Jonathan Miller lives with his wife, Rachel, in an elegant Victorian house near Regent’s Park in North London. Their three children, one daughter and two sons, have grown up and gone, and Rachel, a general-practitioner doctor, now works in community medicine. The house, where the Millers have lived for forty-three years, is in a graceful crescent that has long been associated with “the life of the mind,” particularly writers and artists. Charles Dickens lived there with his mistress, who remained in the house until her death, and more recently V.S. Pritchett was round the corner until the end of his life. His current neighbors in the crescent are playwrights Alan Bennett and Michael Frayn, writers Claire Tomalin and Julia O’Faolain, among others.

The drawing room, where we sat by the fire for the following conversation, is full of floor-to-ceiling bookcases, pictures, and sculptures, objets trouvés and objets fabriqués—Assyrian basreliefs, African textiles, collages. Many pictures are by members of the Millers’ families—Jonathan’s father; Rachel’s mother, Ruth Collet—and also by Sickert and Braque and Auerbach. The atmosphere is warm and welcoming. Miller has a small study upstairs and a studio at the top of the house where he does his collages and collage sculptures. (In November 2001 he had his first art exhibition.) Miller speaks with knowledge and enthusiasmabout a variety of subjects, ranging from science and art to literature, philosophy, anthropology, and of course his own present activities, especially the opera. He is one of the most original and sought-after opera directors.

Born in London in 1934 and educated at St. Paul’s School and Cambridge University, Miller trained as a doctor at London University and for a while worked as a junior physician, until the huge success of Beyond the Fringe—a satirical revue he devised with Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore, and Peter Cook—changed the course of his career.

Miller’s wit, intelligence, humor, and enthusiasm for “the life of the mind,” and his ability to suffer fools tolerantly, have won himpopularity, both private and public. He has a great talent for mimicry—both vocal and physical—imitating, in the course of our conversation, numerous voices and accents, ranging from German and French to Yiddish and vaguely Serbo-Croat, effortlessly and in quick succession. His voice is resonant, and he speaks fast, as if words were tumbling over each other in their race to catch up with his thoughts.

INTERVIEWER

You have so many interests, and you have done so much in so many fields, that it is hard to know where to begin. You were born into a very distinguished and interesting family, so the atmosphere in which you grew up must have been rather stimulating.

JONATHAN MILLER

Yes. My mother was a writer, and rather good. She started young—she was only twenty when her first novel, The Mere Living, was published. Her novels were middle class but rather modern; she belonged to the world of Elizabeth Taylor and others of that ilk, although she was perhaps less distinguished than they were, but her books were very well reviewed. She went on writing novels until the end of World War II—seven or eight of them—and then she switched to writing biographical essays, which were published mainly in Cyril Connolly’s journal Horizon. When she died she was working on a biography of Kipling. She died young, from Alzheimer’s disease, which just hit her at around fifty.

INTERVIEWER

Did you read her work?

MILLER

I read her books, and we talked a lot about literature. I used to work on the opposite side of the table from her when I was at home, during the holidays. I would do my swotting for biology while she did her work.

My father was the founder of child psychiatry in this country. He started the first child-guidance clinic in London in 1924. He was trained as a philosopher at Cambridge, doing what was called the moral science tripos, which was philosophy.

INTERVIEWER

So he must have been there with Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein and all that group?

MILLER

He was there when Russell was teaching. Then he switched over to natural science—zoology and so on—and then he went to a London hospital and qualified as a doctor. In 1917 he went to France and worked on shell-shocked soldiers.

INTERVIEWER

So you had a happy family life? Which might explain your good temperament.

MILLER

It was rather pleasant. My sister and myself grew up during the Second World War, and we traveled a lot, because although my father was too old to go on active service he joined up and went into the medical corps and once again became a military psychiatrist, so he moved from one military hospital to another, and we followed him around all over the country. My mother went on writing her books.

INTERVIEWER

Your mother was a niece of Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who was very famous between the wars. His concept of the élan vital as the metaphysical basis of being caught on. Did your mother ever mention him, or see him?

MILLER

My mother met him once or twice, but didn’t know him very well. I don’t recall talking about him very much.

INTERVIEWER

He was clearly a marvelous man. He had converted to Christianity, but when the Germans occupied Paris and he was dying, he got up from his bed and dragged himself to the police station to register as a Jew and get his Yellow Star, which he pinned on his lapel proudly, although the Germans had exempted him and treated him with respect.

MILLER

He was obviously a remarkable man, but I didn’t have much time for religion or for his philosophy. My exposure to philosophy came later, when I was at Cambridge, and by then that sort of philosophy had disappeared. His biological ideas of the élan vital were entirely meaningless. Liveliness, which had previously been the mystery of life—the spontaneity of living things—was now almost self-explanatory. We knew how living things worked, how cells kept alive; we didn’t need to invoke some sort of vital principle. I was brought up at Cambridge on linguistic philosophy, Wittgenstein and his followers.

