real.

You can feel the audience feeling the emotional response that anybody has

towards lit rain in a small, dark room.

And I'm satisfied.

By the way, I have no idea how the rain system works.

It just shows that you can design nice things

without having a clue how they fucking work.

Es is somebody who absolutely amazes me every time we work.

I come back excited from meetings,

because she's always coming up with information I would've never known

or discovered by any other means.

A new stimulus every time, many in a meeting.

[Es] Normally, throughout the process there will be a number of meetings.

There might be five or there might be 25.

And it might take a year or three years or three months.

I will have my team make models.

I will draw the kind of models I think it's going to be,

and then when I come back, we've got a whole bunch of options.

Sometimes they're interesting. Sometimes they're less interesting.

We have another meeting,

we say, "We think it could be this, it could be that..."

So you need to turn up with everything.

[upbeat music playing]

[Es] This is actually probably the most recent, and it's a rejected idea.

He was drawn in Paris in Karl Lagerfeld's studio,

while Kanye West and Kim Kardashian were being photographed on a bed.

And I sat at the end of the bed drawing ideas that Kanye was having

and one of them was a man made out of LED,

and this posture is the result of many, many sketches.

Because at first, he looked too strong,

then he didn't look sufficiently vulnerable.

so we got to a sketch that he loved on that day

and we made this model.

And then we took it to Los Angeles and it was hated instantly,

so it came home in shame.

And it's hanging its head in shame

with a little parrot-headed man on it to cheer it up.

[laughs]

-[Es] You have that... -Mm-hmm.

-[Es] I want a little doorway. -Just flat?

-Blank. -Flush.

-A flush door. -Mm-hmm.

[Es] And it can open.

I was invited to make a piece for the Belgian Triennale Exhibition.

It's an exhibition about the relationship between music and art.

A visual embodiment of music.

And that's why I was invited to take part, because of the work I've done in music.

You know what you could do?

You could put the gauze there and then have just a torn out area.

So, I think that's quite elegant, if you just stretch it.

Yeah, I think that would look really smart.

I immediately wanted to make a cube that would revolve,

that would have different apertures on different sides,

projecting images of some of the shows I've made over 20 years.

I'll tell you what my mind's going through:

is whether it's interesting to see the mess inside,

or whether you want to keep it mysterious, you know. That's the--

That's the point.

-Ta-da! -Okay.

[laughs] I love that, I'm going to come around here more often. It's done!

There's an element of anxiety about it all.

There's an element of terror,

because Kanye is not going to be there, Beyoncé is not going to be there.

I've got to make something that is worth watching on its own,

which I haven't really made before, so we'll see.

It might or might not be worth watching.

[doorbell rings]

-[intercom] Hello? -[Es] Hello!

[door buzzes]

[Tim] I would never have been seen dead at a pop concert,

and I'd never would have gone to one but for Es.

Well, he can speak for himself. I would've been to lots.

But I think it's the spectacle.

[Tim] All those lights that come up, people taking pictures

and the deafening noise and everything, I've actually quite taken to it.

This was a lovely Christmas present Es gave us last year,

and it's offcuts from a big set she did in Dresden, and it's Der Freischütz.

Another nice thing is we get to see a lot of the stuff she does,

so we're camp followers. We are roadies, really. We go around.

And it's wonderful, because all sorts of places we'd never would've been.

[Angela] By the way, my husband, you may not know this...

Es's dad is a great crocheter.

-[Tim] That's my speciality-- -[Angela] He makes tea cozies--

-[Tim] I also made the table. -[Angela] He made this table.

-My husband made this table. -This is out of scaffolding planks.

Yep. Old scaffolding boards.

I mean, 90% of the stuff in this house is from junk shops

and we just painted them or made them.

[Tim] Yeah.

[Angela] So I think Es has done exactly the same thing,

but we never really thought she'd go into anything connected with art.

Music was her thing.

[Es] My way of escaping or adventuring away from the countryside

was through music.

'Cause I would go up to London on the train, age 11, on my own,

and I had music lessons in London at the Royal Academy,

and then when I finished my music lessons,

I would then have the rest of the day in London,

rocking about with my travel card.

