NEWSARAMA - WHT: GEOF ISHERWOOD

by Daniel Robert Epstein

Due to his work (pencils and inks) on such comic books as Silver Surfer, Dr. Strange, the Marvel graphic novel Revenge of the Living Monolith, Daredevil, Suicide Squad, Barry Windsor-Smith’s Storyteller and many more, Geof Isherwood has long been a fan favorite artist.

In recent years not much comic work has come from the man well that’s because he’s been designing visuals, set dressings and storyboards for films such as Battlefield Earth, Timeline, Rollerball and Chaz Palminteri’s Noel. Isherwood’s most recent project was Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain. Newsarama got a chance to talk to the artist about working with Aronofsky and the two comic book projects he’s writing and drawing.

Newsarama: Looking at your recent project list, it’s pretty clear that you work on a lot of movies in Montreal.

Geof Isherwood: Yes, I live here and work here mostly. I’ve taken a couple trips elsewhere for work, but most productions hire local for tax credit purposes.

NRAMA: The Fountain must have been one of your more exciting projects.

GI: The Fountain was definitely much more involved and a much more interesting project than a lot of them, true. Unfortunately, most of the others didn’t really come out too well for various reasons. Of course, movies are such big productions so it’s not usually one person that is going to make or break it unless you’re the lead actor or director or something.

NRAMA: I don’t think Battlefield Earth’s failure can be attributed to you…

GI: Actually for that I did more production/illustration concept drawings.

NRAMA: How did that kind of work come to you?

GI: Patrick Tatopoulos was here to work on Battlefield Earth and a few people said that I should try getting some movie work because some of these larger productions were just starting to come into town at the time. I managed to wangle an interview and it was good timing because I just happened to send my resume into there when he was interviewing.

NRAMA: Do you do only storyboards or do you do whatever’s needed for a given production?

GI: Whatever for visuals and I’ve done set dressings as well. For example, there was that The Reagans TV movie where James Brolin played Ronald Reagan. I did a number of painting reproductions for the White House such as the George Washington portrait in the Oval Office.

NRAMA: So your actual artwork actually was in the film.

GI: Yes, that was kind of fun. It was a typical movie thing where you have no time to do anything so I managed to paint that in about three days. I think I did about ten paintings in 14 days.

NRAMA: Wow.

GI: That was interesting and fun.

NRAMA: So that movie aired on Showtime, did you get to see it?

GI: No I didn’t see it because we don’t have a satellite dish.

NRAMA: What other film work have you been involved with recently?

GI: Gothika was another movie I did a lot of work on. I worked with the production designer Grace Walker, who’s from Australia. That movie had actually started there and then switched to Montreal when it had changes in production such as a new director. So I did a lot of concept drawings for the sets he was designing and also some storyboards. For example there were paintings done by mental patients and I did a bunch of those.

In terms of The Fountain, my work was almost entirely storyboards but I did a couple of costume changes for Hugh Jackman. Darren [Aronofsky] also had a couple other people doing them. But when they came here, because of the new and different sets, a lot of scenes were redone. I probably did about half the movie because they wanted to storyboard every scene.

NRAMA: How was it working with Darren Aronofsky?

GI: He was very specific. When we would sit down, he’d have like an overhead blueprint diagram to show where the actors would be and the camera positions. He had a shot list because he shot it in a very specific way. He was limiting himself to certain camera angles to create a specific look for the movie so I would follow that.

NRAMA: Did he give you like thumbnails or just describe it to you?

GI: No he would go with the shot list and this blueprint and then from there I would just draw. He didn’t do thumbnails per se. He liked fairly tight and finished drawings. Here and there if he wanted suggestions, he would say, “If you have an idea let me see it.” He was very open to that. To me, the storyboard process is all preliminary anyway. In the sense that once you get on the set, he might see something else and change it. Storyboards are mostly to be used by the director but also for other departments so when they get to the set they’ll say “Ok, we only need to build so much for a set because we’re not going to see half of it.”

NRAMA: Can you tell me what some of your suggestions were?

GI: There’s a big scene of Jackman and a couple of other conquistadors fighting against a whole horde of Mayan warriors. That was a scene which was rewritten a few times. I storyboarded it about three or four times because it was the most complex scene in the movie. There were a lot of visual effects shots involved. The storyboards are especially important for the visual effects because they really need to know what the frame is going to be. I was like; maybe he should do this instead of that because it would be more logical for him to be reacting naturally to what the other warriors are doing. Darren may write the scene out in ten or 15 minutes or even a half an hour. But when I’m working on a scene for day after day I’m thinking about it a hundred times more. So lots of little things are going to happen in my mind and I can say “hey what if this could happen or that?” It’s just a matter of spending more time with something and getting flashes. I guess I’ll see how it comes out in the end but I hope some of those will come through.

Also in a couple other scenes I had the thought of them playing a little more dramatically but staying within his shooting style and he liked the way those played out.

NRAMA: Was anyone aware of your comic book background?

GI: I showed him my stuff when I first went in but I don’t know if he was really aware of it at the time. The local art directors, that set up the interviews, all know because they’re familiar with me. But by and large when I go in for an interview film people are usually not up on all that.

NRAMA: Did you see much of the work that Kent Williams was doing for The Fountain graphic novel?

GI: Yeah I saw a lot of that. Kent was continually emailing Darren pages of stuff and he had them printed up and put up on his wall. So every so often, when I would go in to see him and talk over stuff I would be looking over Kent’s work. As the actual movie progressed it was quite startlingly different from what Kent was doing but he had told Kent to just go with it.

NRAMA: Do you know if your work is going to be included in any behind the scenes stuff for The Fountain?