INTERVIEWER

What made you go for science rather than philosophy, or literature? Did you read a lot of books?

MILLER

I can’t remember reading a great deal when I was very young—it came later. I was an active, outdoor boy. I didn’t do any sport, but just the usual mischievous things children during the war did—running around in a gang, throwing sticks at trees to get conkers down, that sort of thing. I began reading when I was twenty. From then on I read literature, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, science, law.

INTERVIEWER

What did you read in literature? Did you read the canon?

MILLER

I did read some of the canon—Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Balzac . . . oh the list is endless. I also read the Bible. To me it is an interesting piece of anthropology. Religion is a thought disorder, and something from which one can get better, perhaps with the help of some pills. But I preferred the New Testament to the Old. If only that high priest instead of rending his garment had said, “Oh Jesus, where have you been? We have been waiting for you,” Christianity would have been what it was meant to be: a reform of Judaism, the way Protestantism was a reform of Christianity.

But to go back, I got interested in biology when I was about thirteen; I didn’t decide to become a doctor but I did decide to go for biology.

INTERVIEWER

What made you choose biology?

MILLER

I think probably because my father had given me a microscope. I looked at living animals under the microscope and I was very intrigued. I had a little laboratory, where I used to dissect animals, and then when I was at school I fell under the influence of an important teacher who taught me and Oliver Sacks. It seemed inevitable that we would study biology. I was interested in morphology—why it was that animals divided into definite groups, had different designs, different plans, different physical structures. I used to collect plants and animals, and I was fascinated by these morphological distinctions. Every Easter holiday the school biology class used to go to a marine biological laboratory in Scotland and spend three weeks studying marine creatures. In London every Saturday I used to go to the natural history museum. I was just engulfed by biology.

INTERVIEWER

Your parents were obviously not interested in religion, but they sent you to St. Paul’s, which is rather favored by Jewish intellectuals. How conscious were you of your Jewish culture, especially growing up during the war?

MILLER

That is true about St. Paul’s. Perhaps because St. Paul’s was a day school; also because, despite its name, it was not closely associated with the Church in the way that Westminster was.

I was never conscious of being Jewish at all; during the war there wasn’t any time for my father to inflict any sort of Jewish practices on us; he was too busy. In any case he had a sort of anxious relationship to his past—there he was, now a fully assimilated, professional Englishman who had been at Cambridge and served in both world wars, but at the same time the immediate descendent of recently arrived Russian Jews. He tried, rather halfheartedly, towards the end of the war, when we got to know what had happened to European Jews, to get us to identify with “our roots” as he said, but by then it was too late.

INTERVIEWER

Yet your two best friends growing up were Jewish—Oliver Sacks and Eric Korn.

MILLER

It was a particular kind of Jewish intellectual group at St. Paul’s that hung together, not because we felt ourselves to be, as it were, embattled Jews in a gentile community; it was just that we thought the same way. It is hard to detect any Jewish thing that made us think the same way; it was rather that we were biologists and also literary intellectuals. We founded a literary society at St. Paul’s. We weren’t interested in games or sport, we were only interested in the life of the mind. So we were a slightly subversive group.

I never experienced any anti-Semitism. It may be that some of the masters might have said, “Oh, well those Jewish boys, you can trust them to be too clever by half,” but they never said it to us.

INTERVIEWER

So you never felt any specificity?

MILLER

No. In my second encounter with an intellectual group, when I went to New York, I fell in with Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein and Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Although Lowell would sometimes say, “You know, Jonathan, I’m one-eighth Jewish myself.”

I rather flinch from the idea that there is a Jewish mind, or a Jewish psyche. The only thing one can say—although one can’t connect it to one’s own life—is that there is a sort of lineage, a pedigree, of commitment to the Book. Because my relatively distant ancestors could all read and write; they all had to read and write because in order to be good Jews they had to study the Book. There was obviously a Talmudic mind, which was exegetical and argumentative. It may be that when the tide of religion had receded and there was no concern with God or the law, it left a sort of inquisitiveness, a curiosity about principles, argument, and discussion.

INTERVIEWER

When did you decide to study medicine rather than biology?

MILLER

Medicine seemed a very good mediating discipline which brought together ideas about the mind and the biology of the brain. That has always been my interest. I’ve always been preoccupied by the relationship between brain and mind—how thoughts can arise from the brain, a problem which has not been solved.

INTERVIEWER

So you went to Cambridge and read medicine and did well, but while you were there you fell in with the Cambridge Footlights, which was the beginning of the end of medicine, so to speak?

