As a title designer, Sebastian Pardo often has to wait to see his work on the big screen, tinkering away on a computer to set up the film perfectly. But when he saw “The Brutalist” for the first time in its finished form on a screen befitting of its scope, it wasn’t the text that he himself placed on screen that he was so impressed by writ large, but by what director Brady Corbet and crew had already laid into the film to capture the period detail of the 1950s in which the film is set.
“What blew me away even when I saw the film on the laptop was this guy is a warlock,” Pardo said of Corbet. “How did he travel through time? Because all the clothes, all the locations, everything is so meticulous. Even the magazine that they printed is the right type of paper and the right printing process. It was not inkjet, and [it had] the old heavyweight paper the magazines used to be. Those types of details blow me away because I’m hypervigilant about all that and your immersion is never broken. At every level, people were just operating such a level of detail and care. I was glad to be involved.”
Pardo fit right into the mix when he’d relish the opportunity to do a deep dive into the Bauhaus movement, a radical rethinking of all aspects of design in the early 20th century prompted by the industrial revolution that helped shape the outlook of the architect at the center of “The Brutalist,” played by Adrien Brody. Although simplicity was at the center of the practice, giving birth to such clean fonts as Futura and Gill Sans, it was a time of great experimentation, which emboldened Pardo, whose credits include “White Noise” and “If Beale Street Could Talk,” plenty of room for playfulness. Knowing from the time that he first worked on an early teaser for the film that Corbet was game to upend audience expectations with a side-scrolling set of titles, Pardo shakes things up within that when the the varying thickness of the fonts, the size and the spacing all make a rudimentary part of a film come alive with minimal style in true Bauhaus fashion.
Even before Pardo became sought after as a title designer, he knew how to make an introduction, partnering with Riel Roch Decter for the continually inspired production and distribution company MEMORY that has helped usher in innovative filmmakers such as Theo Anthony (“All Light, Everywhere”) and Zia Anger (“My First Film”). Whether working in-house or for another studio — or to launch the enterprise with his titles or see it through from start to finish as a producer — Pardo has always found a way to help other filmmakers put their best foot forward and even for as long as we’ve been fans of his work at The Moveable Fest, we were surprised by how intertwined his efforts have been, taking a holistic approach to putting the work of daring artists into the world with just the right context from a film’s marketing materials on. As “The Brutalist” is starting to unspool in theaters, Pardo spoke about evoking the spirit of a project in its opening frames, his longtime passion for the craft and having risks pay off.
How did you gravitate towards title design in the first place?
My dad was a fine artist and an architect, so I was always around the arts and very in tune to design, but I never studied it. Then when I was in film school, people would just put in the default font or did something lazy and I was like, “Oh, let me help you with that.” I’d just have fun designing people’s titles for their movies, but I was still focused on directing and then eventually producing. That continued when I started at the Directors Bureau and other really talented people around me were making cool stuff. Khalil Joseph and Jon Wang, who ended up producing “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” were there. There were a lot of really interesting people around, and I’d do a similar thing [where I’d say], “Oh, those titles could use help. Do you want me to do something?”
Back then, I figured out my own rig to make them optically, so it just became a side hobby and then when we started MEMORY, I did the titles for “Palo Alto” and it just made sense to be involved with a lot of the films that I was producing. I would just get the chance to design them. We would design our own posters and do the graphics on the trailers, so it was part of the cohesive design language of Memory and over time, people were like, “I really like what you’re doing with Memory, can you design some stuff for me?” And from just having the peer group that were around making interesting movies, I did the titles for “Moonlight” and “Beale Street” and some Duplass movies and eventually “Room 104,” and it just became this thing that was happening on the side of everything we were doing with our production company.
It ended up being a valuable part where people needed help with marketing or they wanted their movie titles designed because I had the experience of being a producer and the understanding of how movies come together, but also how to translate the artist’s vision through the whole project. That became a useful skill as a title designer to [think] “This is what it should look like to communicate the kind of things that the film communicates,” and that became a valuable way of looking at the challenge of title design. It just became something that slowly grew over time and it’s been 10 years of doing MEMORY and almost as much doing design.
If your father was an architect, was “The Brutalist” a particularly exciting prospect?
Absolutely. I love architecture and there’s a lot of similarities with architecture and filmmaking and the film isn’t shy of that association either. Initially, the way that the project came about was I helped Brady [Corbet] with the sales reel. They had shot some footage and they made a little trailer to go get more money [to finance the production], so there wasn’t a lot of time for that, maybe a couple days of helping put together some graphics. But because I was well-versed in art history and architecture, I didn’t have to start at zero in understanding [what was needed].
I actually really like brutalist architecture. It was very aligned already with my natural aesthetics and we made that teaser and then about four years passed because it’s a challenge to fundraise movies period, let alone all the challenges that existed in 2020, but when the movie came back, there was more time to dive deep and really hone the research [to put towards the title design]. I went to the library and like pulled out every book I could on Bauhaus, but even before going to the books, I [thought], “We’re not going for any of the cliche Bauhaus thoughts. We’re going to go a little deeper,” so it was a really great exercise to go and find the next level under the Bauhaus constructivist language that could be fresh and interesting.
Brady has discussed this idea of wanting minimalism and maximalism at the same time, at least in regards to the film’s score, but that would seem to apply to the titles as well. Was that the case?
