Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles [director] Part of this is I'm trying to figure out some of the big picture things. How aesthetically to tell your story. And even before that, kind of what your story is, you know? Roll, camera. [Christoph] I've been thinking about how we would kind of create the documentary. And in my general state of anxiety right now, I came to this question: Is this about me, or is this by me? And you don't even see me drawing, right? [director] We don't. We're just seeing the top half of your head. So you can act with your eyes. [director laughs] [Cristoph] When I design the experience for the viewer, of course I want to come across as good as I possibly can. 'Cause we're vain and we have to be. And if it's about me, it's a little bit, just tug of war of how much do you make me reveal and how much do I reveal of stuff that I might not want to reveal. But, ultimately, it's not about me. [director] Be an artist. [Cristoph whispers] Be an artist. [drumming] [woman sings in German] [clock ticks loudly] [door opens and closes distantly] [Christoph] I would say everything that happens between nine and six is about work. I work mostly by myself. So I sit at my desk and I draw and I design. So I'm there, and it's me and my art supplies and my computer and my coffee maker, so it's kind of me, me, me. I'm such a control freak that I would always love to sit down and come up with the perfect formula for creating art. But it doesn't work that way. It's a little bit of a painful realization, because, ultimately, it really is, to a very large degree, staring at paper. And I have to trust for kind of crazy moments to happen. [piano plays] I would say that abstraction probably is, for me, the most important concept of art. Where you say, "Oh, I'm just drawing a simple box, because I love things that are not precious." But it's the idea of, like, I start with a thousand different thoughts and then I, one by one, throw them all out, until, at the end, I have the one or two or three that are essential to the whole question. But the abstraction, for me, is this idea of getting rid of everything that's not essential to making a point. This thing here, it's called The Good Shape or The Good Form. So I take this flatiron shape and I start doing things out of it. Men, women, bathroom, strongman, nuclear power plant, cowboys and Indians, all sorts of sports. [director] So what did your teachers make of you? I had a very, very difficult teacher, Heinz Edelmann, who did Yellow Submarine, The Beatles' movie, and did amazing posters and book work. Fantastic designer, but let's say he did not teach by encouragement. The highest compliment that you could hope for was, "Oh, we don't really have a problem with that." That was like, "Yes!" When I grew up in South Western Germany, I was always drawing. It was all about getting action and proportion right. Drawing things very dynamic. And that was the goal. To kind of get there, to this, like, hyperrealist, amazing painting. And this is kind of the notion that I went to art school with. But the teacher I had at art school, Mr. Edelmann, he made it pretty clear that he really disliked this stuff that I was doing. So I was drawing hundreds of sketches on just letter-sized paper, and each week, he would come in and go through them and basically say, "Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope." "Oh, this one's okay!" 'Cause this is what we did in school. Take a topic, like a red clown's nose, and then just squeeze the hell out of it. Just do every single variation. [director laughs] [Cristoph] Eventually, I realized that it's not about something super simple like a black square or, like, one line. But each idea requires a very specific amount of information. Sometimes it's a lot: a lot of details, a lot of realism. Sometimes it's really just this one line. The one pixel. But each idea has one moment on that scale. So, lets say you want to illustrate the idea of a heart as a symbol for love. When you illustrate it, as just, like, a red square, which is the ultimate abstraction of a heart, nobody knows what you're talking about, so it totally falls flat. When you go all the way realistic and draw an actual heart made out of flesh and blood and pumping, it's just so disgusting that the last thing anybody would ever think about is love. And somewhere between that abstract red square and the real, kind of butchered heart, is the graphic shape that kind of looks like that, and kind of looks like that, and it's just right to transport this idea of a symbol for love. New Yorker covers are the biggest deal for an illustrator, I think. Once you see The New Yorker cover once, you see the history, you see the artist, you see, most importantly, I guess, the cultural impact. This was my... This was the first one. [director] What was the date? July 9, 2001, the day I got married. Which is especially fantastic. What I love is that this is what they put on the magazine. There's no headline. There's not even a story. This was July 4, 2001. It was about the missile shield. The Dr. Strangelovian generals who start World War Three. There's no story about this idea inside the magazine. It's almost like the stage is pulled empty and this is the image for one week. The second cover might actually have been... this one. And, to a strange degree, this might even be the most exciting one, because the first cover of The New Yorker is the Eustace Tilley, this New York dandy with a top hat. And we said, "Let's try to do an icon of an icon." Making the butterfly just a blue square, makes absolutely no sense unless you know the original. I've done 22, I think. The thing is, I never even thought about 22. You think that when you've done two or three, all of a sudden it becomes, like, "Oh, it's just another job." It's not, because it's extremely exciting, but it never becomes easy. [clock ticking] [director] So tell me about this New Yorker cover you're working on. [Christoph] I'm doing this virtual reality cover, which... It's more like augmented reality. So the idea is I have this magazine open, on the front or on the back, now I approach it with my phone or with my tablet and then this whole three-dimensional animation comes out. And you're just like, "No way!" There's a lot of kind of levels of metaphors and drawing to work. And 3-D and 2-D and back and forth, and it's kind of like physical and... And I also knew I couldn't plan. I couldn't have one idea that just solves the entire thing. I had to start somewhere and then say, "Okay, is this strong enough or flexible enough to just go to the next step?" [clock ticking] So the magazine, in theory, opened like that. But I don't look at a magazine like that, I think nobody ever looks at a magazine like that. So I thought, when I have a magazine, I might look at it like that, so, really seeing it as the inside-outside world. And I was thinking, "What's... What's like a very New York inside/outside scene?" I realized that a subway... I have the windows, I have people sitting in there and then the whole subway can be... Yeah, that's the idea of the magazine as the plane that the person walks through. You can see it from the inside or from the outside. It's a New York City cab, off-duty, which you can see... It's off-duty here. This is... Let's make it busy. This one's busy. It looks better, though, all black and yellow. My favorite colors. It's the restriction with Lego, the restriction of... just very low resolution... It's almost like a three-dimensional pixel drawing... that I enjoy so much. [director] Why have you done so much New York work? Well, it started with my connection. It was the first city I went to by myself... and I think there's only one city in your life that you go to by yourself...