[violin music playing]

[Es] So music kind of was an entry point into another tribe.

And I have always enjoyed, since then, being amongst the tribe of musicians.

I thought that bands, you see,

'cause I had been going out with a record producer,

and we went to see lots of shows,

and I always thought they were visually desperately boring.

Probably because I went to the wrong ones. I didn't go to the fascinating ones.

But they looked like this.

People playing guitars here, guitars here,

you might have had keyboards here,

and then you sometimes had a curtain or the band's name up here,

or, if you were really lucky, you might have had some projection.

But that was pretty much everything I saw in bands.

And I didn't like this shape,

'cause I thought it was a humpbacked band shape.

I was used to looking at opera and theater,

and I thought that was a mess.

And I didn't like these lights up here that just did "ri-ra-ra-ra" lighty things.

I didn't like it.

So, the first time I did a rock show,

I said, "Why don't we put them all in their own little box?"

You can go in here, Mr. Drummer. You can go in here, Mr. Guitarist.

The singer can go in here...

[rock music playing]

[Es] I put a gauze on the front, like this, which is a kind of netting,

and I put a mirror all over the sides.

A very cheap, crap mirror 'cause I didn't have much money.

And my idea was to sort of deconstruct the anatomy of this four-piece band.

So you just saw the vocalist's mouth, the drummer's nose,

the guitarist's eye and the bass player's ear.

But, in my excitement,

I neglected to remember that this was their farewell gig

and they would need to take a bow

and step out and be seen by their adoring fans.

[applause]

So, I just stapled this front gauze on and also, once they're in,

I stapled the rear projection screen on, so they actually couldn't get out.

People tell me I should watch a film called Spinal Tap,

but I've never seen it

and I don't intend to at this point in my life,

because everyone says my life is too similar to it.

So I'm never watching that film. Sorry.

And this is what Kanye saw

when he was in the middle of sacking his set designer,

and my friend heard him sacking his set designer

and said, "Look at this. She's just done this."

And Kanye said, "Oh goody, goody! I'll have one of those."

So that's how it all started.

[heavy bass playing]

[Es] What can this artifice bring on that's true?

What are you going to make the audience feel?

How can something pretend, initiate, or generate anything true?

I have been given the opportunity to spend sometimes millions of an artist's money

on, effectively, a sculpture that they have commissioned,

like Take That's giant man.

The question of "Why?" endures throughout.

Why did we want that slice of light through the middle of Beyoncé's cube?

Why did we want that circle of light around the Pet Shop Boys?

Why did we want that block of light in the middle of the arena for U2's tour?

In fact the U2 show,

the whole conversation we had was a journey from a square to a circle.

From the home, to the world, and that stage ended up actually being

a journey from a square stage to a circular stage.

What I tend to be most interested in is the psychology of a space.

A lot of my work now is about finding environments for music.

And there's a lot more freedom, I would say,

because many lyrics are already poetry.

So I guess I'm designing for poetry to happen in, more often than prose.

I really quite methodically go, "Okay, let's listen to the lyrics,

let's write down the lyrics that we respond to,

let's try and find a poetry, let's try and find a story."

And each time an actor or a singer sings or says a word...

♪ Blossom's fallin' from a tree ♪

that's another question:

what should be around them while they're saying this?

What would support or counterpoint what they're doing?

So, it's really complex, there are a lot of parts to it.

[futuristic music playing]

In spaces where I make things,

I can find light and scratch out light and shape things to allow light in.

Like the U2 show.

We found magic tricks that work best to control light.

For example, a mirror.

The first time I used a piece of mirror would've been Macbeth,

where we sliced a box in half with mirror

and we were able to see one half of this table,

with and without the ghost of Banquo as it revolved.

And it behaved as his psychological space,

as a metaphor for the tricks that were being played on him.

And then recently I used a mirror on a piece called The Nether,

which was about a world created digitally.

So I somehow needed to make the audience not trust their environment.

So what was interesting is people who came out of that play

described having seen a glass box, but actually, there was no box.

There was nothing there,

it was just objects placed in space with a mirror set quite far behind them,

so the audience's depth perception was really messed about with

so they thought they were reading a box

and they were just reading objects in relation to an invisible box.

