Lin-Manuel Miranda: ‘Your job as an artist is to be connected to your nine-year-old self’

telegraph.co.uk:

sayonara crossed out, because that doesn’t fit. You see all the different drafts before you get to the one we know.’ The lesson? ‘That hard work can lead to beautiful, simple things.’It’s just the kind of anecdote you might hear from an inspiring and unorthodox teacher who is keen to drill into his charges that, however far you think blazing talent can take you, you won’t get anywhere without putting the hours in, kids.

And today, in an anteroom at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York City, that’s essentially the role Miranda is playing: not in any of his many, many more familiar capacities, but as a humble mentor.Sitting alongside him, rapt – and possibly not hearing the story for the first time – is Agustina San Martín, a 31-year-old Argentine filmmaker and visual artist who, every few months for the past two years, has met with Miranda to collect these pearls of wisdom.‘Oh, she mentored me a lot more than I mentored her…’ Miranda mutters, while Martín blushes a little behind her oversized tortoiseshell glasses.

Theirs is a marriage of ideas, and the matchmaker was Rolex (admittedly, a significant dowry was paid), which, for the past 20 years, has quietly set about pairing young artists of ‘exceptional potential’ with often preposterously famous and successful elders for a sustained programme of ‘practical guidance and deep insight’.

Essentially the couples hang out, see one another work, talk craft, and ideally form a lasting creative bond that enriches the arts.New unions occur every two years, and the list of past mentors offering a wing to shelter under is impressive: from Martin Scorsese to Joan Jonas, David Adjaye to Colm Tóibín.