Interview with Trespass Magazine
And as somebody who has followed Saunders’ career, it’s not hard to guess that they will be adored by lovers of film posters around the world and he will continue to be “the Jeremy Saunders” who gets slightly embarrassed that his ticket-sellers are causing such a fuss.
Glen Dunks, Trespass Magazine (2010). No longer available. Archived below.
If you have walked into an Australian cinema within the last five years, there is a good chance you have seen the work of Jeremy Saunders and didn’t know it. Saunders has slowly built a reputation as the best key art designer in the country, the man who makes movie posters that hang in cinema foyers and bus stops around the country. The mere mention of his name on Twitter these days creates a flourish of excitement – “a new Jeremy Saunders design is here!” – his status as a cult figure amongst cinephiles is certainly here to stay.
Speaking to Jeremy, I discover he is bowled over by the success he has achieved. Self-depreciating, he is surprised that anybody would even want to write about him. He tells a story of how he was “at a party the other weekend and someone said to me, ‘Are you… the Jeremy Saunders?’ and they actually meant me.” He reduces his role in the release of a film as “basically I sell tickets for films,” and finds it “utterly perplexing and slightly embarrassing” that people are actually discussing his work not only here in Australia, but around the globe too.
That his designs are seen and discussed around the globe – having appeared on many international websites (some run by big names within the Hollywood entertainment industry) – is a testament to his work because, more or less, the key art he creates is for the Australian release only. Saunders has created work for films directed by George Clooney (Good Night and Good Luck) Agnes Jaoui (Look at Me) and Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) as well as dozens of Australian features including Samson & Delilah, Little Fish and Candy. He puts his popularity with local distributors down to lacklustre international work, “international art tends to be designed for everyone and suitable for no-one – it’s generally rather bland and unmemorable. I hope to bring something relevant and interesting to the campaign that no-one else has.”
Occasionally something will come along, however, that pushes somebody into the stratosphere of their career and last year, for Saunders, that was Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. A now infamous design involving a pair of scissors and a strategically located drop of blood, travelled around the globe so fast that an on-vacation Saunders was inundated with emails and didn’t know why. His design has since been imitated in other countries and was probably seen by more sets of eyes than the actual film. “Antichrist took about 90 minutes” he muses, which is definitely not the average time to design key art.
Nor did he end up spending the average amount of time on the new Australian film Animal Kingdom. “If the film is worth it, I’ll do whatever it takes,” he says, and the “massive undertaking” that was creating the poster for David Michôd’s Melbourne-set crime saga, set for release later in 2010, was a 12-month process. “From concept, through a number of photo shoots all around the world, and then as much time on Photoshop as I would normally spend doing 10 different drafts… it’s been a long ride.”
When asked to pinpoint one design that he is most proud of, Saunders is, at first, diplomatic, before singling out the key art of John Curran’s We Don’t Live Here Anymore. “[That design] always sticks out because it was a hell of a slog. John Curran knew what he wanted and it took lots of work to get there, but I learned a lot from him.” Describing unused or rejected designs, “There are a few less attractive children,” Saunders isn’t shy about letting me know what he doesn’t like. “The worst is those horizontal strip posters where they have a couple of strips with the stars smiling … Julie and Julia, that’s one. The Holiday was another, there are bloody loads of them.” I can’t help but nod in approval. “Big heads floating over sunset landscapes” is another that receives scorn from all parts of the Internet. “I’m sure they work, you know. People – other people, not me – obviously respond to actors’ faces.”
Saunders wishes he could be more creative than he already is. The process for creating a piece of key art for an Australian film is much different to that of an international film, where the filmmakers “probably barely considered Australia and they likely don’t care.” Unless you’re a Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon) or Steven Soderbergh (Che), a foreign director will have little say in an Australian key art concept. Saunders hasn’t heard a peep out of Lars Von Trier’s camp in regards to the Antichrist poster that made the film even more infamous than it already was. “Australian posters are much harder to get creative with,” he says before adding that “I think in this country people are scared of being seen as pretentious or ‘elite’ … so I think we often instinctively flinch away from getting too heady or rich in our ideas, which is a terrible shame.”
Throughout the rest of 2010 Jeremy Saunders’ work will adorn the walls of arthouses and megaplexes alike; whether it is the crisp black and white of The White Ribbon, the visual trickery of Fish Tank or his as-yet-unseen work for Australian superhero film Griff the Invisible and Lou. And as somebody who has followed Saunders’ career, it’s not hard to guess that they will be adored by lovers of film posters around the world and he will continue to be “the Jeremy Saunders” who gets slightly embarrassed that his ticket-sellers are causing such a fuss.