Friday, March 21, 2008

The Fountain

Some time before the movie "The Fountain" was due to come out in August of 2005, Darren Aronofsky the filmmaker gave the script to several comic book artists and asked them to draw a poster for the movie. Warner Bros had a website just for the movie, full of eerie and tantalizing music and smoky visual effects, and the posters were supposed to be shown on it, I think one per week, before the final unveiling. The public was supposed to have its collective taste buds whetted for the glories of what was to come.
However, there were all sorts of production problems, and the movie didn't actually appear in the theaters until at least a year later than that. The posters were never publicized. Nothing seemed to come of them at all. I wondered and wondered what Seth's poster looked like. One evening I just sat down at the computer, and after googling "Seth Fisher The Fountain", went through every single website that I found. Finally after 20-some pages, someone had posted all the posters.
I was surprised. Nemo, Seth's friend and fellow artist had sent me this image before, but neither he not I knew what its origins were.
It wasn't a total loss. As Seth said to me, Warner Bros paid him in movie money. That is, lots of it. He made as much for this one drawing for them as he would have made for about 8 pages of a comic book.
The image is so calm, and the colors are so, um, jarring, that I thought at first it was something he wasn't finished with. It seems quite unlike most of his comic book work. But he didn't do things haphazardly, ever. Clearly those colors and that sort of image were within the realm of ideas he was working out. This is relatively late work of his. He had a lot of ideas brewing, and changes were on the horizon, though we may never know exactly what they were.

1 comment:

j_ay said...

Nice find!
Very interesting. The computer colours are *very* vibrant