A Poster Odyssey: Interview with Artist Tomer Hanuka
Interview featured in Layered Butter's Stanley Kubrick issue.
Stanley Kubrick films have always been dipped in a mysterious aura. Something dreary, slow, and brooding. Something that feels as though it’s pleasant to watch, before the director’s inherent darkness kicks in. At least that’s how artist Tomer Hanuka sees it.
Born and raised in Israel, Tomer grew up with a limited stream of western media as a young boy. The rarity of North American pop culture cultivated an undeniable allure, including a fascination with super hero comics. This connection brought Tomer to art, and that art brought him to the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Tomer Hanuka’s art has graced National Geographic covers, The New Yorker, and the graphic novel The Divine, but his true brilliance shines in alternative movie posters. Known for saturated colors and an otherworldly feel, his work transforms familiar characters and titles into something entirely unique. While he’s reimagined films like Blade Runner (1982) and Akira (1988), his collection of Stanley Kubrick posters stands as a near-magnum opus.
Tomer’s Kubrick-inspired digital works live in this darkness. They feature fantastical foregrounds, bright ambitious colors, clearly defined objects, and chaotic scenes. They exist in the same balance of pleasant and uncomfortable that Kubrick’s films thrived on. Every place where white could be used, we find cream, ivory, or sand-like colors. Are you looking through a lens, or remembering a hazy memory?
These Kubrick-inspired posters exemplify the marriage between art and film in an incredible fashion. They are everything the alternative movie posterworld looks for in a good poster. Tomer makes each piece into an essay about the experience of watching each film. He blends in aspects of the movies, the narrative, the imagery, and the emotion into a singular illustration, soaked in sharp colour. His undeniable talent made him a perfect artist to feature in our Kubrick volume.
Lolita by Tomer Hanuka
Growing up in Israel, what was your exposure to North American pop culture? Anecdotes I've heard from my relatives there have said that there's a lot of overlap, but it's also filtered through a very different cultural lens. I don't necessarily mean military culture but…
Tomer Hanuka: I don't think we can ignore it, though. That's the culture, you know. The Crisis is the culture; the Occupation is the culture in many ways. Growing up, there was Western culture, but it came in small bits and was ever so mysterious. I was born in the mid- 70s, so it wasn't as westernized as it is now, and the modes of communication were a lot more basic, like, we didn't have a television. Then, when we had a television, it only had one channel and was black and white. For many, many years, we had just this one channel, and then it became color. But it's not like we were, like, swimming in a culture from the West. That was very, very rare and special. When we got gifts from an aunt that moved to LA, we got sent comic books. That was like a very special alien artifact that we could never decode. It's in a language that we didn't recognize, and it was just so beautiful and impenetrable in a way that you just savour it. Basically, I think, it was the first form of drugs for me, feeling high, falling into Gotham City, you know, like this full color thing. I think especially because I didn't feel part of the culture [in Israel]. The generals, the heroic sort of myth and all that — I never connected with it. Though it's funny because superheroes kind of [play into the heroic sort of myth] in a different way, but it's also like the myth of the man and nothing could stop him, [even] though there's some darkness, he's so strong, and he's gonna save everything. That I could connect with, I think, because it was colorful and fictionalized, and I mean that's a power fantasy, so I happily took to it.
Being exposed to comics and sharing that love with your twin brother, Asaf, when did you feel like approaching the arts became viable as a path for you creatively?
Tomer Hanuka: We were very much into drawing, obsessed with it really, and we went to a specialized art high school that was very hard to get into. We had to take the bus, you know, it was very far away. We were kind of in it from the beginning, very dedicated to it, and it's something that we did together. I think a lot of drawing and the act of drawing, for me, is this idea of spending time with my brother, and that it's a communal activity. Even now that we live in different countries, I still feel like I'm spending time with him in my head on some level, thinking about lines and compositions.
2001: A Space Odyssey by Tomer Hanuka
When you studied at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) and started working across different mediums, what did you view differently between book covers, comics, animation, magazine covers, and posters.