GI: I know there were a couple other people videotaping everybody on the crew including myself. They were doing a “Making of The Fountain” for the DVD and there are a number of shots of me either talking with Darren or doing some drawing. I was in the office with Darren once and one of them was in there filming something and I said “Stop, wait a minute, don’t go there, come stand around over here and you’re going to get a better angle.” Darren was looking at me crooked and said, “Who’s the director around here?’” I said “Watch, you’ll see. They’ll get a nice angle on this.” I think that’s the one danger film directors have when they come across people who’ve done comics for a long time because as a comic artist, we have to be everyone on the crew. Especially when working for Marvel, you get a plot but you really have to break that down and tell the story and often have to re-jig the plot to make it fit. We’re the actors, the production designer, set designer, costume designer, you’re everybody. Doing work on a movie is much more limited in scope but also much more intense. But usually it’s more of a sketchy nature and I don’t have to bring as much detail into it. Especially on concept drawings and things like that because they’re more on a preliminary basis and they’re quite subject to change so it’s not really cost effective it to spend three or four days doing a picture and then have somebody in two seconds say “Nah, that’s not what I want.” I really enjoy doing movie work as well because of the variety you get.

NRAMA: It doesn’t seem like you’ve worked with directors as interesting as Aronofsky before.

GI: I met Bryan Singer very briefly because he was going to direct Confessions of a Dangerous Mind in Montreal. I met with him a couple of times and went over a couple of scenes. There was a scene where Chuck Barris is supposedly an assassin and is escaping in East Berlin so he wedges his car in an alley and tosses a hand grenade so it explodes. Bryan had already left and gone back to LA at the time so I was in talking with the producers about this scene and they told me that I had to take that scene out with that car blowing up or they were going to take the cost of that scene out of my salary. I told them I couldn’t do that because I would have to charge them more. They fell out of their chair; they just couldn’t believe that some local yokel was talking to some LA big shot like that.

NRAMA: How does that compare to Aronofsky?

GI: He knew what he wanted and that was in his favor. The movie was originally going to be shot in Australia with Brad Pitt and for various reasons that didn’t work out. He obviously knew this material inside and out so that’s why I was a little surprised when he said “If you have any ideas let me know.” I figured he had it absolutely down cold. But when it came to the filming from what I could see it was all done in a very orderly manner. No panic or anything like that, it was very calm on the set, which is the way things should be. I noticed he did shoot a lot of takes for each shot. That was interesting because some directors would only do two or three but he would sometimes do 15, 17 or even 20 takes. Though some shots he only did a couple but for others he did an awful lot of them. I had a feeling he was doing that to give his editor choices. He would let Hugh and Rachel [Weisz] do the scene over and over again to let them kind of feel out how it should go but I don’t remember him giving them a lot of direction.

NRAMA: Stepping out of your movie world for a minute, you worked full time in comic books for 15 years…take us back to the start.

GI: Yeah, I got my first job in 1982. I actually went to Marvel when I was 16 and I met with Marie Severin and Dave Cockrum and they were fun and very encouraging. A couple years later, I was going to college and right after I graduated I got my first job at Marvel doing a small horror story for Bizarre Adventures. But that didn’t lead anywhere else. Later that fall DC had a thing called New Talent Showcase and they tried me out penciling a story but they didn’t get an inker and so they sent it back to me and I inked it. But that also didn’t lead anywhere.

So the next spring I went back to New York and right away Archie had a thing called Red Circle and Rich Buckler was working with those. I was going to do some assistance for him so I worked for a couple of days actually but I had also dropped by Marvel. Ralph Macchio had given me a Daredevil fill-in to pencil. I also did a Power Man and Iron Fist. A couple doors down from him was Larry Hama editing the Conan comics. So I went in to see him. As it turned out he gave me a Conan the King story fill-in because Marc Silvestri was very slow. Apparently he was so late on issue #21 of that series that they had about 11 or 12 inkers. So I drew the follow-up issue and then after that I started inking it regularly. I inked a bunch of Savage Sword of Conan and some Red Sonja stuff and eventually wound up inking the regular Conan titles. So I stuck with the Conan stuff for a while.

NRAMA: And from there, years and years. Speaking of your more recent comics, you’re working on two things - Lani the Leopard Queen and EROX. What can be said of either?

GI: It’s funny how these things work out. I’ve been doing a lot of these drawings, which I’ve been selling them on eBay. They’re jungley kind of scenes and things like that and people seem to respond to them. Finally, the idea for Lani the Leopard Queen kind of hit me because I wanted to do something of a jungley nature and because kids always seem to like talking animals and that sort of thing. The whole idea for the story came together and I gave Lani a sister for there to be a sibling rivalry and also a magic element because the cats talk because they are people who have been turned into cats. At the moment I’ve drawn 38 pages of it.

EROX is an entirely different kettle of fish. That was originally a Conan story that I had submitted for potential publication. I was thinking Conan’s stories are always based around his sword fighting prowess and a lot of times he meets the princess as a slave girl but you never see what goes on behind closed doors. So I thought, what if there’s a story that dealt more with his romantic actions as opposed to the sword-fighting ones and the sort of nasty consequences he gets from that. But I think that kind of freaked them out a little bit so they didn’t really want to bite. Since then I rewrote the whole thing taking Conan out of it and putting in a new character I created, EROX. It’s set in a similar fantasy realm world but it deals a lot more with sexual politics. It’s primarily about a guy who’s been brought up entirely as a warrior so he’s completely inexperienced sexually. Then he is thrust in this 16th century version of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion. It’s kind of a fun setup and that’s something that deals on the romantic/sexual level.

Check out the official site for Geof Isherwood
http://www.geofisherwood.com/