Martin Scorsese and Gangs of New York
Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese on set of Gangs of New York (2002)
I hadn’t seen or worked with Marty since The Color of Money in 1986. After Money Marty began working with Saul Bass. Well, after doing five films with Marty, sadly, Saul died and Marty was devastated.
During post production I had a couple of conversations with Marty’s longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker and finally, she invited me to come to New York to meet with Marty and see a cut of Gangs of New York.
When I saw him at the screening it was like no time had passed at all. We embraced and chatted so comfortably that 16 years absence just faded away.
I had many strong ideas after the screening and we met briefly for me to describe them in detail. It all came back to me as to why I’d always done my best work with Marty.
And that was because he was so sharp and always got what I was saying and was right with me on the details of the concept and the idea and immediately responded, added to and helped to clearly define it in a form that it could be executed and brought to full fruition.
Right away I had the idea of the big, bold wooden letters for the title treatment that came right out of the 1850s era of newspaper and poster printing with big, wooden hand cut letters and black ink on newsprint paper.
Upon returning to LA I scoured the city for authentic, wooden letters from the early days of American newspapers. They had to be physically of similar size to each other and I wanted a variety of typestyles within the letters and words to give a bigness of the city and the melting pot of different kinds of people all melded together in one big, loud and boisterous town.
Further, the wear and the damage to the letters with ink stains and years of grime would represent the violence and the struggle just to stay alive in such a rough and dangerous environment.
I had a nice selection of both Roman and Gothic letters that I stacked up and started to shoot still photos of them. The old wood had a wonderful, dirty brown, ochre burnt Sienna feel with a lot of wood grain and stained face of each letter. It looked fantastic.
Of course, ‘GANGS’ had to be the most prominent word but then I stacked a great Bodoni Bold NEW sitting on top of a terrific square serif face for ‘YORK’ and a very tiny ‘OF’ sat in front of ‘NEW.’
The original wooden letters I used to create the Gangs of New York title card
Though I wanted to shoot the letters live action, I knew it would be too expensive so I simply photographed them in natural light on a very high definition digital camera. I wanted to get the thickness and the blunt mass of the assemblage to convey the crowded, dense conglomeration of buildings and people crowded together, living on top of one another.
Then I began making camera moves on the letters to punctuate the power and bigness of them to state the name of this big, muscular film.
I wanted the letters to be so big that they would go off of the screen, completely crowding out anything else.
Just in time to do my tests, I got the U2 music that they had written and recorded that would play behind the titles which really inspired me to shoot a move that the music would punctuate and really drive home the feeling that I wanted.
I shot several different moves on the title and shipped them to New York for Marty to see. He loved them and gave me the go ahead to produce it on 35mm.
The Gangs of New York title card as it appears in the film
The remainder of the main titles were to go to the end of the film, which is where I was able to push the design to the limit and move the letters off of the screen and move inside of them to create these great graphic shapes that I then superimposed very bold, dimensional titles with shadows cast on to the big letters for a really outstanding effect of historical, dramatic and very atmospheric feeling. Everyone was very pleased.
However, a big wrench suddenly gummed up the works.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Marty called to tell me that he had just told the owners of Miramax that he didn’t want to use their logo on the head of Gangs of New York. He explained that his first scene was so moody and quiet that he felt the logo overpowered and diminished the scene that followed. The owners actually listened and were actually willing to see what Marty had in mind to replace their logo for just this film.
So, this problem fell into my lap to create and design an alternate logo that would embody the qualities of Miramax but not the bold, loudness of their old, massive, giant letter ‘M.’
I played around with many, many ideas, from a proscenium stage with a curtain opening to drawings of two overweight guys to a sub-amorphous ooze with the letters squishing within, coming into readability and then out again. The final one is shown here.
The special Miramax logo I designed for Gangs of New York