Tomer Hanuka: I went to SVA, graduated in 2000, and started working as a freelancer. I really wanted to break into the editorial market, which was quite strong, then, but now I think it's not as robust. There's not as many magazines, or as much budgets for them. When I started doing posters with Mondo, Mitch [Putnam] approached me, and it blew my mind. I felt like I was doing an essay, because it was about what I think about the experience of watching the movie. It wasn't explaining it like any editorial does sometimes. It wasn't selling it like the work I did for advertising, I didn't need to market anything. It was simply about saying something new about my experience with an art form, or with a specific piece of art. I think there is something about it that is like making a love letter to fan art, and taking that fan art very, very seriously. The poster was the most where I injected my "self" into the process, and then animation was already a bigger step beyond that, because here I was already coming up with ideas. With comics also, it's kind of like being more in control of the actual content.
Now you've gone from learning at SVA to teaching the next generations of artists there. During the pandemic, there was an article published by CTV News here in Canada, about a series of mock COVID-related New Yorker covers that your students created, which were phenomenal.
Yeah, they were amazing! I think it was two years or a year and a half teaching in that Zoom cage. Some students that showed up were in China and woke up at 3 a.m., and there were times that I saw them nodding off, because they just pass out, it's too late for them. But [the students] did amazing, you know, because they all had a lot of family members getting sick, they're stuck in the tiny rooms, they can't go anywhere, and some of them just can't go back home because all the borders are closed, but they showed up, and they really gave it 100%. That was amazing. They showed up, talked about colors and ideas like it's the most serious thing in the world. When we put it out online, I didn't think anybody would see. It was crazy that it went viral. I think it was viewed 21 million times. It was on the front page of Twitter, and had the write-ups like CNN, Canada, The Washington Post — it was just nuts.
A Clockwork Orange by Tomer Hanuka
Does teaching bring out a different perspective about how you approach your body of work now?
It's very strange that teaching is like a give-and-take thing, it's a cycle. When you see students, especially people that, let's say, were born after 2000, they were born like after I already graduated. It's like for them, you're seeing that super fresh idea that there are no set rules, and you just come and you try something new. I think it's courageous to see that type of mindset that isn't like "Here are my Masters, and let me just do one step above that," and leaning on very strong foundations, but you can also come from another way, saying “I'm just going to draw something intuitively, and then sort of deal with where it takes me.” I mean, it's kind of a freshness, and a very hard quality to define, but it's fearlessness, taking a leap, and trusting that you’ll land somewhere interesting.
When you started working on posters with Mitch and Mondo, you mentioned how it kind of felt like an essay, in an editorial, in a different way for you. How would you describe your own posters? What is your approach?
First of all, I need to like it, or at least see it and enjoy it. I've been approached to do a lot of films that I'm not into, or I didn't take them because I felt like “I have nothing interesting to say about this.” Once I watch it, and I feel like there's something I can add to the equation, then I can find that angle. I remember with Eyes Wide Shut (1999), I was completely convinced that the whole idea is about marital relationships and being married, cheating, and what is that kind of agreement between the husband and the wife? When do you break it, and where are the cracks? Because I've seen the film many years ago, obviously, and then again for the poster. But the more I thought about it, I said no, it's about status. It's about class. It's about this young doctor in a very expensive city, and the stairs are like he's going up the scale of society. The idea was to find an angle in every film, and to say something interesting that was sometimes counterintuitive. If I could put something provocative, if I can do Rambo (1982), but make it like a Japanese woodcut print that's all about the beauty of the waterfall, and it's not about muscles or blood or machine guns. That's when I feel like I crafted something in a new way.
Eyes Wide Shut by Tomer Hanuka
What draws you into Kubrick's films that you feel brings out your eclectic artistic sensibilities?
I think he's really the best at what he does in terms of creating an image that has this gravity of a symbol, but also extremely effective in moving drama and story forward. He is like the master artist of the media I’ve consumed in my 49 years. I feel like he's really up there. There's a certain darkness and symmetry in how he breaks up the space.
You discuss being inspired by other paintings and using elements of that narrative storytelling inside your posters. One example I can think of off the top of my head is Psycho (1960) and being inspired by Edward Hopper. Is that something that you approached in each Kubrick poster?
It's something that I always think about almost on each job. I think with posters, there's such an attraction for me to borrow and quote things that I feel the audience is familiar with, and we can use that referential shorthand, take a bit of that DNA and mix it with yours and see where it goes. I think it just adds another layer of narrative and history that people can get like an extra sort of flavor. I also did it in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) with Fuseli, [who] is this Italian painter from the 18th century. He has a painting of this creature sitting on a woman's chest, and it's called The Nightmare, and it's literally a copy of that composition for the Space Odyssey poster.
