 NEWS |  | Home > NEWS > THE WIZARD Q&A: ERIC SKILLMAN
|
THE WIZARD Q&A: ERIC SKILLMAN | | The Criterion Collection designer dishes on bringing comic book artists to Criterion | | | By David Paggi | | Posted 2/11/2008 | |  | |  As a project designer for Criterion Collection, the high end DVD production company, Eric Skillman (ericskillman.com) has brought some of the most renowned comic book artists to cinema high society, employing them to illustrate covers of Criterion DVD’s. Wizard recently sat down with Skillman to pick his brain about designing some of the coolest DVD’s on the market and the story behind bringing comics’ biggest and brightest to Criterion.
WIZARD: Tell me a little bit about your background in art and design, and how that led you to Criterion?
ERIC SKILLMAN: Self taught primarily. I taught myself through the literary magazine in college. I got a job with a guy called Stuart Cauley at Pollen Design, who really taught me most of what I know. I did that while in college and a couple other freelance gigs and then got this afterward and I've been here for six years.
What exactly does your job entail as art director?
I should clarify; I'm not the Art Director of the whole department. I art direct various projects, but the actual Art Director is a woman named Sarah Habibi. So I do whole designs from covers to menus to packaging to whatever. And then whenever we work with illustrators I tend to be the one to call them up and shepard the project and get them involved and get their contribution set down.
What’s your process like for designing a DVD? Are you usually familiar with the films?
I'm not usually familiar with them before they show up on the schedule necessarily. Sometimes I am but for the most part the schedule’s always kind of a surprise. We definitely watch every one of them and have an extensive conversation with the [project’s] producer and then the president of the company gets involved and we talk about what kind of themes and visual metaphors and motifs we might want to aim for stylistically. From there we decide who we're going to assign it to, whether it’s me or some other designer or if we call an illustrator. If its a project of mine I’ll go off by myself for a week or so and try and pull together a number of comp designers and then bring them back and see what kind of comments we get, take one of those maybe go back for another round. I do have a blog where I go over [the design process].
For example I'm looking over the DVD's on my desk —[Aikira Kurosawa’s] “Drunken Angel”, which is one we did with Jock (The Losers, Green Arrow: Year One, Faker). There's a scene towards the end of the film where the characters are wresting around and the Matsunaga character knocks over into some cans of paint, and the paint spills in an artful kind of way and what was his black suit gets covered in white paint, so its a sort of a transformative moment where he's rebelling against the Yakuza influence, which is represented by the snazzy black suit that he's been wearing and he becomes purified in that scene. We took that and said that sort of scene and idea is what we want to riff off of. We took that to Jock, along with this idea that there's this sump thing in the middle of the town that's full of mud and its like this sucking hole that the center of town is being sucked down by the Yakuza influence, so we said maybe give us a backdrop of this muddy, crappy, sumpy grossness then a slosh of white paint with the character sort of crawling through it, and then he took that and abstracted it one step further and did his thing and then that became the cover.
| |  Do freelance artists usually get notes like that?
Usually. It really depends how specific an idea the producer has about what they want going in to the project. If they've got a very specific interpretation of the film, and I can tell that there is one thing or another that they're definitely going to want to see, then you lock it down a little more before you call somebody, but like the “Monsters and Madmen” project we did with Darwyn Cooke, that was basically —we want to have crazy genre fun with this and his compositional skills are so great that I didn't want to tell him anything. I didn't want to say, “Oh this has to go here and this has to go there.” I just said, ”Here's a bunch of elements that could go in there and would probably be cool. Play with as many or as few of them as you want and just give us something that looks great.” So that's really 100 percent his design.
Do Director’s usually get involved in the design process?
Sometimes. There are a couple of directors that like to be very involved, like Wes Anderson. Wes Anderson basically art directs everything himself—in a good way! Other directors have been more or less involved but for the most part with the living directors, we'll put something together and then send it to them for an approval. We'll get a couple thoughts to begin with but for the most part they tend to have moved on to the next project, so they're not always necessarily thinking about some movie they did ten years ago, which is mostly what we work on. So they tend to need us to send them something to be able to vibe off of and comment on before they can really get too involved.
When did you first bring comic book artists to Criterion? When did it occur to you?
