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.”