And I use mirror a lot in the fashion shows I've been doing with Louis Vuitton.

This is a new discovery of a transparent, two-way mirror

that is mirror whenever there is not light behind it.

So, if you put a piece of LED screen behind a piece of two-way mirror,

then if you conjure a face against black behind mirror,

then the mirror will reflect the room everywhere except where the face is,

so you effectively see a suspended face amidst a huge double sized room.

I'm making more immersive pieces

that an audience can wander around and find themselves in.

Just recently, I was invited to create anything I wanted

for this Chanel project.

As long as it was about scent, it could be anything.

I came up with a mirrored maze,

and it seemed to me that that was a good analog

for the frontal brain making 50,000 decisions a minute.

And then suddenly allow them into a room where the floor falls away

and they plummet.

Then you'd be creating a sculptural physical analog

for how it feels to be plummeted back in time to a memory,

in the way that you do when you suddenly smell your mother's perfume.

[piano music playing]

[Es] I used to come to this church

and the extraordinary thing about this church

is it's a very small, little parish.

And yet, there are 11 stained glass windows here,

which were designed by Marc Chagall.

Which is an extraordinary thing, I think.

[piano playing continues]

[Es] A local member of the parish council,

his daughter died in a sailing accident tragically in 1963.

She was 21.

In memory of her, he commissioned these windows.

When Chagall came here and saw this window in situ,

he said, "Okay, I need to do the whole church."

So over the next ten years, he created the rest of the windows, one by one.

[piano playing continues]

There was a big Chagall exhibition in the early '80s,

and it would've been around that time I would've seen all of Chagall's work...

and also joined it together with seeing these windows.

So this feels like paint turned into light.

The intensity of that cobalt and ultramarine and cyan,

all those different blues that are going on together in that,

is something that I would've seen in paint and then I would've come here

and realized what happens when you pour light through it

and look at the refractions that are coming off it on the wall there.

And the fact that this guy... There's his name.

You know, he was here.

It reminds you that artists all have to come from somewhere, however small.

[birdsong]

What strikes me about these windows is, from the inside,

they are this glorious,

jewel-like emanating source of colored light.

But look at them here, they're black.

It's waiting to be brought to life.

It's how I feel at the beginning of a show,

before the lights come up on a piece of scenery.

The turning of the lights out at the start of a performance

is a really special thing, isn't it?

When you sit with a group of people in the dark.

'Cause it's not something we habitually do.

And I think that goes back to earliest childhood,

the lights being turned out.

You know, if you think about sleepovers...

A group of children awake in the dark, being an entry point into something.

And I think that sort of does get rerehearsed.

There's 80,000 people and the sun goes down.

That's the same as what happened at Stonehenge,

before there were any Christians here, but there were druids.

Something happens at that point in the show, because there's a change.

They have all come to focus their gaze on one person.

We don't need to say worship,

but all the energy of the room is focused on that one little individual,

and that in itself is an extraordinary, physiological event.

Eighty thousand humans are all looking at one other little human.

[electricity crackles]

[crowd roaring]

[heavy bass plays]

[Es] I worked with Beyoncé on the Formation tour,

and we came up with a thing that's not terribly dissimilar to this in some ways.

It's a cuboid, but it does open with this slit, this aperture of light.

When she was a child, she spoke to a TV preacher

and the preacher said to her, "Put your hand on the TV,"

and she felt the sensation of prayer.

I think it was the combination in a child's mind of what a TV does

and what the language and tone of prayer feels like.

And later she realized this big revolving block of her

is another way of broadcasting her and what she's saying.

If you look at most concerts before 2003,

most of the photos were done by professional photographers near the front

and you'll see a big god-like image of the pop star

and a load of lights behind.

And that's how the imagery was recorded

and that's how most people who didn't go would perceive the show.

So cut to cameras on phones...

Suddenly that event is being recorded from every angle

and therefore my work is suddenly being seen from every angle

and being understood in a different way.

So it's a big shift.

The artists I'm working with are bombarded with images of themselves and their show.

They know their show like they never knew it.

They're aware that how many people will perceive this show

will be via those media,

so, to a degree, we're designing to a square at the moment.

