Which writers or artists most influenced your work?

Only Mies influenced me. Le Corbusier I met. He was a nasty man, but obviously a genius. You don’t have to like the people just because they’re geniuses. Mies and I got along better and we became pretty close. I worked with him on his greatest building here, the Seagram building, which was kind of fun, but again, you can’t be a hero-worshipper and be an uncommon architect; you’ve got to be your own man. So I split with Mies and did a different kind of work.

No. Although I have to qualify that. Though he was, by jazz standards, a very square composer, he was, by musical theater standards, a not square composer, and he taught me to be less square. I tend to be square.

I wrote a little book called Screening History , in which I go in great detail into the movies that affected me growing up. This was in the years of puberty, and so on. The Prince and the Pauper , based on Mark Twain’s novel with the Mauch twins in it. All of the propaganda films I loved, because they were political.

Thrust into my profession without any training whatsoever, I had to just flounder and just find my way. It was an agonizing experience. It’s like jumping off a diving board in the Olympic contest without knowing how to swim or dive, and I just had to find my way. So one day, I said to Jimmy Cagney, “Jimmy, what is acting?” and he said, “I don’t know.” He said, “All I can tell you is whatever you say, mean it,” and I thought that marvelous counsel.

Professor Randall was a great advisor and a great mentor. He taught me, I think, in the best possible way. He was not a brilliant lecturer. His courses were fairly pedestrian. I didn’t think his seminars were particularly interesting. But working with him on a one-to-one basis as his assistant, I think that’s the way one has to learn to be a historian. That is, he was writing, and if he needed some particular reference, I had to go find it and get it. If he was writing, he wanted everything checked meticulously over and over again. So I had to take the manuscript over to the library and check it all out. So that by working closely with him, I got to see, first of all, a lot of the library and its extensive holdings, but I got, even more important, to understand what a scholar is about. It is about care. It is about “pains-taking.” It is about judgment as well as it’s about very skillful writing. He was an excellent writer as well. So in that sense, Professor Randall and Mrs. Randall shaped my future career.

Very much, because he’s interested in that same kind of process. Bonnard, Matisse, Indian miniature paintings, which he collected. That’s where the light comes from, a spectral relationship within the painting itself.

Well, if I had studied theater, I would not be making the kind of theater that I’m making. My theater came about by living. My first play that had text was written with another 13-year-old young man named Christopher Knowles who spent 11 years of his life in an institution for brain damaged children and was composing text that were arranged mathematically and had to do with geometry. I was fascinated by his mind and the way he was putting words together. Not only was it interesting to hear, but it was also very interesting to see. It wouldn’t be necessarily right for someone else, but for me it was something I was drawn to. It came about by living, not by reading a book.

I spent time with Rauschenberg a lot during the combine period. I think just around the combine period. He had a big influence on me because he was very free and not full of philosophy and why I’m doing this and that. Some of the artists had this anchor of having to be — relate sometimes to Hegel and Kant and Nietzsche. It was sort of baggage that they brought to the table that was irrelevant. I mean it was in their head and it was relevant, but it was irrelevant to this moment of truth. So I found the artists that were kind of “dumb smart,” that were really smart but didn’t parade it, that were willing to take the risks and stuff.

They were the great architects who have gone before. So they were architects like Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright. Of course, they were alive at the time that I was studying. But there were also, for me, not just buildings.

Well, I mean, obviously, as I said, Richard Rodgers, very obviously say, composers like Prokofiev, like Gershwin, all of these, the great musical theater writers. I would add, as melodists, I think if you were talking about the great melodists of the 20th century, I would put Paul McCartney in there. I would definitely put Rodgers. I would definitely put Prokofiev. I’d definitely put Gershwin because he died so young, but definitely would put him there. And those, of course, in the theater side of things, I’d definitely put Hal Prince

Well, I saw Mies van der Rohe and then I was introduced to Shiro Kuramata’s work and that brought me even further into this world. I’m interested in everything. I mean, Peter Zumthor is obviously very talented, he does interesting work — but I don’t study my contemporaries in architecture and design so much.