Funny enough, a lot of your Kubrick posters are very dreamlike, but have very exaggerated nightmarish qualities that feel almost ethereal, yet very hard to grasp, because just like any dream or nightmare, there's so much thrown at you. Is that something that you also see within Kubrick's body of work as you approached these posters?
I have to say, I didn't consciously think about the word nightmare. I see them as very pleasurable experiences. I think there is inherent darkness in his vision; that’s probably what I find so attractive. But I feel it's always like transformed and left to art. It's not like a horror film. There is that transformation that elevates it, an experience that eventually is so uplifting for me. Maybe except The Shining (1980).
The Shining by Tomer Hanuka
With that particular poster, what was your approach using the ballroom party scene with Jack Nicholson at the bar?
This is a made-up scene where I wanted to take all the nightmarish creatures he saw and bring them to the bar, sort of having a good time drinking, but with all these creatures that he sees. I am usually happier when I find a scene that is not in the movie. If I can make up something new that still works, and people never noticed it [was made up], that's the weirdest thing. Nobody ever said like, "Hey, that was never in Psycho. You'd never see this." But you don't need to.
It's made up but it's more of what happens beyond the scope of what the camera shows you, and how that would feel real in that moment for those characters.
Exactly, it's saying there is a bigger world. The movie is just like a window, and let's explore a bit of that. I think that the approach for The Shining showed that there was a moment in that Hotel when this happened, and we didn't see.
Dr. Strangelove by Tomer Hanuka
With Dr. Strangelove (1964), I love how it's a mixture between apocalyptic and hedonistic. The way the exaggerated characteristics in the composition are almost comical.
It's true. I mean, first of all it's a hilarious movie. And again, this is a film [where] my understanding of it changed when I worked on the poster. I thought it was about this anti-war, Cold War, sort of war parody or satire, in a way. But the more I've seen it, it feels like all the symbols, the anger and greed — conceptually it's about toxic masculinity. Because even the Arms Race, it's kind of like a hard-on. He can't stop himself from his arm doing the “Heil Hitler” thing on its own. And the bomb is completely sexual. The bombers have to do it, it has to come out, it has to explode. To me, the clearest way this is seen is the secretary of the general: she's in a bikini like in a tanning bed. Why is there a woman in a bikini in that kind of, like military complex, you know? I think that's the key to sort of understanding that this is all about men not being able to contain it. That poster was about trying to make this connection. Put Dr. Strangelove and then put this huge bomb with a girl, but letting the viewer hopefully feel that there's gravity there. It's just this attraction between this creature, you know, this doctor, and then the bomb, and they're just attracted to each other. Like they want that meeting, even though it will completely smush him. It's still inevitable.
The inevitability of a phallic symbol being, you know...
It must explode.
Then on the flip side of that, with Full Metal Jacket (1987), you're using the smoke clouds behind Joker as Mickey Mouse ears, to play into the Mickey Mouse Club song that they sing right at the end. It's a subtle way, if you haven't seen the film, to go back to that poster afterwards and see all those thematic elements come together.
The idea that the viewer would be alienated at first — that is by design. I want the viewer to be a little alienated, I want them [to] be angry. I think this is, like I said, it's an elevated form of fan art, but it's really anti-fan art, because it's not about easter eggs that tickle you in a way that it's something familiar that we all like. No, this is about taking something that is precious to try to break it apart, expose it, and look at it in a fresh way, so that maybe you would appreciate it, like in a different way now. That I'd have a conversation with you in your head saying something slightly different. A lot of times when I plan these posters, I like to think about what would get the fans really angry on the internet but would still be a great image. I was thinking of that with 300 (2006), which is full of big, sweaty guys, like super ripped, tiny underwear, killing each other. And the idea was to make a fragile figure in the snow from the back holding a spear, so you don't get all those corny images, you get the opposite of that. But it still works for the movie. It's still like in the spirit of the film. Specifically about Full Metal Jacket, the classic image for the film that I remember as a child was the helmet, and it says "Born to Kill," but there's also the peace sign. The duality of the peace sign, the “Born to Kill,” the bullets — I was looking for like a duality, and I found that with the "Show me your Warface," and then the Mickey Mouse Club. Obviously, they're children, and they're sent to do an impossible job. I wonder how many people saw the Mickey Mouse ears in the smoke? I don't think it was that clear.
Full Metal Jacket by Tomer Hanuka
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