A Tchaikovsky Concerto and a gun clutched side by side. A masked man. The full moon. The striking, enigmatic poster of Anurag Kashyap’s Kennedy fits what we know of the film – “Kennedy is a ghost in the system looking for redemption,” is all the director said to Variety – but it’s also an anomaly in a marketing culture that’s more star-driven than concept-driven. There are also nods to Kashyap’s other films in the poster. Ahead of the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival’s Midnight Screenings section next month, Ranjan Singh, a producer at Kashyap’s production house Good Bad Films and Sahil Kajale, a creative director at visual promotion firm Warrior’s Touch, who have worked together for around a decade, spoke about distilling a two-hour-long film into a single image, the brief they got from the director and the poster design clichés they’re tired of seeing today:
What kind of brief did you get from Anurag?
Ranjan: Anurag suggested that I try a Giallo style of poster, which has a prominent male figure, then a woman at the side who is usually a dancer or a dead body lying there. It’s a B-grade, noir style, which is the genre of film that Kennedy falls into. Not everybody gets the Giallo style of poster – Anurag and I had tried that with Raman Raghav (2016) too. That’s why I called Sahil because I knew he could crack it.
What kind of timelines were you working on?
Ranjan: One week! Cannes was very secretive, they told us that the film had been selected about 12 hours before they announced it. We thought we’d finish the poster by May. But then the Cannes selection happened and Anurag called us from the airport saying, “We need a poster!” That’s when I called Sahil, showed him the film the next day at the office and we worked on the poster over the next week. But Anurag had a clarity of style and so Sahil and poster designer Bir Saaz were able to integrate his ideas well.
When you watch a film that’s two hours long or longer, how do you figure out how to distill that into a single image?
Sahil: There’s no by-the-book answer to this. It comes with an eye, an understanding of the film and with just doing it for a long time. Along with posters, we’ve also done trailer campaigns, so we’ve figured out what the right elements to take from a film are. You have to understand what the content of your film is and then there are elements that are absolutely mandatory – the look of the characters, the setting of the film. In this case, Anurag knew what he wanted so we weren’t in the dark and that made it much, much easier.
When we looked at Giallo movie posters, we saw that we could follow this pattern in which the protagonist was always in the foreground and larger in size and positioning. There was always a side character who was probably in silhouette. So we had Rahul Bhat in the forefront and Sunny Leone next to him. We added blood spatter, which is very common in a lot of Giallo posters. If there’s a murder, there will be blood. The idea was to go completely pulp with this one. There was no holding back. We didn’t want to follow the generic tropes of poster design that you see today. We didn’t want there to be the ultra-finesse that comes with digital art. The poster has an old-school painted effect. There’s, for lack of a better word, a lack of touch up there. The most important events in the film happen at night. There’s a murder that happens at night, so you can see a lit moon in the background.
Ranjan: The mask was an essential part of the film. The blood was important because there is a suggestion of violence. A poster has to give the audience a taste of the film. A trailer is easier because there are visuals conveying a lot more.
Sahil: We were thinking about how we could create an impact even without showing the lead actor’s face. It’s a bold and progressive move on the makers’ part to release a poster without showing the lead actor’s full face. Anurag was clear that that was what he wanted. It’s also led to curiosity as to why he’s wearing a mask because it’s not a generic mask, it looks unique.
What references did you look at?
Sahil: We looked at classic posters for films like Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980). They don’t belong to the Giallo genre but you’ll find that some of the elements in the Kennedy poster come from there.
Ranjan: Those posters don’t belong to the horror genre but what we took from the Taxi Driver poster was the use of the colour yellow. Then we added elements like a Sixties-Seventies’ heroine. The moon tells you that the film is shot at night. The circle around Rahul helps the eye focus on him.
It’s intriguing also because we usually have a hero-driven culture and not a concept-driven culture when it comes to posters.
Ranjan: This is also a very hero-driven poster, but it’s a contemporized version of a Giallo poster that balances it out with all these other elements.
Sahil: The top of the poster reads: From the director of Gangs of Wasseypur, Ugly and Psycho Raman. This is something old-school poster makers used to do because displaying a director’s earlier films was a way of promoting his new film. This was back when you would only see posters when you went to the theatre, or maybe on a billboard somewhere when television wasn’t around.
Ranjan: I was very surprised when people pointed out our credit block because since the time we worked with Phantom, we’ve always had as many or even more credits. But even in the posters we looked at for reference, the credit block was huge. The names of every technician were prominent. The image was smaller and the credits were massive. We’ve maintained that style even now. We didn’t use any Indian references though. Even our Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) poster was also a desi Giallo type – bright colours and kitschy design.
Sahil: We’ve actually attempted to pay tribute to a lot of other Anurag Kashyap movies in the Kennedy poster. There are a lot of Easter Eggs there. The typeface of the title is similar to the typeface of Black Friday (2004). The black font on the yellow background comes from That Girl In Yellow Boots (2010). The blood spatter comes from Gulaal (2009). The blue and red light on Rahul Bhat’s face comes from the Raman Raghav poster. A lot of people probably won’t get these references but as Anurag fanboys we wanted to pay tribute while making this poster.
Are there any modern poster design clichés you’re tired of seeing?
Ranjan: I’d want to do more concept posters. We can go beyond the hero-heroine standard. Earlier, we’d look at posters on billboards and on big marquees. Today, your posters get consumed on phones. So you can play around with it. People can zoom in, look at the Easter Eggs.
Sahil: Our goal is always to make our posters look like one natural image that is seamlessly blended together. There are so many posters you see that look like they’re made up of images that have been digitally played around with. You can tell even if you’re not a technician. It always looks artificial. Posters should look nice and aesthetically pleasing to the eye.