My Friend Sam
I first met Sam Taylor Johnson in a dream. I had approached her in 1999 about making a short film together and in my dream she told me she wasn’t able to do it but that something else good was going to happen.
Everything took place as per the dream: Sam had other commitments and in the end I made the film with John Malkovich, who came up with the most brilliant anarchic ideas and we went on to collaborate on two more films which he directed. Sam and I became great friends after this and somehow the intention of working together always remained.
When she was living in LA with her husband Aaron Taylor Johnson and their family, I would stay with them, bringing gifts of jumpers and t-shirts as tokens of my gratitude for having a home from home. One day they sent me a video of themselves standing in their West Hollywood garden wearing all these garments on top of each other and peeling them off at top speed. It was a brilliant piece of performance art and lodged in my system.
When I feel low, I often speak to Sam about ideas – not specific per se but how to break a creative impasse, what to think about, where to look that’s different from where I normally look. I was always interested when my father started a self portrait, how he saw himself at that moment in his life. It feels like a reset when I see other people do that.
Sam is the most dynamic of my friends, things happen immediately with her, from meeting for breakfast “can you meet in half an hour?” to ‘Let’s do a project together.’ This time it was me that floated the suggestion and Sam came back with a concept which involved self portraits.
