“When they did manage to think outside the box, the results were inspirational.”

Bill Gold Interview, Another Magazine

The man behind the images for Clockwork Orange and The Exorcist, Bill Gold has a career spanning six decades in iconic poster design. This November sees the launch of Bill Gold: Posterworks, and Another Magazine had a chat with him to celebrate.

When creating your movie posters how do you go about defining a film in just one image? Each campaign that I worked on was different. Sometimes, we would work endlessly for months, working on different designs and ideas until we cracked it, and sometimes, for example the campaign for The Exorcist, I immediately was taken by the now famous image of the priest at the door and as soon as I turned it into a design, it felt right and both the director and the studio were really not interested in seeing anything else.

What are the biggest challenges you face? Sometimes it was very difficult to get the studios to think outside the box. Studios also wanted to show the faces of the actors and make the design as obvious as possible. I called this “The Mount Rushmore effect” – four heads! When they did manage to think outside the box, as was the case with the advance poster for Unforgiven, which has become an iconic design and won several awards, the results were inspirational.

You have created an enormous amount of posters throughout your 60 year career, which are your favourites and why?
 

Oh boy, that’s tough! People always ask me this and I find it very hard to pick favourites. They are all like my children. If I had to choose, my most satisfying work was the campaigns I did with Clint Eastwood – every single one of his films from Dirty Harry to Mystic River.

Did you ever feel restricted by repeatedly working to the format of a movie poster? 
No, because every movie told a different story and presented us with different challenges. This is why I chose to solely concentrate on designing movie posters because they are a great canvas for telling a story.

What do you feel is the secret to making a good movie poster? 


Less is more!

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