Martin Scorsese was almost too scared to recruit Saul Bass: “Do we dare?”
Many of the people who make movies genuinely iconic are mostly found behind the scenes and do not end up being household names.
They could be cinematographers, like Greig Fraser, who is currently much in demand thanks to his stunning work on Project Hail Mary and Dune, or casting directors, responsible for hiring actors to play parts you couldn’t imagine being played by anyone else, or they could even be a graphic designer like Saul Bass, responsible for some of the best-known artworks in history and a key ally of Martin Scorsese.
Someone who changed the industry completely, Bass is not unknown by any means, with many believing he could well be the finest graphic designer of the 20th century, and he was certainly the man behind movie posters and title sequences that were revolutionary, eye-catching and incredibly cool.
The New Yorker moved to Hollywood in the 1940s and first linked up with director Otto Preminger, the fiery Austrian director responsible for movies including 1955’s The Man with the Golden Arm and the brilliant James Stewart courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder, and it was on those movies that Bass provided the game-changing artwork that proved so hugely influential, leading the great Alfred Hitchcock to call upon him to provide the opening titles to some of the greatest movies of all time, namely Vertigo, Psycho, and North by Northwest.
Some years later, although it’s difficult to imagine someone like Martin Scorsese being starstruck, that was indeed the young director’s overriding emotion when it came to seeing if Bass could be brought on board for some of his movies.
Scorsese told AnOther: “Saul Bass. Before I ever met him, before we worked together, he was a legend in my eyes. His designs, for film titles and company logos and record albums and posters, defined an era. The first time we met was on Goodfellas. I had an idea of what I wanted for the titles, but couldn’t quite get it. Someone suggested Saul, and my reaction was: ‘Do we dare?’ After all, this was the man who designed the title sequences for Vertigo, Psycho, Anatomy of a Murder, Advise and Consent, Spartacus, Ocean’s 11, and so many other pictures that defined movies and movie-going for me.”
Bass and Scorsese would end up working on four films together over a five-year period, including the multi-Oscar-nominated The Age of Innocence and the Robert De Niro Vegas mob movie Casino. Aside from his design work, Bass was also a filmmaker, and his influence on Scorsese included his love of employing fast cuts and tight framing that had first been seen with his storyboarding of the famous shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Bass’ work is still regularly paid homage to, with the Coen brothers’ 2008 film, Burn After Reading, featuring artwork inspired by the designer, as did the cover of the White Stripes ‘The Hardest Button to Button’.
Scorsese, meanwhile, is preparing to make his return to Hollywood three years after the Oscar-winning Killers of the Flower Moon, with a succession of projects he is in charge of directing. They include the upcoming thriller What Happens at Night starring his long-term collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence about a young couple visiting a European city in order to adopt a child.