MILLER

I did a little bit with the Footlights. I performed in the summer shows but I was not a member of the Footlight Club. When they put on a show I did an act.

INTERVIEWER

That is when your talent for mimicry and comedy was revealed.

MILLER

Although I could do lots of voices, I don’t think that is what my comic talent consisted of—I just had a vision of the absurd. That was what my act consisted of, and I wrote my own material.

INTERVIEWER

You had a famous sketch about General Wolfe and King George III, which was very funny and became famous. Can you remember it?

MILLER

It was a sketch I did for the Footlights. General Wolfe fought for the British against the French in Canada, where he was killed. Someone said to George III, “The thing about General Wolfe is that he is mad.” And the king said, “If he is mad I wish he would bite my other generals.” So I set up an imaginary scene in which George III says, “How is General Wolfe? [Miller imitates the king’s German accent and other accents throughout the sketch.] I wish he would bite all my other generals. I zinks it’s not a bad idea. Have General Wolfe sent for.” So they send for General Wolfe and he comes, “Did you send for me, Sire?” he asks. “General Wolfe, they tell me you are mad, are you?” says the king. “Well Sir, perhaps I am, a little.” “Well now what I want you to do, if you’re mad, is to bite all my other generals.” “Oh very well Sir, very well.” So then I had this scene called The Trooping of the Teeth, when General Wolfe went to Aldershot, accompanied by George III in a barge. I had a scene where the soldiers are all lined up, and a sort of Richard Dimbleby figure [Dimbleby used to describe royal occasions on the radio in the sixties and seventies] saying, “Here on the parade ground at Aldershot we are preparing for the ceremony of the Biting of the Generals. On the far side you can see the generals marching across town . . .” “Generals Halt! Roll Sleeves!” Dimbleby says, “There, on the far side, I can see the diminutive figure of General Wolfe himself, his teeth gleaming in the evening sun. And oh look! He is cleaning his teeth. What a magnificent gesture! And now he is coming up to the line of the generals and the Biting of the Generals will begin. We are going down onto the parade ground to hear at close quarters . . .” rrrrip . . . rrrip . . . rrrrip . . . “Thank you, Sir! Thank you, Sir!”

INTERVIEWER

And then you gave it all up.

MILLER

I gave it up when I left Cambridge and came to University College on a scholarship to do my clinical work. I walked the wards and did all that medical students do. I took great interest in neurological conditions, with a special emphasis on disorders of language. I did the occasional show in the hospital at Christmastime, but I never thought that I would do any more theater. Then after I had qualified as a doctor, John Bassett, who was working at the Edinburgh Festival, came to see me with the view of putting together a late-night revue at the festival. He had heard of me because he had been at school—Bedales—with Rachel and at Oxford with Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. I had seen Peter Cook perform when I was working as a doctor at Cambridge. So the four of us were brought together and we devised Beyond the Fringe, and we took the show to the Edinburgh Festival in 1960.

The show was so catastrophically successful that it disrupted everything I was going to do, and indeed everything that Alan Bennett was going to do—he was a medieval historian and was studying for a PhD. But Peter and Dudley always wanted to be in the theater. I thought I would go back to medicine after a while, that this was a brief episode in which I could make some money, which would tide me over nicely during the thin years when I was a junior doctor. And then one thing led to another, and I gradually drifted away. In some ways I have always regretted it.

INTERVIEWER

Then you went to America with Beyond the Fringe. Was America a revelation? You said that you fell in with a group of American intellectuals.

MILLER

I fell in with that New York Review of Books and Partisan Review crowd, and I started writing for them—mainly book reviews, and occasional theater reviews. I thought that I would go back to medicine. Alas by then my moral fiber had rotted. It was such an easy life—I didn’t have to get up at six o’clock in the morning and scrub for surgery, and I was better paid than a junior doctor. I thought that I had drifted too far from medicine to go back and suffer the privations and difficulties that being a junior house doctor entailed, and also the extremely narrow and constrained ladder of promotion which existed in British medicine.

INTERVIEWER

I’m sure it makes you cringe when you are described as a polymath, but perhaps you did wish to avoid being limited to one single activity, and a very exacting discipline?

MILLER

I hate it when they call me a polymath. It is vulgar, and meaningless. It never seemed to me very odd to be interested in several things. My father could paint, he read philosophy, he was a scientist, he could read in several languages. That seemed to me what civilized intelligent people did. It’s only in the vulgar twentieth-century journalistic world that it is called being a polymath. I’m not a polymath. There are thousands of intellectual disciplines which I’m completely incapable of—I can’t do maths, I can’t do higher physics, I can’t play the piano.

