Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
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design, I feel like I help clients put together their own narrative. Your careers have much in common—imagination, intu- ition. You both create worlds. EM: Yes. It's investigating, too. HP: It totally is! It's the chase. EM: And wanting to know the history of things. I sometimes view the world as a crime scene, and your job is to figure out how it got that way. HP: Well, I like to celebrate beau- ty. You like to celebrate content. Looking around this room, there's a lot of taxidermy. EM: My wife and I like that. It's not square with [many ideas] of beauty. Stephen Hawking came to dinner once. We put him in a chair and he was at a strange angle looking up at the albatross. When we got him hooked to his speak- ing machine, the first thing he said was, "They're very faithful." How do objects inspire your work? EM: Often in my movies some of my best images are connected to objects. The milkshake in The Thin Blue Line [a key detail in the murder investigation tracked by the film] comes to mind. My of- fice is my lair. I don't know what I'd do without it. My wife kindly describes it as a daycare center for myself. HP: You love beautiful objects. You love art. It's very fulfilling to create a workspace that you are attached to. . "I always dIstInguIsh between symbols and objects. symbols are weaker because they have to represent somethIng, whereas an object has Its own power." —errol morris Among Morris's (above, in his home with Pribell) impressive "animal" collection ("They're very faithful," Stephen Hawking once remarked) is a taxi- dermy albatross. A squirrel monkey skeleton. An array of taxidermy New England songbirds. bostoncommon-magazine.com 111