Luckily NEON was happy to risk the horizontal format change, and so we submitted the final new sketch here:Īnd then I drew it, watercolored it and wrapped it all up with the usual mix of digitally applied practical layering to the final: ![]() Unsatisfied with these I immediately followed up with a couple of others:Īnd then in an email suggested we take this last one, and turn it so the grass rose up, making Kang the victim of the experience, and likening him to the murders… and we were off to the races. Initially NEON wanted to redo the multilevel floating Twin peaks portrait approach we did with such success in Parasite… I resisted the expected pull in the spirit of trying not to over ride the same ground here, so offered a few options to go forward with as you see below: Keeping Kang in line of sight and those fields of grass he returns to at the end and finds the first corpse tucked int he drainpipe at the film’s outset made a perfect two-element approach. So I decided to reduce the experience down to the lead detective, played by Bong’s own personal favorite avatar, Kang-Ho Song. There’s no Luke-with-a-lightsaber moment to hang a hat on. It’s a tricky film to draw on, much int he selfsame way Parasite was: it’s a character piece with large themes told through small moments, and covering a lot of ground without ever getting lost or being singular in its ethic. The first thing of course was to craft some sketches to submit. But lucky for me I had never seen Memories of Murder before, so I could con myself into the helpful notion that new-to-me was the same as new. A well worn muscle I’ve used when getting to reimagine old favorite films for posters or Criterion releases… without it, it would be impossible. But happily there’s always comfort in the process, and getting back down to it, flushing the brain toilet on anything but what you see before you helps. Now I had to follow up on the heels of that rocket ship and frankly, that can make the parts lock up. This alone was a little intimidating because lucky for me when I did Parasite, I had no notion that it would become the juggernaut that it did. When I was first brought in to do MoM for NEON, it was largely on the heels of my doing a similar thing for them all with PARASITE success. ![]() No mean feat, but that was put to the test in a big way this last fall when I was asked to make a poster for Bong Joon Ho’s marvelous crime noir, MEMORIES OF MURDER for NEON’s rollout campaign to release, and then again a few weeks after to do it all over again for The Criterion Collection. And if doing so stands any kind of chance at all, it demands that two essential ingredients be present: The subject is rich enough to suffer a return trip for second helpings, and the artist is able to cut bait and re-approach the material freshly with only the wisdom of the previous effort as a guide of what not to repeat. It’s hard to capture lightening twice, but it’s not impossible. It is never an uncommon thing to get a follow up gig when things went so well the first go-round, but then doubling down on that gig with another concerning the same subject weeks apart is.
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