INTERVIEWER

And yet now you say that you regret not having confined yourself to medicine. Why?

MILLER

Because I think that is where the interesting stuff is happening at the moment: in that area of philosophy which is concerned with the nature of the mind, which now overlaps with neurobiology, and which is extremely productive. It would have been interesting to have been a contender, as Marlon Brando says in On the Waterfront. I still think clearly and productively about these things. Whenever I attend groups and seminars, which I do from time to time, I’m not just an idle tourist gawping at what’s going on.

INTERVIEWER

Beyond the Fringe lasted over two years, then what happened?

MILLER

I was asked by George Devine (the director of the Royal Court Theatre at the time) to direct one of John Osborne’s plays, Under Plain Cover. Then I did another play, and found directing easy, and I enjoyed it, simply because it called upon a lot of talents which had already been developed when I was a doctor, namely observation of behavior, getting behavior right.

INTERVIEWER

Are there other connections between directing and medicine?

MILLER

They connect much more than one might think. It is not an accident that there have been so many writers who have been connected with medicine. Chekhov, for example. The world of clinical observation is similar to social and personal observation. As a doctor or a writer you have to watch what people do, because that is what gives the game away. Above all, if you have been connected with science you have a very good bullshit detector. Fatuous pretention simply won’t pass in medicine. You have to think clearly. I think in that sense there is something wonderfully commonplace in the medical eye, which if you bring to the theater restores it to accuracy and reality.

INTERVIEWER

With your gift for mimicry and your physical versatility, could you not have become an actor?

MILLER

No. I had never thought I could be an actor. I was a clown, a mimic. For example, I often direct by example. I find it hard to resist doing something in a scene in order to illustrate what I think the scene is about. Sometimes it is a disadvantage —I find that I can do better than the actor, and they get daunted by what I do. I don’t like doing it, because you can get an inept copy. If they are good, they take it in and then make it their own. If they are less good, they rather slavishly—and often incompetently—copy. What you want them to do is to see what it is you’re exemplifying, and find their own way of doing it. The most important thing about directing, as far as the performers are concerned, is perfectly straightforward: the director’s task is reminding the actors of things which they knew all along but had forgotten. In other words, a sense of recognition. You say to the actor, “Have you noticed that when people do that they sometimes . . .” And they say, “Of course! How did I not think of it!” And they do it perfectly. The second thing is trying to get them to forget what they ought not to have known in the first place—clichés.

INTERVIEWER

So you did the Osborne play. What happened next?

MILLER

Then came a request by Robert Lowell to do his play The Old Glory. Once again I discovered that I could direct easily, that I didn’t have to study it—it just occurred to me spontaneously what to do. And I knew how to stage the play, what it ought to look like. That came from another source—nothing to do with medicine, but with an interest in visual arts. At that time I was becoming very interested in the visual arts, which I hadn’t been previously. I had done a bit of painting when I was sixteen, and I liked the Impressionists, but that was all. I wasn’t interested in the history of art. Gradually, under the influence of a number of people who taught me by talking to me, I became interested. So that began to work on my imagination, and it had a tremendous effect on staging. When you are going to do a play you have to decide what it should look like, where it is to be set, in what period it is going to be, and what did that period actually look like. Because, as I said, half the time you have to try to get people to forget what they shouldn’t have known in the first place, which is kitsch, kitsch history. Ninety percent of what was happening on the stage when people were doing Shakespeare was kitsch history. I recognized that early on.

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean by “kitsch history”?

MILLER

I mean theatrical clichés: people wore clothes which were generally “historic,” which bore very little relationship to what was going on. As I became more interested in history and sociology, I asked how people behaved in the sixteenth century. What were the political and social ideas that dominated intellectual and social life, and how does that have a bearing on this particular play? For example, the nature of sovereignty. Art history was one thing, but I was also interested in anthropology —like my father—and sociology, and taking all these factors into consideration in order to place these things, finding a reason for the action to take the form that it did.

INTERVIEWER

Since the Osborne and the Lowell plays in the early sixties you haven’t done any modern or contemporary plays. Is that a deliberate choice?

MILLER

Not really. I have never been asked to do them. Almost all my work in the theater has been the result of invitation rather than my going out and looking for it. There are a few things I have gone after, such as Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Emperor, one of the most marvelous pieces of social journalism. It is a story about a derelict, rotten society—Ethiopia under Haile Salassi. It is the most modern thing I have done.

The main reason I haven’t done more contemporary plays is because there isn’t much for a director to do which can’t be done by the playwright himself; the director is at the service of the playwright, and there can be frictions between a living playwright and the director, whereas with a dead one you can just get on with it. For example, I did a play by Peter Nichols, The Freeway; it didn’t work, and he blamed me for it. Another thing is that I’m much more interested in the problems of plays which are in their afterlife. There is a problem about how to stage them, which one tries to figure out.

