BREAKING THROUGH

Over mountains and seas, director John Andres captures the rugged outdoorsman in legendary reclusive glass artist William Morris

By Molly Norris

“I’ve been around art all of my life,” says director John Andres, whose new film Creative Nature explores the life and creative process of famed glass artist William Morris. The artist and avid outdoorsman was a dream subject for Andres, combining a dual passion for art and nature.

“I was able to work with this incredible artist who let his medium speak to him and who also spoke to nature,” Andres says. “For me it was a real alignment of interests.”

Andres has been involved with arts related documentaries his entire career, including producing and directing for seven years the series ArtsBreak for Bravo. His feature documentary The Line King: The Al Hirschfeld Story was nominated for an Academy Award. His wife works in Broadway musicals and the two have settled in New York, although Andres began his production career in Seattle.

Andres fell for Morris’s work first at the Bumbershoot arts festival in Seattle, and later at a solo exhibit of the artist’s work in Manhattan. He recognized how unique Morris’s glass art was: large-scale installations made of crafted, ritualistic objects such as tusks, artifacts and corn. Unlike many glass artists who easily seduce via the inherent beauty of the medium, Morris’s textured works defy prettiness by resembling stone, artifact and bone.

Morris’ 2004 Myth, Object, and the Animal exhibit at the Palm Springs Desert Museum provides the narrative structure for the film, such that, as Andres says, the museum itself becomes a ‘hub’ to the film’s narrative wheel. The titles of the art installations – Cache, Artifact Wall, and Mazorca – appear on the screen as specific works are unpacked, installed, and discussed by Morris’s team. Woven between these interludes are outdoor and hot shop scenes that usher us into the artist’s life and psyche against composer James Lavino’s delicate score.

As the film makes clear, Morris is as big a name as they come in the art glass world, beginning his career at age 19 working as Dale Chihuly’s assistant. Some large vessels of his can be found on the Internet starting at $150,000. “Many more famous people than I, documentary filmmakers who are known by everyone, have asked to do films about Bill,” says Andres. “And for whatever reason he said no.”

“I knew that the timing had to be right,” he continues. “From Bill’s perspective as well as mine. And I wanted to make sure that when I really pursued this I was ready, that I had my team in place, that I knew we were ready to climb mountains and do the extreme things we had to do that could cover both the art part of it as well as the rugged part of it.”

Filming Morris was a physical challenge—Andres says the artist’s adventures could win him a “Hemingway of the glass world” moniker. At 49 he is handsome and buff, a philosophically leaning movie star. Morris seems constantly on the move, jogging through hills early mornings scantly clad, paragliding, swimming with sharks, spear fishing, and scaling cliffs. This doesn’t include the action in the hot shop when he hoists molten glass and steel-blowing pipes from the furnace to the workbench and back.

Filming in the hot shop was tricky. Andres spent a lot of time lighting the shop for the film, yet he had to leave enough light for the glass artists to work safely as well. At the same time, he had to avoid the typical clichés of an art documentary. “I didn’t want to make a how-to film about glass,” he says. “I didn’t want to make a film about the next series Bill was going to work on. I wasn’t interested in that because at that point after a decade or so of knowing I wanted to make a film about him and doing the research I knew that this guy had multiple layers and that we’d have to peel back those layers to find out who the guy really is.”

Creative Nature was shot in Washington, California, Hawaii and Canada. For the paragliding scenes, Andres’ young, New York City daughters climbed with him up a 7,000-foot peak so that he could direct the scenes. When we see Morris swimming with a shark, the entire film crew is in the water with the fish and the artist. Andres lost three batteries due to saltwater.

“Obviously we didn’t have an unlimited budget,” says Andres. “We couldn’t follow Bill on every adventure, we couldn’t follow him every minute of the day. So that was a real challenge for all of us.”

“The reason why the film took as long as it did,” he adds, “is that Bill took a sabbatical for eighteen months in the middle of us making the film. He came back in the fall of 2006 and started blowing again. The break was actually good—it informed a bunch of other things that happened and allowed us to come back to New York and see what we did and didn’t have.”

Andres describes the darkest part of making Creative Nature: “The hardest time I had, that kept me waking up at three o’clock in the morning for a few weeks, is when I cut the scenes with Morris’s grown daughter and son. We felt that we needed to keep Bill human – there are so many aspects of the guy that are super human! We filmed him climbing with his kids and this brought out the father in him, a very human part. I really liked it but it just got us to a place where I thought we couldn’t return without doing some voiceover moment that I felt was artificial.”

Both Andres and William Morris share a belief that everyone is creative, nobody more so than anyone else. They both believe in the organic nature of the Muse, of letting ideas and inspirations form on their own until the time is right (Morris even says in the film that the reason he makes art is to allow him to observe nature better). Themes of integrity, intuition, nature, fame, and thinking for yourself to solve your own problems, weave throughout Creative Nature.

And then there is the plot twist that was handed to Andres on a blown glass platter.

Immediately after filming was finished William Morris announced his retirement from glass blowing at the age of 49. It was a shock to the art glass world, let alone to Andres and his team (they added this news as a voiceover at the end of the film). There is a foreshadowing of Morris’s retirement earlier in the documentary when he asks aloud why he is still doing what he does. He talks about not wanting fame or what other folks want of him to cloud his decision, stressing that he wishes to end on a ‘high note.’ Which he does.

“The whole journey of making this film has been wonderful for me,” says Andres; “I’ve relished it all along the way. The access people give, that Bill gave in this, is remarkable. You can’t make a film without access and that’s true for dramatic films but it is particularly true of documentaries. That access comes with faith and trust. I think that Bill and I had to grow with each other.”

John Andres

Molly Norris is a writer, artist and filmmaker who lives in Seattle, Washington.

CREW BOX: Creative Nature

http://www.creativenaturefilm.com

Director, producer, writer: John Andres
Producer: Rick Edrich
Director of Photography: Christopher Bierlein
Editor: Keith Lustofin
Composer: James Lavino