That will probably change. Instagram might suddenly become a triangle.

The more I practice

and the more I begin to be more self-reflective in the practice,

which is happening now, really,

then I begin to ask: why do I need to engage with these people?

What relevance is this work to me?

Why do I need to... What can I bring to it?

It's interesting, isn't it,

because the word "show" suggests that you're revealing something.

It doesn't suggest finding.

What would be nice...

And because I do what I do every day,

I have to make sure the showing of things is in itself the seeking for things.

-Make it a little bit more punchy. -OK.

[Es] Yay! Oh yes!

What would you have to show

if you hadn't been looking and finding and seeking?

This is going on a truck tomorrow night, going to Belgium.

So I looked at some footage of babies playing with those sorting boxes,

where you pick up a triangle, you pick up a circle, you pick up a square

and you try to slot it through different apertures in the box.

It's actually extraordinary footage to watch,

because what's happening in their brain is every time they discover something new,

they're getting a little dopamine rush,

which is why we're biologically selected to be in love with new things.

This baby literally,

either when it does go through or when it doesn't go through,

either of those instances is a new sensation,

and it gets a little reward.

That baby is the equivalent of me here

or in a stadium with Beyoncé, whatever it is.

It's literally what's going on in that little baby's brain,

loving that.

That's what this box is about, really.

I have been trying to fit different projects

through different apertures in my own little practice.

It's a little retrospective.

This is Rye, in East Sussex.

We moved here when I was six, and we lived here till I was 13.

And it happens to have in its town center, a model of this town.

The model tells stories, which I was very captivated by.

A ghost story, or a fable,

or the story of a butcher who killed a mayor.

My house is just there, and the roof is actually a pair of roofs.

And I used to climb out and sit in the little V out on that roof

and look out over the town.

I started to associate storytelling with models.

The systems and influences

of one's childhood are inescapable.

There's something about this that I'm absolutely drawn to,

and my mind mentally enters all of its streets.

But there is another part of me that does sort of wonder what would happen

if you just picked them up and smashed them apart.

You know, what if you put in something really subversive

or poured some paint over it?

My work is as much a reaction against this

as it is continuing to perpetuate the influence of this.

You can perceive the systems of a city

and the history of a city, when you look down on it.

The roads that were built on top of the other roads,

the periods of time...

So how I often use model cities is I don't put them on the floor,

I put them on the wall.

Which puts the audience on the ceiling, which I find fun,

and people do feel something when they look down.

We feel something here, I think,

and if you can bring this feeling into a black box theater, that's exciting.

I play with scale.

Scale is one of my ingredients, I guess, just literally practically in my studio.

I have people of all different heights.

And one of the things that I enjoy in my practice

is to position a human, huge or tiny, in relation to the same object.

Recently, on the Adele show,

her makeup artist became our scenic painter

because we knew that her eye would be this big

and that bit of mascara would interact with her hand here.

When I look over this particular city,

I play a little time-lapse of my own journeys through it,

my own arrival on that train when I was a kid,

the number of times I walked up and down Tottenham Court Road,

when I worked in a bookshop there...

Perceiving the system, finding the systems,

finding the patterns I guess, isn't it?

It's much easier to find a pattern if you're looking down on something.

This is another pair of artists that I collaborate with.

Kanye and Jay Z, for Watch the Throne.

Once we said, "Okay, 'Throne.'

What does 'Throne' actually mean in this context?"

And really it's about,

once you've found yourself in the exalted position,

then the next thing is the anxiety about losing that position.

So they're at once in positions of almighty power,

because they're 15 foot up.

But they're also vulnerable, because they're standing up there

and they could easily be shot or fall off.

And they're alone, they kind of look very lost and alone up there,

so it's a combination of power and vulnerability again, I guess.

That tension between power and fallibility

is very fascinating territory.

I'm not scared.

Just in case you're wondering.

[laughs]

I'm not scared.

[Warner] Es, without any doubt in my mind,

is the most driven human being I have ever met in my life.

You know, in fact, you know, she is so driven,

I think her imagination needs its own chauffeur.

But it's not ambition in a normal sense;

it's really about exploring the imagination.