INTERVIEWER

So when you do Hamlet, for example, and situate it in the 1920s or 1850s, how do you decide the specific period? Because you said that a play is firmly rooted in its own time and place. How do you transpose it, so to speak?

MILLER

There are several ways of dealing with a play that comes from a distant past. One is to relate it to the period from which it comes by a careful analysis of the social structures which prevailed at the time, and which you can then identify as being expressed in the play. For example, I wouldn’t dream of doing Hamlet in any time other than the sixteenth century, because I think it is about that time—its preoccupations and the appearance of ghosts and so on fixes it rigidly in that time. The same with King Lear—you transpose it at your peril. I only transpose it by taking it out of the remote, meaningless antiquity—that Tolkien world in which it is usually placed—and set it when it was written. I mean, it is about monarchy and about Christianity; it is not a pagan play.

There are other plays that you can transpose, because on the whole they are not very good plays in any case. But if you decide to move the play, you have to find social structures in the world to which you are moving it which are analogous to the ones from which you have moved it. Then you can make quite revealing transpositions. For example, when I did The Merchant of Venice and I set it in Venice in the 1890s, I felt that there were common themes about the relationship of Jews to the gentile community in the play which were relatively straightforward.

INTERVIEWER

Some people might say that you can’t change a play arbitrarily. To use a medical analogy, you can’t say, “Well, I don’t like two arms on either side of this man’s body, I’m going to chop one off and put it at the back of his neck.”

MILLER

Well, I would never do that! I would never do what I call mutilating transpositions. I believe that plays have to be moved into a world where they can live without undergoing some sort of distortion.

INTERVIEWER

The most successful of your transpositions was your Rigoletto, which you put in the Mafia world of 1920s New York. How did you come to the idea?

MILLER

Ah, but now we are talking about plays or operas which are written in one period, apparently about another, but the world to which these “historic” works nominally refer is nonexistent. For example, none of the actions that are represented in Verdi’s Rigoletto could possibly have happened in the Gonzaga world to which it refers. It is a virtual historic world. It is generically historic. You have to find a world with some sort of common structure, one in which a man has absolute power of life and death over his followers, and who can behave as badly as he wishes because he is the boss. And that happens in the Mafia.

It is what I call isomorphic—here is my old interest in morphology: I feel that underneath the surface differences there are common structures which allow some plays and operas to be transposed without distortion. I agree with you that there are arbitrary transpositions which are mutilating; but then people who do them don’t think morphologically. Because if you think morphologically and intelligently, you look beneath the surface, which my training as a zoologist taught me to do. I can see that underneath the surface differences of a bird’s wing and a horse’s leg there are deep structures which are the same—they both are vertebrate forelimbs. It is a matter of common sense and tact, really. If you observe these principles of social morphology, you can see things which are homologous.

INTERVIEWER

Does your interest in philosophy influence your work as a director?

MILLER

It does. I think philosophically; I’m interested in how we think, in the theory of the mind. What it is to have representations of the world, how we structure it, how we organize it, and so forth.

INTERVIEWER

You belong to the Anglo-American, analytical philosophy; you are not interested in continental philosophers, are you?

MILLER

I hate them! I repudiate them! I think that the last important French philosopher was Descartes. Heidegger is ghastly—he is like an elephant’s fart. By contrast, in England we have Bertrand Russell, Peter Strawson, Stuart Hampshire . . . The job of philosophy is not to find out the meaning of life, or our relationship to the larger metaphysical principles of the universe; it is finding out the relationship of the mind to the world. How the world is represented in the mind; how do we come to have knowledge; what do we mean by certainty. These are the only things about which you can ask questions. I am interested in problems for which you can foresee a solution; questions to which there is possibly an answer.

INTERVIEWER

And if there isn’t?

MILLER

Then you keep your trap shut! There is no point wasting time asking questions for which there are no answers, or pondering problems that have no solution. First of all you have to ask yourself if something is really a question just because it has a question mark after it.

INTERVIEWER

You are agreeing with Wittgenstein’s famous remark: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.” But questions that have beset humanity from time immemorial —Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going to?—don’t go away because we refuse to ask them. Philosophy has always been about big questions; otherwise it is fidgeting with bits of language.

