This Cultural Life

Award-winning novelist, playwright and short story writer Ali Smith is the author of 12 novels, three of which have been nominated for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Her best-selling How To Be Both won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Costa Novel of the Year in 2014. Brought up in the Scottish Highlands, she was the youngest of five children in a working class family, studied English at Aberdeen University and began writing fiction whilst studying for a doctorate at Cambridge. Ali Smith tells John Wilson about the influence of cinema on her fiction, particularly the work of French new wave director Jacques Rivette whose disregard for conventional linear narrative in films including Céline and Julie Go Boating made a big impression. She also recalls how, as an aspiring writer, the work of fellow Scottish novelists and poets, including Liz Lochhead, Alistair Gray, James Kelman and Muriel Spark, helped give her the confidence to write her own fiction. Ali Smith also discusses 1960s pop artist Pauline Boty, a contemporary of Peter Blake and David Hockney, who tragically died at the age of 28 in 1966. Boty’s life and work - overlooked for three decades after she died - became a central aspect of Ali Smith’s 2016 novel Autumn, the first of a quartet of seasonal-themed books written and published over four years. Producer: Edwina Pitman

As one of the most successful screenwriters of modern times, Aaron Sorkin is renowned for his quickfire, rhythmic dialogue in films and television dramas including The West Wing, A Few Good Men, The Newsroom, Moneyball and The Social Network. More recently he’s directed his own screenplays with films including Molly’s Game, The Trial Of The Chicago 7 and Meet the Ricardos.Aaron Sorkin tells John Wilson how, at the age of five, his parents took him to see the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, an experience that sparked his love of theatre. He remembers seeing Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf a few years later and being entranced by the musicality of the dialogue. Debates around the family dinner table, led by his corporate lawyer father, are another source of inspiration for a writer famed for creating adversarial scenarios in courtrooms and the corridors of power. Sorkin pays tribute to his mentor, the Oscar winning screenwriter William Goldman, and explains how Goldman’s screenplay for the classic 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid offers a masterclass in dramatic dialogue. Aaron Sorkin also reflects on his writing process, and how he often gripped by ‘writer’s block’, despite being one of the most prolific screenwriters of his generation.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Spanish ballet star Tamara Rojo has enjoyed a 20 year stage career, in which she starred in all the greatest classical ballet roles to both critical and popular acclaim. She became artistic director of the English National Ballet, and recently made her debut as a choreographer with a new version of the 19th century ballet Raymonda. Now, after a decade running the ENB, she is preparing to take on a new job as artistic director of the San Francisco ballet, the first woman to hold the role. She tells John Wilson about the chance introduction to a dance class at school, and her unexpected success winning the Paris International Dance competition in 1994 which led to a role at Scottish Ballet at the age of 17. She reveals how seeing Francis Bacon's studies of the Velazquez portrait of Pope Innocent X made her reassess approaches to classic works of art and inspired a desire to re imagine works from the classical ballet canon. She also explains why she loves the Lars von Trier film Dancer in the Dark and how Bjork's tour de force performance mirrors he own approach to inhabiting a role.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Olivier and Emmy-winning actor Brian Cox is best known these days as Logan Roy, the tyrannical media mogul and disappointed father in the hit series Succession. It’s a character familiar to him having played King Lear, along with virtually every other classical role during a sixty year stage career at the National Theatre, the RSC and repertory theatres throughout the UK. On screen he’s made a name for himself as the go-to character actor of his generation, with roles in the Bourne trilogy, Troy, Braveheart and many more. Villains are his speciality and include the original portrayal of Hannibal Lector on screen in the film Manhunter. In a wide-ranging conversation, he tells John Wilson about the most formative influences on his career which started when he worked as a stage hand at the Dundee Rep Theatre in his home city. He reminisces about working with directors including Lindsay Anderson and John Schlesinger, and how seeing Albert Finney on screen in the 1960s made him realise there were new opportunities for working class actors. He also reflects on the international fame he has found playing Logan Roy.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Artist Maggi Hambling is a painter known for evocative portraits, and powerfully energetic seascapes of the Suffolk coastline where she grew up. She’s also a sculptor, whose public artworks, including tributes to Oscar Wilde, Benjamin Britten and more recently Mary Wollstonecraft, have been the focus of both acclaim and controversy. She tells John Wilson about her unconventional family life in Suffolk, discovering her artistic talent as child and studying with the East Anglian school of painting under Sir Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. She explains how Rembrandt's portraits were a major influence on her own work, and reveals how a trip to New York in 1969 proved to be a formative experience, not least because she found herself at the legendary Woodstock Festival that year. She also speaks candidly about how painting family members and close friends after they have died, including both her parents and her partner in their coffins, helped keep their memory alive for her.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Acclaimed American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato talks to John Wilson about the works and events that have made her the performer she is. A Grammy and Olivier award-winning opera star, Joyce is renowned for her range, control and dramatic performances on stages around the world. She reveals her most formative influences including her teenage love of Billy Joel; the struggle to perfect her singing technique; her breakthrough role as Rosina in Rossini's The Barber of Seville; and the film and opera of Dead Man Walking, which ultimately led her to take part in life-changing work in Sing Sing maximum security prison.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Dancer and choreographer Akram Khan is one of the world’s most acclaimed and influential figures working in contemporary dance today. Born in London to Bangladeshi parents, Akram is renowned for his radical productions in which classical Asian music and movement is fused with modern styles. He’s won many awards, was made an MBE in 2005, and choreographed and performed in the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. He tells John Wilson about his teenage role in Peter Brook's epic production of The Mahabharata, which toured the world; the importance of collaborating with with leading creative figures from outside the world of dance including Anish Kapoor and Juliette Binoche; and reveals how an extraordinary chance encounter changed his artistic outlook.Producer: Edwina Pitman

