The Artist Behind Awards Season’s Most Stunning Movie Posters

James Jean, the award-winning Taiwanese-American illustrator and painter, was once best known to comic-book fans as the cover artist of Vertigo Comics’ long-running fantasy series Fables, as well as a handful of DC Comics superhero titles (including Batgirl and Green Arrow). But he’s also a painter whose work has been exhibited everywhere from New York’s Jack Tilton Gallery to Tokyo’s Hidari Zingaro Gallery—and now, movie buffs should know him from his poster art for three 2017 titles: Blade Runner 2049,Mother!, and The Shape of Water, the last of which expands into theaters nationwide on Friday. Jean’s romantic, surreal style is instantly recognizable; you can’t help but be drawn in by his idiosyncratic synthesis of influences, like influential Japanese painter Hokusai, and the collectives of artists that produced Soviet propaganda.

The posters for Mother! and The Shape of Water started out as pencil sketches, while the Blade Runner 2049 poster was made entirely digitally, using an iPad Pro’s Apple Pencil and the Procreate app. (Jean also used pencil sketches, promotional material, director Denis Villeneuve's prior films, and time-lapse photos for reference points.) His two character posters for Mother! were both hand-painted. “I’m really happy with how I used different media to achieve different moods and feelings,” Jean said during a phone interview earlier this week.

His vivid charcoal drawing for The Shape of Water is maybe the most impressive of these four recent works. Jean was given a few notes from director Guillermo del Toro, who personally asked Jean to make a poster for the film. But apart from del Toro’s suggestion of a “yin-yang”-like symbol to represent Sally Hawkins and Doug Jones’s respectively mute and monstrous lovers, Jean was free to develop his own concepts. The result of that creative freedom is especially remarkable considering how messy and imprecise charcoals tend to be.

That being said: how is it possible that Jean’s sharp, vivid Shape of Water poster is an untouched charcoal drawing? Jean laughs when I ask if he re-did his drawing using Photoshop or iPad apps. In reality, he actually used nothing more sophisticated than erasers, a blending stump (a compressed roll of paper shaped into a point, used to precisely blend the charcoals), and his fingers. “The process is very similar to painting, more so than pencil drawing,” Jean explains.

Jean’s two Mother! posters conceal “easter egg”-like details. His execution of Darren Aronofsky’s vision in these images, which show Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem’s respective muse and poet characters, is remarkable—especially the Hebrew letters that Jean painted into the folds of Lawrence’s white dress.

Jean designed his Blade Runner 2049 poster before he actually saw director Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to the 1982 science-fiction cult classic. His emphasis on key story elements—including the dead tree, the omnipresent rain, and the gigantic hologram that Ryan Gosling’s character runs into—effectively distills some of the film’s key ideas into a singular image. This poster isn’t a quota-satisfying checklist of the film’s key elements; instead, it’s an artist’s personal vision. Indeed, Jean tells me his poster is basically his way of imagining “what I would do if I were making [Blade Runner 2049].” He then sheepishly admits that he still hasn’t seen the film.

Jean’s technique is remarkable, but his style is what makes his posters so refreshing. He consciously tries not to emulate the generic nature of most contemporary movie posters, particularly the “pyramid of heads” trope that reduces so many posters to close images of lead actors’ disembodied faces. He prefers the “earnest, energetic quality” of painted movie posters from Ghana—like this one for Cobra, starring Sylvester Stallone. He compares the patently unrealistic—and often obscene—depiction of action stars in these posters to “fan art”: “You can feel a kind of innocent energy in them. That’s kind of what I hope to tap into with my work.”

Jean’s need to preserve the “innocent” quality of his work makes it easier to understand why he doesn’t have any immediate plans to make more film art. He’s made several difficult professional decisions to get to where he is now, having previously left the comics industry after seven years in order to focus on painting. His professional journey has led him to contribute mural art to Prada in 2007 that was literally incorporated into the fabric and design of the label’s spring/summer 2008 collection. He is now gearing up for a new exhibition of work that will debut at Takashi Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Tokyo this upcoming April, and has re-teamed with Prada for its upcoming resort collection, and 2018 men’s spring/summer collection.

Jean has accomplished a lot since “Kindling,” his first solo show at New York’s Jonathan LeVine Gallery back in 2009. But he still feels limited by the expectations—and baggage—that came from earlier successes. For example: while Jean reveres iconic American artist Drew Struzan’s poster art for the Indiana Jones and Star Wars films, he also thinks “it’s really hard for [Struzan] to top what he did, even now.” For Jean, Struzan’s relatively new Star Wars posters are “less successful” because they feel like imitations of his now-classic work.

Jean also sometimes hears a version of that from his own admirers. “A lot of the new work I’m doing is pretty effective,” he said. “But when you get that kind of negative feedback, it does stick in the back of your head.”

Still, looking at Jean’s four showstopping 2017 posters, one can’t help but hope that he’ll make more of them, and soon. His quartet rewards attention, and activates viewers’ imaginations in ways that very few modern poster artists can. Just take his Shape of Water poster, for instance. It evokes an innocent longing that the young del Toro felt when he first saw Creature from the Black Lagoon at age six, and hoped that actress Julia Adams would end up running away with that film’s Gill Man monster.

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