MILLER

But language is the medium through which we say things about what it is like to have sensations, beliefs, perceptions, and so forth; what do we mean by volition—what is the difference between a voluntary action and an involuntary one. These are deeply interesting questions which might have answers we can find by looking at brains. Wittgenstein says, “What is the difference between my lifting my arm and my arm merely going up.” It sounds like a trivial fidgeting with the language, but it is not. It encapsulates the problem of volition. When I chew I do it deliberately; I can stop if someone says, “Would you mind not chewing while I’m talking to you?” But once that food has passed the back of my tongue, there is no way someone can say, “Would you mind not undertaking peristalsis while I’m talking?” I mean, we sometimes make rumbles, and we say excuse me while the stomach goes grrrr brrrr. This happens in me, in my intestines, but I don’t do it, it gets done, on my behalf. This is the sort of distinction which my sort of philosophers, analytical philosophers, are interested in. And it is a philosophical question because it raises deep questions about responsibility: for what things can I be blamed and for what things can I be praised. I mean, nobody would give a prize or say, “Bravo for getting the food from your mouth to your anus! You did that in a very short time, much shorter than anyone else. Well done!”

INTERVIEWER

But the fundamental question of philosophy is: Why Being instead of Nothingness? How do we deal with it?

MILLER

I haven’t got the faintest idea. There is no point getting involved in it because there is no conceivable answer to it. I am struck by the unknowability of things, and the fact that what we know is the consequence of a nervous system which acquaints us with things sufficiently to enable us to move profitably through the furniture of the world and get by.

INTERVIEWER

So Plato and Aristotle were less clever than, say, Auguste Comte, or the ayatollahs of Darwinism such as Richard Dawkins and others?

MILLER

They were less informed. Aristotle got certain things disastrously wrong.

What is interesting about Jesus is not his claim that he was the son of God, but his insistence that we have deep and unconditional responsibilities for one another, and that there is nobody who is a negligible person. That claim expressed by someone who was willing to sacrifice himself for it is very startling. But it is equally startling to find people who were willing to risk torture and death at the time of the German occupation.

INTERVIEWER

But Christ sacrificed himself because he believed that God wished him to do it.

MILLER

Yes, but he was wrong about that. The important thing is that he expressed mutual moral responsibility, the fact that he did it in the name of something doubtful and ambiguous is beside the point. What motivates certain saints to behave in certain ways is often utterly repulsive. St. Catherine of Siena was prepared to drink pus—it’s crazy! The fact that Jesus rode to Jerusalem knowing he would be crucified is similar to Jean Moulin’s behavior in the Resistance; he knew he would be arrested and tortured to death by Klaus Barbie. We are amazed, and we say, Would that I were as courageous.

INTERVIEWER

Being as passionate about the subject of philosophy as you are, how does it enter into your work as director?

MILLER

It comes into it all the time, in that I’m watching people behaving intentionally. I keep asking myself, What do they intend by what they are doing? Are they fully aware of their own intentions? What is it that motivates Hamlet? How much does he know what he is doing?

I am less interested in the Freudian unconscious than in another form of unconscious about which I have written recently, which is what I call the Enabling Unconscious. We can, for example, go to sleep with a problem in our mind and wake up with a clear solution. There are deep levels of capability which don’t reach consciousness and yet deliver their results into consciousness. This is again where science is so much better than metaphysics. There were people in the nineteenth century who began to see this; in fact, most philosophers have had vague intuitions, but they were not smart enough to think clearly about it. The reason they now think about it is because we have a device which enables us to do so—the computer. The computer gives us a metaphor to consider what it is to have mental activities we are not aware of. We once thought that chess was a high-level spiritual capability which only human beings possessed. We now get machines which are better at it than we are. Once we examine how machines do it, we get a pretty good idea how our brains might do it. These are profitable questions because there are procedures you can follow to produce an answer. The questions which you say won’t go away—metaphysical ones—are like flies which won’t go away. But it doesn’t mean that they are interesting.

INTERVIEWER

Opera has been your main activity in recent years. When did you start?

MILLER

The first opera I did was a modern work by Alexander Goehr, Arden Must Die. I had some misgivings about it, just as I did about the first play I ever did, but I did it, and it worked. Even though I couldn’t read music, when I heard it, I knew what it dictated by way of action on the stage.

INTERVIEWER

You do almost entirely the classic repertoire. What is your relationship with the composers of these operas? Do you imagine what, for example, Debussy would want you to do with his Pelléas et Mélisande?

MILLER

No. I never think of what they might have wanted. I think of these operas as objets trouvés which have outlasted their natural lives. Probably the idea of reviving things from a distant past is a peculiarity of our century. Almost all the operas in the eighteenth century were premieres; the idea of a repertoire of classics would never have occurred to anyone. Doing an opera from a hundred years earlier would have been inconceivable in the eighteenth century and probably even in the nineteenth century.

INTERVIEWER

How much research do you do when you are doing an opera for the first time?

