Dieter Rams [Photo: courtesy Gary Hustwit]
Dieter Rams is done giving interviews, and Gary Hustwit can only poke at his tempeh hash with a laugh here and a sigh there, hoping he did the legend justice.
I sit with Hustwit in a chilly Chicago diner before screening the film later that night at its Midwestern premiere. Hustwit cannot know this documentary represents the last time Rams will speak to the press, of course, but Rams has certainly left him with that impression.
“He feels that’s the last interview he has to do. Seriously, he’s not doing any others,” says Hustwit. “I think he’s tired of talking and saying the same thing. He wants his books and this film going out and doing the talking.”
You know Hustwit from his design trilogy of documentaries: Helvetica, Objectified, and Urbanized, about typefaces, industrial design, and architecture, respectively. Hustwit’s new film is not about a topic, but a person. Rams is a 75-minute profile of the most influential designer of our lifetimes–the architect-turned industrial designer whose team ushered in the modern era of consumer technology in the 1950s and ’60s at Braun, creating the de facto template of beautiful, usable minimalism upon which most devices are made today at companies across the globe.