German-born British composer Max Richter tells John Wilson about his earliest musical influences, including the revelatory experience of first hearing Bach’s Double Violin concerto. He reveals how, growing up in Bedford in the early 1970s, a contemporary music-loving milkman would deliver albums by the likes of Philip Glass, John Cage and Steve Reich, musicians who helped inspire Max to pursue his interest in composition. He recalls the raw energy and political engagement of punk bands like Stiff Little Fingers and The Clash whose gigs he saw as a teenager; and how hearing German synthesiser-pioneers Kraftwerk on a BBC nature documentary sparked his interest in electronica. Max also pays tribute to the Italian composer Luciano Berio who tutored Max in Italy and honed his compositional skills. Max Richter is one of the world’s most successful contemporary composers, selling more than a million albums and clocking up over a billion streams. His melodic, evocative compositions have been heard in television soundtracks and films scores, including Arrival, Shutter Island, Mary Queen of Scots, Bridgerton and many more. His albums include Memoryhouse, The Blue Notebooks, the eight-hour-long composition Sleep, and Recomposed which reworked Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. He has also composed for theatre and ballet. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Since her breakthrough in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm, Nicole Kidman has played a hugely diverse array of roles - in arthouse films like Lars Von Trier’s Dogville and blockbusters including Paddington. She talks to John Wilson about the influence of some of the filmmakers with whom she worked, included Jane Campion who directed her in Portrait Of A Lady, and Stanley Kubrick who became a close friend after she starred, with her ex-husband Tom Cruise, in Eyes Wide Shut. Nicole Kidman recalls the making of Baz Luhrmann's musical Moulin Rouge and The Hours, the film for which she won the best actress Academy Award for her role as Virginia Woolf. She also discusses the excitement and fear she experienced on the London stage in the plays The Blue Room and Photograph 51.Producer: Edwina Pitman

As leader of rock band The Police, and as a multiple-Grammy winning solo artist, Sting has sold more than 100 million albums worldwide over his four decade career. In conversation with John Wilson, Sting explores some of the people and places that helped shape his creativity. He recalls his working class upbringing in the Tyneside shipbuilding communities, and how hearing The Beatles inspired his musical ambitions as a child. Sting explains why, at the height of their international success, he split The Police in the mid-eighties. He also reveals how Miles Davis and other jazz musicians, and classical composers including Bach and Prokofiev, inspired his new musical direction as a solo artist. Producer: Edwina Pitman