Eric Skillman, artistic director of the Criterion Collection, is constantly collecting names.
Skillman is the mastermind behind finding the artists who create or illustrate the Criterion Collection’s DVD artwork, which is why he has thousands of artists in the archive.
He is always looking for new artists, but he is also looking for the perfect partner. Talk to diverse Over Zoom, Skillman explains the process of matching an artist to a project. “I find out the upcoming schedule a month or two before I hire. Sometimes I find it difficult to watch movies that I watched before we were hired.
Access to great films allows Skillman to find the best illustrators and artists around the world. Sometimes it’s simple composition, other times it’s looking at a scene and turning it into an illustration. When possible, this is in cooperation with the director.
“He’s the right fit for this project,” he says. “The films haven’t become repetitive for me yet, they’re still varied and interesting and have a lot of new and different things about them, so there are new people discovering who is suitable for new projects all the time.”
Skillman speaks with diverse About the process of putting the cover art together, and below explains the ideas behind some of Criterion’s designs and illustrations.
How involved are studios or filmmakers in the artwork for a Criterion Collection film?
We interact with filmmakers and their preferences much more than we interact with studios. By itself. Our process interacts with filmmakers directly. If there’s something they like that’s been made before, we generally go with what they like best. But more often than not, we’re excited about making new things. We think there’s a slightly different story to tell about a film when it’s first released, where you have to introduce it to a new audience, versus a film that’s been around for 30 years, or a long time, and people have pre-existing associations.
Where does the technical process for a standard usually begin?
It starts with a conversation, usually between me and our in-house producer. Every project has a producer who looks after the entire project from start to finish, and we talk through what we’re trying to achieve and what we want to communicate. If there is a filmmaker alive, we usually try to schedule a meeting with them to get their input. From there, we usually bring in an outside designer who iterates some of the ideas we present. Their ideas are often better than ours because that’s why we work with great creative people, and then the back and forth approval process is pretty standard from there, as far as they send the drawings and we take notes and get the results. The whole thing, from start to finish, takes about two months, and then we have another month of fine-tuning the bells and whistles.
What do you look for in an artist?
It’s very project specific. It’s either a situation like JoJo Dancer, where we had the idea of collage and then it was about finding someone whose work embodied that. right? On other occasions, it’s about having prior knowledge of the artist and their work, and being able to say: “I trust you. Let’s find out together what it will be like.” I’m constantly just collecting names. Anytime I see anything I like in the world, I know who made it, and I write it down. I have an archive of 1000’s of names of people I just want to find a project for someday.
Below, Skillman analyzes the ideas behind four standard labels.
“The Grifters” by Drusilla Adeline
“We had a lot of conversations about this yellow, and I don’t think we ever came up with a successful intellectual idea about why this yellow worked, but nothing else we tried made sense to us, and it always seemed like it had to be there.
“The sunglasses are such an iconic part of the movie, and I think part of the reason they’re so iconic is because they’re used so strongly in the poster and in the opening scene. But they’re so ingrained in that opening that they stick with you.”
“So we wanted to try to find a new way to approach it. The original poster is great, but it’s been seen before, and people know what to expect. So, how do you give it something now? And that was the specific choice to isolate the sunglasses and make them just sunglasses.”
“It came from our designer Drusilla, who is a great collaborator. I showed her some different ideas about focusing on those sunglasses, and she said, ‘Well, why don’t we do this?’
“The Piano” by Greg Roth
“Greg Roth is one of my favorite people to work with; endlessly creative, endlessly collaborative, and a joy to have on any project.
“This particular project was interesting. This concept came from something Jane Campion said in an interview. She talked about how the scene was drawn from it. There’s a bit of editing where Holly Hunter as Ada McGrath walks away, and it cuts to a wooded area, and then comes back to it. Jane talked about The amount of meaning that was attached to the film in this adaptation but that transition from the civilized world to her awakening of her individuality and sexuality was a great moment.
“So, they’re two photographs, and we were trying to think about how to turn them into one still image. Greg had long done composite drawings that he really loved. But he’d never really done one of those for us. So I said, ‘Greg, can you take that approach and run with it?’ On this scene?” and he got it right away.
“Céline and Julie Go Boating” by Lauren Tamaki
“This movie is about three and a half hours long. It’s a fun hour, but there’s so much in it that you can’t expect anyone to articulate the entire plot. What matters is the experience of hanging out with these two women and their friendship and the joy that comes from it.”
“Lauren is someone who has that kind of energy in her own life, and she’s someone who captures joy in her artwork really well. So in that movie we said, ‘Watch the movie and tell us what you think.’ And she gave us 35 drawings. It was amazing to pick and choose, and it was done.” Most of it was somewhere in the package because I couldn’t let it go to waste.
“One of my favorite things is when I reach out to a designer and they tell me a movie they’ve never seen before, and then they watch it and say, ‘I can’t believe I’ve never seen it.’ They fall in love with it, and that, to me, is one of the things that makes me feel like I chose The right person for this.
“Go-Go Dance” by Matt Smalls
“This particular work is a metal collage. Matt takes pieces of scrap metal. Everything he makes is beautiful and we were able to go to him and say, ‘Do what you do and make us a picture of Richard Pryor.’ We had the idea that the film was very fragmented. It’s about the image.” Self by Richard Pryor directed and co-written as he attempts to reconstruct a sense of self after a fictionalized version of a famous self-immolation incident. His idea of trying to construct a fractured sense of self from bits and pieces of your life story has caught on It really resonated with us, and this seemed to fit in perfectly with what Matt does in all of his work.
“It didn’t require any artistic direction or feedback beyond that initial connection we made, and it created the most beautiful thing.”