A Conversation with Sean Longmore
No Time to Die by Sean Longmore
Sean Longmore is a graphic designer and digital artist based in the UK. He is a movie fan and has been obsessed with James Bond since watching Roger Moore ski off a cliff at age six. He is yet to own a bright yellow ski suit to recreate the jump.
LAYERED BUTTER: What do you look for when starting a piece? Is it the subject matter, or is there an iconographic moment you want to depict in your style?
SEAN LONGMORE: I look for fun. Creativity is an escape for me, and I find it’s the best way to communicate what happens inside my mind. With any work I produce for myself, I always do my best to make sure I start with what excites me most about that particular project, whether that’s a colour, an image or a layout choice and go from there. For GoldenEye (1995), I knew no matter what, I wanted the image of the girls smashing the hammer and sickle, and I knew I wanted two golden eyes on there because there’s two in the film. For Skyfall (2012) everything started with a vibrant red and the layout all worked around that gorgeous shot of the dragon.
James Bond seems to be a frequent character you tackle. What is it about that property that makes you want to revisit it?
Everyone has that one thing they truly love. The spark that excites them. Often it’s something we’ve grown up with that’s made an impression on who we are. For me, that’s 007. I’ve always been obsessed with it since I was a kid. The films pretty much play on a loop shot for shot in my head. I love books on how the films were made, and I want to know all the details about them. I was a Bond fan before I was an artist. I can remember getting the official James Bond movie poster book when I was around six or seven, and I just completely fell in love. I can distinctly remember firstly being baffled and yet fascinated by Robert McGinnis’ pieces for the '67 Casino Royale because I had no idea what it was; and then being absolutely blown away when I saw Dan Gouzee’s Moonraker (1979) artwork. The international one sheet, with the cable car, gondola and the hang glider in the panels of Drax’s space station; that was my Mona Lisa growing up. It was pre-internet for me, so it was like discovering a new part of the film I’d never seen. I couldn’t help myself but to pay as much homage as possible to that when I did my Moonraker piece, there’s just no other way to do it!
Moonraker by Sean Longmore
Your Bond poster style seems to also be heavily influenced by the official Japanese one sheets for those movies, what is it about those posters that inspired you? Colour? Font? Illustrations?
My visual style is certainly postmodern and a reaction against minimalism. I’m a very visual thinker and my brain thinks in pictures at a pace that I can never keep up with. I like to cram the canvas full of imagery because that’s how I see the world, and that’s why I feel like I can relate to those original Japanese posters so well. They capture the films for me, particularly the ones from the 60s which I’ve had hanging on my walls for years. There’s a lost art form to those original Japanese posters. Some person in Japan, who had never seen the movie they’d been asked to market, was given a bunch of stills and told to make it all look exciting. They’d fill the canvas to the brim with all these photos regardless of context, haphazardly recolour things, accidentally include a still of the cameraman and then frame it all with Japanese typography, which is the most beautiful alphabet to gaze upon. I wasn’t allowed to study art at high school. I was told I’d fail straight away because I can’t draw or paint on paper to save my life, so working in a similar way to those original Japanese designers felt like the natural way for me to express my visual creativity. I try to think “What if those guys back then had access to Photoshop, how much fun would they have had?!
The Man with the Golden Gun by Sean Longmore
Do you find that your art direction changes based on which specific Bond era you are portraying?
My style in reference to the layout and composition changes per film rather than era. I find categorising the Bond films into eras really difficult because they each have their own distinct creative persona. I can see groupings where certain members of the production crew cross over, but even then, all of John Glen’s five films are visually separate from each other, and all of Maibaum’s stories are very different. I tried to keep a recognisable art direction through all the Craig films, because there’s that sense of continuity between them, but each one still took on a life of its own. Casino Royale (2006) felt like the piece I had to be the most poetic with, so I based all the imagery on the title sequence. Quantum of Solace (2008) became a very grounded display of action. I wanted Skyfall (2012) to feel like a painting, putting all that beautiful Deakins’ cinematography on display. Spectre (2015) was just one where I went visually nuts. The tentacles almost felt a step too far but worked in the context of the Japanese style not being hyper-accurate. And No Time To Die (2021) was just a display of everything I’m most anticipating. I’ve tried to mix things up with colour too but have found that I struggle to move away from using a mix of vibrant contrasting colours, so I guess that’s something that’s just stuck inside me, and I still pack everything with explosions and lasers; I just can’t help myself.
I’ve also tried to move to a more “painted” style with my work where I’ve attempted to blur the lines between book Bond and movie Bond. There’s certainly been a lot more digital painting and texturing involved with those.
What is your favourite Bond Movie?
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). It’s perfect, and the thought of eventually tackling it in my style feels like designing a new front cover for the Bible. It’s full of all the conventions one comes to expect from 007, and Hunt uses that as a foundation to completely re-evaluate acceptable filmmaking conventions: speeding up footage, really aggressive cuts, merging shots together; then add Barry’s score, Louis Armstrong, and Diana Rigg’s spot on performance on top of that. You feel every emotion from excitement to nauseating grief in the space of two hours. It’s everything cinema should be.
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