Role Cred­its: Inside the world of Dan Perri

Dan Per­ri is 79, but he hopes that peo­ple don’t think he’s dead. For the pro­lif­ic title design­er, who has cre­at­ed titles for films like Rag­ing Bull, A Night­mare on Elm Street, Cad­dy Shack, Star Wars, Gangs of New York and The Exor­cist, retire­ment is still some­where far off on the hori­zon. To be a title design­er is to be among the innu­mer­able unsung heroes work­ing on a movie, your work front and cen­tre but your name nes­tled beneath scores of oth­ers in the end cred­its. It’s the nature of Perri’s job to let his art speak for him – but he wants peo­ple to know that he’s still here.

If you’ve watched a film released at some point in the last 52 years, you’re like­ly to have come across Perri’s work with­out real­is­ing it. Peo­ple have told him that you can’t real­ly tell when a title sequence is his. ​“I’m known as a chameleon,” he tells me from his home in Los Ange­les, two dif­fer­ent posters for The Exor­cist behind him. ​“I do what’s best for the film. And since no two films are alike, I wouldn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly do the same design for both films. I real­ly don’t have a style.”

Whether it’s the slow crawl of the Star Wars open­ing or Travis Bickle’s taxi mak­ing its entrance to moody jazz at the hyp­not­ic, exper­i­men­tal out­set of Taxi Dri­ver, Per­ri has made an indeli­ble mark on movies. He doesn’t just design every­thing about the look of a film’s title; often he will also direct sequences in which a film’s cen­tral char­ac­ter is intro­duced to the audi­ence. He is as inter­est­ed in film as he is in art.

Per­ri has been an artist for as long as he can remem­ber. In grade school he drew with pen­cils, and sculpt­ed; he start­ed a sign-paint­ing busi­ness at the age of 12. When he was in high school, his art teacher, who had been an adver­tis­ing agency art direc­tor on Madi­son Avenue, began to expose him and oth­er stu­dents to the design man­u­als of the time. ​“I stud­ied them like they were my Bible,” he says. He stud­ied at the Art Cen­ter Col­lege of Design in Pasade­na before enlist­ing in the navy dur­ing the Viet­nam War, where he worked as a jour­nal­ist and a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, pro­duc­ing a four-page news­pa­per every day. ​“I was away from my bride, who I just mar­ried about two weeks before I went away,” he says.

How did jour­nal­ism affect his evo­lu­tion as a title design­er? (He lat­er stud­ied jour­nal­ism for­mal­ly at the Defense Infor­ma­tion School.) ​“It taught me how to think clear­ly; how to gath­er infor­ma­tion which would become a sto­ry; and how to present that sto­ry in a log­i­cal, sim­ple way so it could be under­stood by oth­ers. I learned long ago that I’m a sto­ry­teller,” he says, ​“and I tell sto­ries with my title sequences.”

For Per­ri, the work always begins in the same way. ​“It’s always start­ed with a pen­cil and paper and an idea that I have to rush to draw before it goes away.” He works by him­self, which allows him to main­tain his inde­pen­dence. At one point, when he was at his very busiest, he need­ed to decide whether or not to bring on oth­er design­ers to help him. He decid­ed not to – not, he says, because of ego, but because when direc­tors ask for Dan Per­ri, they want Dan Perri.

In very rare instances, a direc­tor might want Dan Per­ri but not appre­ci­ate what they get. Per­ri tells me that he left the Julia Roberts film Leave the World Behind after the direc­tor, Sam Esmali, seemed to devel­op a prob­lem with him. When he was hired for Star Wars, he went on to have a frac­tious rela­tion­ship with George Lucas. He is won­der­ful­ly can­did about how bad the rela­tion­ship was: ​“I was gonna say we didn’t get along but that real­ly isn’t true; he real­ly didn’t get along with any­one.” Lucas, who had plen­ty of oth­er things on his mind, thought that the titles were rel­a­tive­ly unim­por­tant. ​“He was always pre­oc­cu­pied, frus­trat­ed, put-upon,” says Perri.

Lucas agreed to Perri’s now-infa­mous con­ceit, bor­rowed from Union Pacif­ic, of the open­ing titles dis­ap­pear­ing out into space. Per­ri need­ed to test the idea for weeks on end, every vis­it to Lucas yawn­ing on for hours at a time. ​“So it got to be a drag,” he says. ​“And he nev­er liked what I was doing, it seemed like. So I would trav­el up there and get beat up every day, when­ev­er I saw him.”

Near the end of the process, the post-pro­duc­tion super­vi­sor asked Per­ri via Lucas if he would take half a point on the film instead of his salary. ​“I lit­er­al­ly said, ​‘Fuck no. Are you kid­ding me?’” Per­ri says. ​“I thought this was a stu­pid lit­tle space film that wasn’t gonna go any­where. I wasn’t about to take points on this stu­pid lit­tle space film that was gonna go in the toi­let.” For­tu­nate­ly this isn’t quite as painful a sto­ry as it could be: when Fox realised the film looked promis­ing, they rescind­ed all their points offers any­way. Yet Per­ri was only ever paid for the first film, despite his titles appear­ing in all the sub­se­quent films in the franchise.

Per­ri has worked with so many direc­tors over his 50-year career – Scors­ese, Spiel­berg, Stone, Fried­kin, Alt­man – that he has a wealth of sto­ries. For The Beaver, Jodie Fos­ter told him that Mel Gibson’s char­ac­ter was ​“drown­ing emo­tion­al­ly”, so Per­ri said, ​“Well, let’s put the titles under­wa­ter.” He designed plas­tic let­ters, sub­merged them in his pool, and Fos­ter called it ​“a bil­lion-dol­lar title sequence”. On There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Ander­son already knew what type style he want­ed for the titles. Nonethe­less, Per­ri tried mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent options, engrav­ing the let­ters, film­ing them, light­ing them from the side. None of this made a dif­fer­ence. Ander­son stuck with what he had imag­ined from the very start. ​“So he real­ly didn’t need me,” Per­ri says. ​“It’s only on my reel because the film became big.”

Over half a cen­tu­ry, Per­ri has seen his indus­try evolve. He thinks he had more work back in the day than title design­ers do now – these days, he says, a lot of the work is done by stu­dios, not indi­vid­u­als. He is work­ing on the title for Wal­ter Hill’s lat­est film as well as design­ing the logo for a rock band from Ohio called Peo­ple in the Day­time, who want him to treat them as a movie rather than a band. He did try to retire once, 10 years ago, when he was mak­ing a fea­ture film called Shark­skin, but just when he thought he was out, they pulled him back in – with an offer to work on Luca Guadagnino’s Sus­piria. ​“I see no end to my work ​‘cause I still enjoy it,” he says cheer­ful­ly. ​“I’m per­fect­ly sat­is­fied to be where I am.”