MILLER

I listen to records, read the libretto, think about it, and then I start thinking about when it was written, what was going on at the time, what was the sensibility that it represented. I usually choose to do it in its own time, not the time to which it refers. Debussy seemed perfectly happy, as indeed was Maurice Maeterlinck, who wrote the story, to set Pelléas et Mélisande in the Middle Ages. While when I listened to the record, the music sounded like a Monet painting. The opera belongs to the Impressionist movement, and I thought, Well, if I’m going to set it in a time which is consistent with Impressionism visually, then I ought to find out what its literary counterpart is. And of course it was Proust. It is the Château of the Guermantes, and the little boy is young Marcel. Whether Debussy imagined it in that way is beside the point; what matters is whether it works today in such a way that it makes you see and hear the work as if for the first time.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever have trouble with the libretti? Or feel constrained?

MILLER

Yes, but you can’t change them. To me there are probably forty operas which are worth doing. The other stories and plots are often ludicrous.

INTERVIEWER

When you are doing an opera for the fifth or tenth time, say The Magic Flute or Don Giovanni, how do you find new ways of doing it so that you don’t repeat yourself?

MILLER

I do more or less the same thing, but it slowly evolves. For Don Giovanni, which I have done twice, both times it was set in the eighteenth century, and the scenery is exactly the same. In the last scene, when the statue of the dead commandattore comes to take the don to hell, usually you see a door open and red flames at the back. Well, I thought, What is hell? Hell is the harm we have done by our actions which come back to haunt us. So I based it on an essay by Richard Cobb about eighteenth-century women recovered from the Seine, who had been dishonored and abandoned by their lovers and thrown out by their fathers, and in despair had jumped into the river. He had studied the records of the Préfecture de Police. So when the door opens at the end of the opera I had all these women Don Giovanni had wronged come to face him. So the production evolves over time.

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever walked away from a project, either because of the conductor or the singers?

MILLER

I have had one or two rows which have made me walk away for a few days and then come back. Disagreement with conductors about what should happen on the stage. For example, I was doing Falstaff in Zurich about seven or eight years ago, and the conductor took exception to the penultimate scene where the girls are all plotting what they are going to do. Traditionally their voices die away as they disappear and the stage is left empty. But I wanted the two people who are themselves also plotting and are silently hearing what is happening to be shown at the window of the inn nodding wisely at one another, as much as to say, We know what’s going to happen! The conductor said, “But it is not in the score.” So I said, “But it doesn’t interfere with the music.” He objected, so I said, “Since you know what is in the score and I don’t, you direct it,” and I walked out. I went away to Basel and spent my time at the art museum there, and then they begged me to come back. So I said I didn’t question the conductor about his tempi, so he must let me do the staging as long as it does not disrupt the music or interfere with it. It turned out to be one of the things that was noticed and commented on as a witty flourish.

INTERVIEWER

What about trouble with divas?

MILLER

The second time it happened I didn’t walk away—I was banned. I did a very successful production of Figaro with Claudio Abbado in Vienna, and we took it to the Metropolitan in New York with a new cast and new conductor, James Levine. Cecilia Bartoli sang Suzanna, and she insisted on doing two alternative arias which Mozart had written, which were concert pieces and should be omitted from the stage production, because the words don’t match what goes on; they have nothing to do with the scene. So I objected. We argued and finally they agreed that she would do it for the television but perhaps not for the premiere. So I said, “Well, you are going to perpetuate on television something which is an abomination to me.” Joe Volpe, who runs the Met, let my agent know that I must never dare to think of ever coming back again. I had done four big successes for them—Pelléas, Katia Kabanova, The Rake’s Progress, and Figaro. But the diva rules.

INTERVIEWER

What about La Scala and Riccardo Muti?

MILLER

I never worked with Muti. At La Scala I worked with Lorin Maazel, and he never turned up at rehearsals, so that was fine. Levine doesn’t turn up at rehearsals either. They come only when the orchestra is there, not when you are rehearsing with the piano. Sometimes they come late and then ask why one is doing this or that; and very tactfully one tells them that if they had come earlier they would know.

INTERVIEWER

Who is your favorite conductor?

MILLER

Claudio Abbado. He is very intelligent, and he is there every day all day and from the first day. He is wonderful. I also worked with Colin Davis and we got on. He didn’t agree with my ending of Cosi fan Tutte—he thought it ought to be a celebration of love, and I said, “No, these people can’t possibly meet one another after they have betrayed each other on the scale that they have.” So I had them all leave the stage in a fury. He said, “Well, it is not in the music.” So I said, “Well, it is negotiable what is in the music.” He went along with it, and it was a big success.

INTERVIEWER

And your favorite singers?

MILLER

Dawn Upshaw, Frederika von Stade, Bryn Terfel . . . oh lots!