[chime music playing]

And there is quality in Beethoven and Wagner and Shakespeare and Pinter,

which perhaps there isn't in other fields.

And I've got a feeling that deeply inside Es,

the quality has got to win through.

This was made for Don Giovanni, which is called the graveyard of designers

'cause it's a notoriously hard piece to design for precisely that reason

that it's very specific about people getting stuck in corridors in the dark,

so if you don't provide the necessary doors for all of that to go off,

it actually doesn't work.

So, we made a revolving box.

It's a kind of maze. All of these doors could slide.

All of this could be completely closed or any bit of it could slide or open,

so it was like an ever-changing architecture.

It was projected on, on all sides, with a mapping system.

When you make kinetic pieces of scenery, it's very exciting to an audience.

She always came up with things that made me think about things anew.

And she talked about the democracy of the theater.

If you've got 20 people on stage,

you cannot control where the audience looks.

The theater demands that democracy,

where you're making sure everybody from the top of the house,

to the bottom of the house is getting an experience.

[Es] The rook in Wagner's Parsifal.

What happens throughout the piece is it turns

and you see it from every angle.

The reason we chose the rook was because it's a symbol that everybody recognizes.

It's not necessary for the audience to know every detail.

It's actually more helpful to create an object

that, for everybody, has meaning.

For example, how you feel in a tunnel.

I think there are just these absolutely basic, atavistic,

primal responses we all have

to being in a dark, curved tunnel space.

So I do think, on everybody, there's an emotional response to that.

But the things that I create are not the things.

They are the time that the people at the show spend

in the company of the things.

So it's time that you're making, really.

Time perceived by an audience.

[pulsating sounds playing]

The objects themselves are not what you think they are.

What I am trying to say is if you were to keep the things I make

and put them in an art gallery,

they wouldn't be behaving as they were designed to behave.

They can only do that in time.

Reflecting the light and projections in different ways,

with different people inside them,

saying different words with different sound effects.

With Hamlet, we made a very specific timeline.

We read the pages of the script,

and we literally make a chart, second by second, page by page.

What is happening? Who is saying what?

As I start to shade things in,

what I'm always thinking about is how the audience will feel.

How long will they experience this for and then what will happen next?

Everything else is sort of serving that.

[Bradwell] The design you see is the tip of the iceberg.

But the amount of work you do to provide that tip of the iceberg

is what's important.

It will hold you up.

When I was a child, what I'm doing right now was my idea of utter heaven.

This was pretty much what I wanted to do.

But yeah, obviously now,

the things I make are a little bit more contemporary than a Pollock's toy theater.

But, you know, look, you're already doing surrealism.

I'm just doing that, look,

or I'm doing this.

With Hamlet, we made a very specific copy of an Edwardian stately home,

and it had to be that specific and that real and naturalistic,

so that we could then violate it with an influx of black poisonous earth.

So sometimes, as in the rules of a surreal painting,

surrealism works because there's reality.

[Es] Here, Lulu, try this one. Look. If you push it in here...

-Then push it from there. There you go. -But this is supposed to be the curtain.

-[Es] That is the curtain. -[Ludo] He died.

You put it in here, Milly.

-[Ry] Where? -[Es] Here.

[Ry] Oh.

[Es] There is a parallel with some of the artists that I work with

who feel that once you've toured the world and have played in front of 80,000 people,

you then say, "Well, what do I actually want to make for me?"

I ask why this needs to happen.

[Ry] Wait, don't pull the curtain up yet.

-[Ludo] Ooh. -And...

-Go! -[Ludo hums]

[Es] I do it for love.

I thought that if I made a beautiful object,

it was the most important use of my time.

[playful music playing]

[Es] Theater makers are aware of the ephemerality of what they're making.

Nothing's going to last.

You know when you set out to make it that it's going to be gone.

Sometimes in a week, sometimes in four days,

sometimes in four years.

In the end, everything is only going to exist in the memories of people.

You had to be there on that night,

to see that performance from Benedict Cumberbatch, or from Beyoncé.

Or Kanye West is only going to say it on that day.

[playful music continues]

[Es] So that will only exist in people's memories.

[playful music continues]

[music playing]