Alan Lambert is a Dublin based artist who has been working in film and television for over 30 years. He has painted murals, backdrops, portraits and various other artwork found within the worlds of projects like the Oscar winning “Poor Things”, Netflix’s hit series “Wednesday”, and Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel”.
Lambert spoke with me about his experience drawing the caricatures for “Blue Moon”, the Oscar nominated movie about legendary Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart (longtime partner with Richard Rogers until the even more legendary partnership of Rogers & Hammerstein)—played by a never-better Ethan Hawke. The film takes place entirely at Sardi’s, a famous Broadway bar littered with caricatures, which was lovingly recreated in Dublin for the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you get involved in “Blue Moon”?
There’s a bit of a history to “Blue Moon” because [of] production designer Susie Cullen. I was in college with her. We graduated together in the 1980s. She studied film. I studied painting. She started working in art performance, I was the last person for her to call if artwork came up. She gave me my first big break on a film called “Moll Flanders” in 1995, so I’ve been working with Susie for years. When “Blue Moon” came along and Susie was designing it – I hadn’t done caricatures before – she usually gives me a call to see how I feel about something, and I said ‘Yeah, let’s just get stuck in and see how it goes.’
Working on “Blue Moon” also has a lot to do with how things have changed in the art film industry in the past few years. The art film industry has gone through some quiet periods and some very busy periods, but in the past four or five years there really has been a boom. A lot of international productions started coming here. So something like “Blue Moon”, you could very easily watch this and it would not enter your mind that it was made in Ireland.
Can you speak to how the film industry in Ireland has changed to allow more work?
I know that when [the History Channel show] “Vikings” started down in Wicklow. I don’t know how good your geography of Ireland is, but Wicklow is basically the county underneath Dublin which has great forests and is really good for medieval battle fields and stuff. When “Vikings” became really big and was a long running TV series, that was a big influx of work that I think was something new. I think on that basis, a lot of international films realized they could get what they would expect to get in England or France or Scotland probably with easier access in Ireland. So I think there was a trend because “The Last Duel” ended up shooting here in 2020. Ridley Scott had never worked here before, but Ireland is such a logical double for medieval France.
What is your history with caricature? Are you a fan of the art form? Have you practiced it before? Did you study it at the Dún Laoghaure institute or the national college of art and design?
I have to admit that the first thing I said to Susie is ‘Well, I don’t really have much experience with caricature.’ But what kind of helped the whole job to start was that it brought me right back to one of my earliest experiences as an artist. In the mid 1980s during my summer breaks from school, I used to go into Dublin city center and do portraits in the streets. You have to learn to do them in about two and a half minutes because a lot of people want their kids done, and their kids don’t stay still for longer than about two and a half minutes.
So I started remembering that because you have to practice. It dawned on me that I have to really get into it. It’s a bit like playing a musical, right? You have to get over the nervousness and be able to produce a drawing that people will be satisfied with so they’ll give you the five pounds. So I said to Susie, ‘I’ll just pretend I’m doing street art. I will go home, put myself on a timer, and I’ll try to get a usable caricature done in five or eight minutes.’ I just practiced that until we got a routine together.
In terms of style, we studied loads of actual caricatures from the period. Each caricature artist seems to have their own kind of device. One artist might have a thing where it’s all about the nose. It’s all about enlarging things. Huge nose, huge ears, you know? And obviously, they are always quite comic.
Once I had the technique, we were able to plow through them. And it was a lot of them, I think I did about 60 [caricatures] by the end.
Did you get to read the script before starting your work? Did you get to visit the set? Did either of those inform your approach to the caricatures at all?
I would’ve been given key pages, but I didn’t read the entire script. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it to the set. I usually do, but on this occasion, it was just so busy at the time that once construction was ahead, I didn’t manage to get any free time. I was miles away down in Ashbourne because [the Netflix show] “Wednesday” had started.
The situation for “Blue Moon” is unusual. Usually stuff is on set because it’s a mural or it’s heavily set dressed like it’s somebody’s artwork in their bedroom or it’s a backdrop, so it has to be made physically on set. [“Blue Moon”] was so expansive that it nearly was a backdrop, but it was still all stuff I could draw at home and simply send down to them.
You created both new caricatures and recreations of the ones from Sardi’s, how did you approach creating the two differ?
One thing that I was very aware of is that you can have something that looks right for the period or you can have something that looks like a modern artist has interpreted it. If you’re not concentrating, things can start to slip so that you end up with stuff that you hadn’t realized how modern it’s starting to look. With doing all the [recreations], I didn’t really have to worry about that because the [reference] photographs were from the period. The photographs and their clothes are so much of the period that it kind of keeps me in that frame of mind.
But then when it comes to the actors, you are looking at modern photographs. Photographs taken from their IMDb where they’re wearing modern clothes, so you have to make sure you pull back into the period look. You really just do that by being very careful about the line, about the composition. I think that is what I was particularly pleased by with that job because when I go back and look at that one of Ethan [Hawke], to me, I would believe that it was on a menu from the period.