Totally, I think that’s expressed more in Brady’s natural instincts and the way that he shapes the project. In terms of what we did in the teaser with this lateral crawl, it was a much bigger text and it was very bold and when he came back years later, he had shot this opening sequence and he knew he wanted to do a lateral crawl and I just threw a lot [of ideas] at him and he was able to push things or pull things back to maybe better align to this minimalism/maximalism tension that he wanted. There was a point we got to in the opening crawl where we were both like, “Oh my God, that’s really great,” but Brady [thought], “That’s too much for the opening. We’re just getting into the movie. Let’s save that for the end crawl.” And that’s how we ended up doing the whole end crawl at a slant because that felt too big for the opening and in that sense, he internally had the compass of how to ride the line of the simplicity and minimalism. You’re already doing a lot here. Let’s keep it simple and let’s go bigger in other portions of the film.
A similar thing happened with the intercards where for 80 to 90% of the time that the film was locked, those cards looked different. But at the end, when we were getting ready to do the 70 millimeter print, Brady was watching it big over and over and he said, “We could do something more here with these cards.” So we threw those out and redesigned them in an afternoon because we’d been working together so long that it was just really easy. We knew the language so well that it was really easy to come up with something new.
The spacing of typeface is quite fascinating all on its own. How did you work with it?
In the early Bauhaus days in the late ’20s, early ’30s, when you see their internal memos and the kind of documents they were making for each other, even things as simple as a memo, they would do things with their typewriters, [like] add all these extra spaces and before they were custom building fonts, one of the few tools they had at their disposal was layout. They were doing diagonals and shapes and circles and even early on when it was a more humble endeavor, layout was a big way that they would express themselves. For a lot of their stuff, they’re dealing with actual texts, writing manifestos or letters that had a different character legibility and the way that written text is laid out has a different set of rules.
For us, the challenge was you have a bunch of names [to list in the credits] and [we thought] we could have fun playing with the expectations of how these different layouts can happen in a way that you wouldn’t really be able to do with text that you need to read for a long period. Reading pages and pages of something laid out like these titles would be difficult, but it would be interesting and fun to break up the titles this way, especially when there’s one card that is all executive producers. You’re repeating this title over and over again, so it was a way to give [the titles] more visual interest and still connect to the Bauhaus school and the design aesthetics of early last century.
This makes use of lines in an interesting way as well. What was it like to use them as a kind of container?
Yeah, that was super fun, and also something present in the constructivist and Bauhaus design language. Because they didn’t have the institutional power or cultural energy to be creating their own font typeset, they were doing things more like that where they would add lines or break up the space that way or add shapes. There’s the famous [Adolf Loos’ line] “Ornamentation is crime,” but they were doing an anti-ornamentation thing and because we have that lateral scroll, it just felt so well suited to lines and shapes and allowing those things to create these counterweights to these big blocks of text. That came from the research, but in the same sense that Brady was saying “minimalism/maximalism,” there’s this tension of the film taking place in the past, but it still is very formally fresh and interesting, so it was a way to represent the formal approach of the film, the story and the history [where] we took all those things into consideration and synthesized them together.
When you’ve been working generally on title design, are there ideas you may have wanted to try before, but wait for the right project to come along to incorporate?
Every project starts tabula rasa. Each film has its own needs, but also each director is comfortable with a certain thing and it doesn’t make sense to bring a concept that’s really rooted in the ideas of one film to another. I really do try to pull out things that are embedded in the project itself and bring those out with the design, so it’s very rare that an approach or something [specific] can be reused. It’s also not totally my place as a designer to come in and say, “We should do something like this.” It takes a special relationship and a special director to have something where you can go really big or push a design onto the film that maybe they weren’t initially thinking. Now, we might mutually discover something together that is really exciting, but the idea that I’ll come in and push it into a place, it doesn’t really happen. I’m reacting to what the director has provided.
The titles themselves have received an enormous response since the teaser trailer was released. What’s all this been like for you?
It’s been incredible. I started on the project November of last year and Brady sent me a link to the film, so I sit down on my laptop in my apartment and I’m totally floored and riveted, so I was excited to be involved. And they had a little temp title in the beginning and I [thought], “This film is so good and this is so exciting to have this canvas to play with.” Starting the process with Brady was great, and I knew that he was ambitious from working with him on the teaser, and you always hope when you’re working with a collaborator for somebody who’s gonna egg you on and give oxygen to the fire. Then I was sitting on work I was really proud of for a long time with nobody seeing it, and around town, people would go, “Oh, what are you working on?” I was like, “I’m working on this amazing movie called ‘The Brutalist.’” There were some troublesome moments in the film’s history where we were concerned that maybe this film wouldn’t get its due, but then it goes to Venice and gets an amazing response.
Then A24 brought me in and I worked on the teaser trailer and people could see a little bit of the work on the teaser that would be in the film and just seeing the response on that was huge. Now everywhere I go, people have been so generous and nice, going out of their way to come up to me and say that they really love those titles. It’s a magic confluence of things to come together, and I’m just very lucky to be involved and lucky that that Brady trusted me and brought me into the process to do it. I’ve been involved with a lot of movies in a lot of different ways, and I’m so glad that this film can even exist and that people are seeing it and responding to it so well. My hope is that that can be a beacon to other people to say that this stuff can be made and celebrated and hopefully can like be successful in a way that rewards the people who back it financially, so it’s been a dream.
“The Brutalist” is now in theaters.