Originally Posted by Michael Brooke  In a nutshell, they weren't designed by Borowczyk himself!
We thought long and hard about the design of this project, because we were in the highly unusual position of dealing with the work of someone who habitually designed his own posters, and indeed started out as a fine artist and award-winning poster designer before turning to film. More specifically, he designed posters for four of his first five features, and a screening invite for the fifth (Goto) - so using his own designs was about as close to a no-brainer as any decision that was made on this project. There was really no good argument for using anything else.
As for the branded Arrow covers, we again used Borowczyk as our inspiration, because his regular producer Dominique Ségrétin told us that for all live-action features, he would pick out a single still that he thought was most representative. In a couple of cases (Immoral Tales and The Beast), he'd incorporate the still into the poster, which is why they're the same still on both sides of the sleeve - but we thought it was important to stick to those principles as well (only bending them slightly with regard to the short films cover, as there wasn't a Borowczyk-selected still so instead we picked one from what he believed to be his best short, Angels' Games).
In fact, we based the entire design of the project (discs, sleeves, book/booklets, box) from things that we know that Borowczyk had personally signed off on. The use of Futura as a font right across the board (bar the subtitles: we thought that would be too jarring) derives from the fact that Borowczyk himself used it more than any other. Similarly, the conscious decision not to use any still images or video clips in any of the menus derives from the similarly image-free advertising flyers that he designed in the 1960s, and so on.
One of the primary aims of the project was, effectively, to give Borowczyk's films back to Borowczyk himself - to decisively separate them from decades of fly-by-night exploitation merchants and lurid covers that he would certainly never have approved had he been given the option. So the notion of effectively asking him to design the packaging (despite him being dead eight years) was one of the earliest ideas that we came up with - and all credit to Arrow for allowing us to follow this through to the end, even if it meant tinkering with their usual branding guidelines. Which is something that the BFI would never have permitted, so I'm very glad in retrospect that I never managed to realise a Borowczyk project there!
Oh, and as a further bonus, not having to pay artists (bar Arrow's usual packaging/booklet designers) or licence third-party designs saved us a fair wodge of cash, which could be diverted elsewhere. So not only was this genuinely the best and most appropriate design decision for this project (since nothing else would have been truer to Borowczyk's intentions), but it was also the cheapest - and is one of the reasons why we managed to get every scrap of film footage scanned in HD and boost something we were still calling "the booklet" as recently as last Easter to a whopping 344 pages. In other words, there was really no downside. |