A love affair with a typeface? For these famous directors, type is part of their art

[ResidentialBusiness]

Some directors are known for their typographic flair—from the ultrawide tracking of Christopher Nolan’s film titles to Quentin Tarantino’s genre vernacular font and lettering selections.

But last week, as we reported on Sean Baker’s extensive use of Aguafina Script across his past four movies, we wondered: How many other directors have firmly embraced a single, singular typeface—and what does that typeface say about their films?

The first part is easier to answer.

“It is rare,” says title designer and Art of the Title editor-in-chief Lola Landekic. “It’s a very interesting choice. As a creator, you have to sort of commit to a specific aesthetic. And I think you also have to know yourself very well and know that there’s a throughline in all your work.”

That’s clearly the case when it comes to Baker and the directors below. 

Sean Baker—Aguafina Script

Perhaps the most audacious thing about Baker’s use of Aguafina in the Best-Picture-winning Anora and his other films is the sheer amount of personality it contains. It is anything but a benign catchall face—but it is also a tonal fit that enhances the characters and themes at the heart of his most recent movies. 

Landekic likens titles and title sequences to seasonings that can make or break a dish. While Baker’s work often deals with poverty and marginalized characters, the energetic Aguafina elevates everything all at once, providing a contrast to the common visual iconography around such subjects. It has perhaps been a key to his films since Tangerine—and one that has carried over into marketing materials and more (a rare luxury when, for example, posters for the Men in Black films feature a bulky sans serif rather than Pablo Ferro’s far more interesting signature lettering that appears in the actual movies). 

“It can be a difficult thing to achieve as a filmmaker, that kind of consistency of aesthetic,” Landekic says. “I admire anyone that can get that through the door because it’s hard these days where everything is created so piecemeal—often the distributor controls the promotional materials, and the filmmaker has very little say into how that gets to look.”

Moreover, as you peruse this list, you’ll notice that it is a veritable boys’ club—and there are reasons for that. “Women don’t get to make as many films, don’t get to make as many follow-up films, and don’t often get to have the level of control over their films that a lot of male filmmakers have,” Landekic notes. “So it’s a multipronged issue why we don’t have a lot of female examples in this particular category.”

Wes Anderson—Futura

A lot has been written about Wes Anderson’s thoughtful and intentional approach to type and lettering—but the face that made him famous was Futura, which branded the first half of his filmography (so much so that many considered it an aesthetic betrayal when he sidelined it for Jessica Hische’s title lettering in Moonrise Kingdom.) In Anderson’s masterpiece The Royal Tenenbaums, Futura was essentially a character in its own right, appearing not just in titles, but on buses, books and myriad places beyond. 

“It harkens back to the French New Wave and sort of how Godard used titles,” Landekic says. “The thing about Futura is that it’s very unadorned. It feels almost like you could overlook it. But the way that Wes Anderson uses it gives it a very clean stamp. . . . What it really does is it makes everything feel very arranged and curated. And for a filmmaker like Wes Anderson, that is a lot of the point.”

One further Futura aside: It’s a common misnomer that Stanley Kubrick used it widely in his filmography. In reality, he only truly deployed it in Eyes Wide Shut, and it cropped up in promotional materials for other projects—though he did reportedly call it his favorite typeface.

Woody Allen—Windsor

Perhaps no typographic directorial bond runs as deep as Woody Allen and Windsor, which has kicked off every single one of Allen’s films since Annie Hall in 1977. As Jarrett Fuller, host of the podcast Scratching the Surface, has detailed, “Legend has it that . . . Allen would often eat breakfast at the same New Jersey diner as noted graphic and type designer Ed Benguiat. Allen, knowing Benguiat as a “printer,” asked him one morning—probably sometime between 1975 and ’77—for a good typeface to use in the credits of his upcoming film. Benguiat offered up Windsor.”

It would go on to become synonymous with the director and all things related to him. And regardless of whether a given film of his was a hit or a flop, quality or not, Windsor was there—and, well, it just works. 

“It’s long, it’s kind of lanky. It has serifs. That ‘f’ that you see in the Windsor font . . . looks like Charlie Chaplin standing with his two feet poking out,” Landekic says. “And so it has that kind of feeling to me where it has a sense of humor about it in the way that [Allen is] using it because a lot of his comedies and his dramatic work deal with a sort of a humdrum misunderstanding elevated to a sense of dramatic chaos in some sense—and Windsor kind of flies in the face of that, where it wants to be regal, but it’s very rounded. So it has two personalities embodied within it.”

John Carpenter—Albertus

In addition to his directorial chops, Carpenter is known for creating some iconic soundtracks for his films. So it tracks that he would be meticulous about other elements within his fictive worlds. One such detail: The typeface Albertus, which he first used in the titles for Escape From New York in 1981, and further deployed in seven other films, including The Thing, Christine, Prince of Darkness, and They Live. 

“One of the larger tenets of horror is a fear of aging,” Landekic explains. “Many monsters are considered monstrous because they are, for example, wrinkly or deformed in a way which can be likened to how age afflicts all of us. And so Albertus . . . has that feeling of time and legacy and something worn. You can easily imagine Albertus being chiseled into a rock face because of its shape. So it lends itself very well to that kind of atmosphere.” 

Ultimately, as a title designer, does Landekic wish every director would take as strong an approach as those referenced in this article?

Landekic says she loves the fact that David Fincher’s movies have such radically different title sequences, and she thinks trying to fit everything into a tightly branded box could push films more toward being devalued as mere content. She adds that it could narrow a filmmaker’s focus too early if they made such a decision at the outset of their career. If Sean Baker wanted to make a sci-fi film, would it work with Aguafina? Would he feel pressure to make it work?

“At the end of the day, I would like the film to feel cohesive,” says Landekic. “And however that happens, however that needs to look, is the ideal. Ultimately, a title sequence and a title font is in service to a larger picture.”

---

View the full article