INTERVIEWER

Let’s talk about your art, since you recently had your first exhibition. You said you started painting when you were sixteen and then you gave up. Why?

MILLER

Because I wasn’t very good at drawing. I wish I were a better draftsman and painter. I liked paintings and I got to know a great deal about them in the course of the last forty years. Then I began to take photographs; I got interested in the configurations of things which were nowhere in particular, hence the title of the book, Nowhere in Particular. I liked abstract configurations—bits and pieces of brick, torn posters, atypical views of things, things which were not scenic but were formal. So I collected a thousand of these photographs and published a selection in the book. Then I became interested in making things.

INTERVIEWER

What do you call the pieces of metal and wood that you put together on a board or stick together. Because one can’t really call them sculptures. Or can one?

MILLER

I call them assemblages. The pictures at the exhibition are just collages. Of course, it is junk; that is what it is. The question is whether it is a value judgment. If you say, “Oh it’s just junk,” I respond by saying, “Actually it is not just junk, I’ve done a lot of work on it.” They are assembled, very carefully juxtaposed. The bits and pieces that I use are junk, in the sense that they are refuse, things that are no longer used for what they were once used. Human artifacts become derelict; they pass their sell-by date and end up on a rubbish heap. Well, some artists recycle them, and put them together in new combinations which are not useful but are perhaps beautiful. Of course it’s junk, but to say that is almost as idiotic as saying about a painting, “That’s just a lot of paint on a piece of canvas.” I’m not pretending that my stuff is great art, but it is art, by which I mean it is put together deliberately to make a composition which pleases me, and which I hope pleases others. In the true etymological sense it is art, in that it is artificial, made by someone. I have a lot of objets trouvés in this room, they are attractive but they are not art. But if an object is incorporated into something, becomes an ingredient in an artifact, and the artifact is not designed to have a function, to do something, then it becomes art.

INTERVIEWER

Art has an “afterlife,” as you put it earlier, but I assume you don’t believe in people having an afterlife, do you? I asked the question because you seem so optimistic and goodnatured that I wondered if you ever think about death?

MILLER

I think about it a lot. I’m puzzled by it. But as Hume said to Boswell, “There are two darknesses, the one from which we came, and one to which we are going, why should I fear the second as opposed to the first?” As a species we have been here only 150,000 years, a trivially short period compared to the rest of the universe. It seems important that we are here; there are some urgencies about being alive, and they cease when we are gone. The various proposals which we invent in order to console ourselves—those of us who need consolation—seem to me so incoherent and nonsensical that I can’t put up with them.

INTERVIEWER

Yet the spiritual dimension of being has been the ground of all great civilizations. As Dostoevsky said, If God doesn’t exist, everything is allowed. I mean, why shouldn’t I kill someone who is a pain in the neck?

MILLER

A lot of people do that and believe in God. Take the Ten Commandments, or its Chinese equivalent. They don’t come from God, they come from our nature. If you have a cooperative species, where every individual depends for its survival on a degree of altruism and decency, then principle will gradually evolve, as in game theory: you play many rounds of cooperation or cheating, and in the long run it becomes evident that it is more profitable to cooperate than cheat. What you call spirituality consists of aims, ambitions, and aspirations which are other than straightforward material satisfactions. Spirituality is a name for a large number of complicated things which have been previously attached to religious dogmas, which are associated with awe and admiration and excitement at the universe, or human virtue, or beauty. But it doesn’t have to be attached to some supernatural agency—it is natural to our species.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think about the great scientists, such as the Nobel laureate Sir John Eccles, who are devout Christians?

MILLER

It means that Eccles and other religious scientists like him were introduced to Christianity before their cognitive immune systems were working. No, where there is a real philosophical and scientific problem is in consciousness. Trying to relate the configuration of the brain to the existence of what we call qualia. I suspect that it may never, ever yield to analysis. We know how brains produce memory and learning, but we don’t know how that accounts for the fact that, as Thomas Nagel says, There is something it is like to be a bat. No matter how different bats are from us, and how unlike us they are, there is unarguably something it is like to be a bat. There is a sort of consciousness which a bat has, but it is not an observable thing. What is observable is bats’ behavior and bats’ brains. What is not observable is the state of mind bats have as a result of having bats’ brains. That is the complicated problem. But the fact that it doesn’t yield to any foreseeable analysis doesn’t mean that you can cram into that tiny area all the spirituality you can. Spirituality is what we have as a result of having the sort of brains we have, and we should be satisfied with that.

INTERVIEWER

Do you still read a lot? I mean, do work and art leave any time?

MILLER

Oh yes, I read all the time, and what I read I get a lot of nourishment from. I recognize that there is something which is like being a bat.