If I were to try to pitch a group of investors on an 80-minute
film about a font I’d be laughed out of the building.
By Mark Healy
Design by Lucy Quintanilla
photo credit tk
I just started seeing it everywhere, and I was like, 'That’s the glue to the movie.' I announced the film about six months before it would be completed and we sold $75,000 worth of t-shirts and posters, so that helped. And it helped market it. I never sent out a press release about Helvetica. I just put the website up and word spread. Again, there was a pent up demand, an untapped audience for that film. And they just took it in. People were lining up in the streets to see the font movie.
Gary Hustwit
Age: 54
Point of Origin: Orange County, California
and started making them. It’s really that simple. Helvetica. Urbanized. Objectify. (The first film shot inside Apple’s Idea Lab.) And two new ones—Design Canada, which he produced, and Rams, which explores the career and contributions of industrial designer Dieter Rams. Here, the director/producer talks about his punk DIY training, the value of independence, and why he thought the world needed a movie about a font.
This guy.
Helvetica (2007)
The first of Hustwit’s design documentaries has been screened all over the world and seen by a many millions of people. “It was the second documentary Netflix included when they started their streaming service,” he says. And it is still regularly screened around the world, from Tehran to Toronto.
Rams
(2019)
A deep appreciation of the consumer product genius, whose work for Braun stands as a paradigm of good design and a great inspiration for Apple and other consumer designers around the world.
Who
thought
it was a
good idea to
start making documentaries about fonts, urban planning, and the heroes of graphic design?
Just me. I was the only audience for that film as far as I knew. It was that simple. I wanted to see a movie about these designers and their processes and to learn about them. And in 2005, when I started working on it, there was nothing available.
Who did you think would want to watch a movie about a font?
Were you trained as a graphic designer?
No. I had just always been a design geek and into fonts. I got a Macintosh in the late ‘80s and used it to design my friend’s band’s record. In college, my friends were in bands and when I got kicked out of college, I worked with them, releasing records and booking tours. I ended up working at this legendary punk rock label SST—Black Flag, Hüsker Dü and all these amazing bands. To me, punk rock is just making things happen that you want to see happen and not letting anyone tell you you can’t. It was just this idea that if there’s something you want to see that doesn’t exist, you just do it.
Why Helvetica?
I wanted to make a film about graphic design and typography because I followed these designers. These are the legends of graphic design, people like Massimo Vignelli, people who’d been working for 50 years and had a huge influence on our lives. Vignelli did the subway graphics and the American Airlines logo and all these things we take for granted, and yet there was nothing out there. Nobody had ever asked him to be in a documentary before and that just seemed insane to me. So Helvetica was a structure where I could do that. There’d been a revival of Helvetica in the late ‘90s and there was a lot of debate about it in the design world: Some people liked its simplicity and cleanliness, some people thought it was sterile. And through that conflict, we could tell the story of typography and graphic design and how it affects people’s daily lives. Massimo Vignelli was the first person I emailed and he wrote me write back, saying, ‘Of course he’d like to be interviewed about Helvetica, the most beautiful typeface….” And then I just built on that until I had 15 of the world’s best designers.
Which they’d never do for say, Courier.
They might for like comic sans or something like that. There has to be some tension around it. Helvetica was the second documentary when Netflix launched their streaming service. It was on Netflix for many, many years. Steady sales continue every month. People still buy it on DVD, they rent the streaming copy on Amazon, they watch it on Kanopy. If you control the rights to the projects you do you can use these new platforms and technologies as they emerge. That’s part of it. I don’t license the films to big distributors who take all rights in perpetuity and just cross my fingers and hope that they do a good job. I’m still making thousands of dollars each month because it’s out there. I don’t know what will happen next month, but it’ll be something, because it’s part of that design world and the documentary world.
What made you say, ‘It’s got to
be Helvetica?
Objectified
(2009)
Hustwit’s second feature documentary explores our relationship to the inanimate objects we rely on and interact with in our everyday lives. He interviewed dozens of design legends including Dieter Rams, Chris Bangle, Karim Rashid, Jonathan Ive and others. Hustwit interviewed Ive at the Apple Design Lab, the first time anyone was permitted to film there.
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (2002)
What started as a straightforward 3-week document of the band’s recording of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, became an epic, wrenching 18-month shoot when the band was dropped by their label. Hustwig helped finance the expanded shoot and was executive producer. The result is a classic of the music doc genre.
Rams is as much about design’s role in our daily lives as it is about Dieter Rams. In a similar way, Design Canada is not about design it’s about Canada itself.
It’s about identity and this new country finding its voice, but it’s also about these exiles from Europe after WWII and these designers giving Canada’s identity this modernist spin. The maple leaf flag was an open design competition. That process alone was fascinating. It’s another one of these untold stories.
What have you learned about designers as people?
Design Canada (2019)
This documentary, directed by Greg Durrell and produced by Hustwit, tells the untold story of a country’s visual transformation through graphic design and how European modernism spread to North America after WWII, sparking a golden age of graphic design.