It was a project called “Divorce Italian Style” which, and this is kind of a stupid reason, but the reason it popped into my head is a big section of the film is about this guy who is tired of his wife and wants to divorce her. But divorce is so verboten in [Italian] culture that his solution is its more culturally acceptable to murder her than to divorce her. Like if he catches her cheating, he tries to orchestrate a situation where he catches her cheating, and I'm making finger quotes now and I know you can't tell, but if he can orchestrate that situation then he can murder her and get off with no prison time, so that's the divorce of the title. And there's all these scenes in the film where he fantasizes about various different ways he could kill her, which are very funny and they get progressively more bizarre, and one of them is he puts her into a rocket and launches her into outer space, and I was watching it and I was trying to come up with design schemes to do and I was like, “Ha-ha, its like love and rockets.” And then I thought about it a little further and actually the whole tone of this would be so perfect for a Jamie Hernandez drawing. At first I was like, how can I fake a Jamie Hernandez drawing, then I was like why would I want to fake a Jamie Hernandez drawing when I could call the real Jamie Hernandez? So thank god he was in to it and excited about it. That was the first one we did, which was a crazy excited project for me. That was fun to do because he's a hero of mine.
| |  How do you decide what artists to tap? Do you try and experiment or do you get specific guys that you know will fit?
For the most part it’s really about trying to find the right person for a project. Imagine what somebody could do with it, find the right person and then just let them be themselves. It’s sort of like casting a film. If you cast the right person then they're going to do something good.
Can we run down the artists you’ve worked with?
Jamie Hernandez did “Divorce Italian Style,” Mike Allred did “Seduced and Abandoned,” “Divorce’s” sequel, Danijel Zezelj did “Hands Over the City,” Darwyn Cooke did the “Monsters and Madmen” set, which included “First Man Into Space,” “The Atomic Submarine,” “The Haunted Strangler,” and “Corridors of Blood,” Bill Sienkiewicz did “Robinson Crusoe on Mars,” Jock did “Drunken Angel,” Kent Williams just did “Miss Julie,” and Sean Phillips just did “Blast of Silence.”
Regarding the upcoming “Blast of Silence” DVD, and Sean Phillips cover. I remember in one of the supplemental sections of Criminal, Patton Oswalt talks about the film and how hard it is to get a copy, and I think at one point he even says, “Criterion, please make a DVD of this!” Was the film already on Criterion’s radar when the issue came out?
I don't have a lot of pull as far as what movies get on the schedule [laughs], that's more about what we can get rights for and this that and the other. It showed up on the schedule and once I had the idea of calling Sean, I printed out that illustration [that accompanied the article] and showed it to everybody and said, “Look, he gets the movie! This is the guy to hire!" And everybody is like, yeah of course, obviously. That wasn't the image we used for the cover because a cover is different than an editorial illustration, but it was definitely a big help in getting him approved for the project. [What originally drew me to Sean for “Blast of Silence” is an interesting story.] “Blast of Silence” has this great narration throughout that’s in second person, like “You this” and “You that,” and if you've spent any time with EC Crime comics from the 50's its just totally the same vibe, the narrator talking to the character. I originally had this idea that it would be great if we could put together this little adaptation like it was a ‘50s EC comic, and then I found out that Alan Baron, the director, had actually drawn, not EC, but Sci-Fi and romance comics in the 50's and clearly that sort of influence was there on him. I had this idea that maybe I'll be the guy that pulls Jack Davis out of retirement [LAUGHS]. But ultimately that’s a little to forcing it to be something that its not, but I got obsessed with the idea of doing a comic adaptation and who could do it and treat it in more modern way but have this perfect Noir vibe, and that leads you pretty immediately to Sean Phillips.
| | | | | | |
Share this article
![[Slashdot]](http://slashdot.org/favicon.ico)
![[Digg]](http://digg.com/favicon.ico)
![[Reddit]](http://reddit.com/favicon.ico)
![[del.icio.us]](http://del.icio.us/favicon.ico)
![[Facebook]](http://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico)
![[Technorati]](http://technorati.com/favicon.ico)
![[Google]](http://www.google.com/favicon.ico)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.stumbleupon.com/favicon.ico)
|  |
 | |
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
|  |
| |
|