Urbanized
(2011)
What Objectified was for product design, this film is for urban planning. Hustwit started considering how much of city-dwellers’ lives are determined by decisions made by urban planners. “Your life, everything you do is programmed by urban design. You’re operating within a designed environment.”
This explores how the environments were
planned and the people who planned them.
this
guy
Among the many smart, admirable, just plain useful products Dieter Rams and his Braun design team created are kitchen appliances and consumer electronics, including what many consider to be the precursor to Apple's iPod.
HOW GARY WENT FROM PUNK ROCK FLYER GUY TO DESIGN DOC AUTEUR.
G
SST Records
An independent record company formed in Long Beach, California in 1978 by Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn. It grew to become a seminal hard core label and released records by Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden and others.
Who thought it was a
documentaries
about DESIGN?
To me, punk rock is just making things happen that you want
to see happen and not letting anyone tell you you can’t.
You cannot understand good design, if you do not understand people.
Dieter Rams, from Rams
Founded Incommunicado, an alternative press that primarily published work by misfits and musicians.
who is
dieter
rams?
click here
photographs and posters courtesy of FILM first
photographs and posters courtesy of FiRST FILM
FLYERS courtesy of SST RECORDS
There’s generally this personality trait they share of being unsatisfied with the status quo and always questioning why something is like it is and wouldn’t it better if we just tweaked this little thing. It’s a trait I’ve seen in every designer I’ve interviewed—constantly looking at the world and observing and thinking about why things aren't working as well as they should and thinking of a solution. That constant dissatisfaction with how things are and maybe this idealism of wanting to improve things, wanting to make the world better, or wanting to make the experience better or people’s lives better. I think that’s at the heart of it and it expresses itself in different ways but almost every designer I’ve talked to is a little bit like that. There’s this thing where if the window is open in a restaurant and you’re cold, half the people will ask, ‘Can I close the window?’ The other half will just get up and close the fucking window. And I’m in that second camp. And a lot of designers are, too. Maybe it’s vanity. At least they recognize the constant need for things to change and improve, whether it’s a car door or a building or a city or a font. Trying to improve people’s experience.
ary Hustwit wanted to watch movies about design—fonts, urban planning, the heroes of graphic design—so he went out
Good idea to start making
Landed at seminal So Cal punk label SST Records after getting kicked out of San Diego State in the 1980s. There, he did everything from marketing and design to booking gigs.
Founded Incommunicado Press in 1995, which published the work of “musicians and misfits.”
Started MP3Lit, a digital audio literary magazine, a precursor to the podcast, and was sold to Slate Media in 2001.
Later in 2001, Hustwit founded Plexifilm, a DVD production company which produced DVDs for major studios like Miramax and Disney, but also released less mainstream fare like the Andy Warhol Screen Tests and Five Films About Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
Produced I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, a doc about the near destruction of the band Wilco while they recorded Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Produced and directed Helvetica, his directorial debut.
Became the first person to be granted permission to film inside the Apple Design Lab for the film Objectified.
key moments
1994
1994
Click the year to see what Gary was up to
1999
2000
2002
1999
Hustwit moved to New York and installed Incommunicado and a bookstore alongside Tonic, an experimental music space on the Lower East Side.
2000
Hustwit had maintained an archive of audio—interviews with authors or spoken word performances. “At the time, MP3s were sort of the big thing,” he says, “so I decided to put some of these recordings online, like an audio literary magazine. We interviewed Jonathan Lethem, we had archival recordings of James Joyce, something new everyday. We ended up getting bought by Salon.com and started doing what we now call podcasts. This was pre-Ipod so you had to listen to them on the site.”
It was around this time that Hustwit bought his first DVD player. “I immediately realized there was nothing to buy that I wanted to watch. There were big studio films and some crappy classics but no independent film, no music projects, no interesting cult movies from the ‘60s.” So he started Plexifilm to produce DVDs he actually wanted to watch. “I stole the director of DVD production from Criterion, Sean Anderson, and we started releasing DVDs for studios—Grifters for Miramax and Ice Age for Disney—but also stuff like the Andy Warhol Screen Tests.”
2002
Plexifilm releases I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. “A month into the company, the Wilco movie sort of dropped into our laps. They just started shooting it and the filmmakers and needed funding and what started as a 3-week shoot turned into an 18-month shoot as the story got involved. And I basically got the funding to pay for the production of the film and then
released its as a film and on DVD a year and half later.”
2002
2000
1999
1994
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I couldn’t believe no one had done a film about him, which was mainly because he didn’t want anyone to do a film about him. And I knew that if I didn’t do a film about him, then no one would. I interviewed him in Objectified. I’d spent an afternoon with him ten years ago. Dieter is in it and so is Jony Ive. It was the first time they let anybody film inside the Apple Design Lab, which was a big deal.
Dieter Rams had never agreed to be the subject of a film until you asked him to do a movie. How did you convince him?
to wATCH
rams
click here
Click here to watch rams trailer
Then You'll Love our Homage to Dieter Rams.
Click here to check it out.
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