For the recreations, you were working off pictures of people from that time period? You weren’t looking at the original caricatures?
No, I was drawing new caricatures off photos of the actors. The researchers were sending me [photos of who] they thought were the good actors and relevant people that would be in that gallery. But at the same time, even though you have to get the likenesses for some of the caricatures because they’re supposed to be recognizable, there are also a lot of old actors I wouldn’t have recognized. I wouldn’t even recognize their names. And for a younger audience, it’s a whole generation that would kind of be not that widely known to most of them.
There was a point where I would kind of say, ‘Look, I don’t know if this caricature is a really good likeness or not, but we kind of have to just keep going.’ So there might be a percentage in there that if those actors were sitting on my stool in the street with me drawing for them, they might not give me the five pounds.
But obviously I was referring to the original caricatures to make sure it was the right colors and the right style of line. The references I was sent of the Sardi’s [caricatures], I stuck very much to those. The whole time I was working, I would’ve had those references open on my desktop just so they were never out of my field of vision, so I’d always be able to see if I went off at all. There were about four pieces I just looked at all time.
You were practicing to finish each caricature in five to eight minutes, did that end up being the average time to complete each piece?
That mightn’t include actually finishing and coloring them. I was doing them with wash and ink on paper. Once I had the caricature right, I would put a little bit of shadow in. Then I’d scan it, and finish all the coloring in photoshop. So the physical originals are just black and white.
When I say getting it right in five or eight or ten minutes, I mean just so that the actual rudiment of the drawing is gonna work. Then I might spend another 20 minutes or half an hour fiddling around with the color in photoshop. I had a template set up in photoshop to make sure it stayed all in the same colors and style. I would just pop the drawing in on the same filters, so that kind of sped it up.
Let’s say for example, I would’ve been sent photographs of references in batches of about ten at a time. I would say, ‘I’m going to do these ten. I’m going to give myself four hours to do them.’ Put on the alarm, and try to stick to that. That’s where it’s very much like street art.
How long did you have to complete all 60 caricatures?
As far as I remember, we did them over quite a long period. I was doing them in batches of ten at a time, and I could’ve been doing them over a week or two each batch. It could’ve been six weeks to two months.
Is that typically how long you’re on a project?
It really does vary a lot. I was trying to schedule a few different jobs at the same time, and I have to explain that sometimes I simply have to rotate loads of things. Sometimes you can’t really. On “The Last Duel” we were on the crew for like three months, but that’s very unusual. I would usually just pop in and do a mural on the set for a few days, and then go on to work on something else. And then when they need me again, I’ll come back. Most of the time I’m on an item basis. With “Blue Moon” it was a bit looser because it wasn’t an item, but it was a single body of work.
Did all your pieces have to be finished before set was constructed?
No, as soon I had a new batch, I would just email them off. They’d print them off, frame them, and bring them around, pop them on set. It was just ongoing. As they were constructing, they just kept putting them up. It’s only the shoot date where everything has to be ready. Once we finished for the actual shoot, all the crew wanted to get theirs done, and some of the producers wanted to get theirs done. I actually did two of Richard Linklater.
You mentioned at the end of shoot, everyone on the crew wanted a caricature. How was it decided who actually ended up getting one?
It kind of gets back to what a small [film] community there was in Ireland for a long time. It meant that you pretty much knew everybody. By the time we get to do caricatures of the crew, I know all the crew. Some of them I would’ve been in college with as well as Susie. So a list will come to me, and I say fine. I would text them, and they would text me their own pictures. It’s kind of taken out of the loop when it’s just between me and them, which was nice. When it comes to the producers and the director, that’s different because their photographs have to be sourced and sent.
Were you given any direction when starting your work?
I just did samples to begin with and then comments began on the basis of the sample. The comments were mostly about the color, composition, and style. It was mainly about them looking right for the period and the likenesses looking right. That’s a running theme whenever you are representing characters in art on film sets. That basically if they aren’t recognizable, they aren’t going to be doing the job they have to do in the story.
As a director yourself, have you picked up any tricks while working for big name directors like Richard Linklater on “Blue Moon” or Ridley Scott on “The Last Duel”?
When you say ‘you’ve worked with Richard Linklater’, I’m at the end of a long chain. Like I didn’t actually meet him or have direct communication with him. But with Ridley Scott, what I found really refreshing is that he had a very straight forward, very down to earth way of communicating. He didn’t use much specialized terms. We had one meeting with him, and he was very clear. ‘I like these shields. I like these colors. Maybe we could get a bit of metal trim on the day etc. Let’s go for the glossy ones.’ Then walk on. Everything is clear. You don’t have to look anything up.
A lot of younger directors, a lot of younger filmmakers, they’ve been studying so much they may not realize how much jargon they are actually using. That’s what I found refreshing about Ridley Scott and [The Last Duel production designer] Arthur Max. They’ve been around for so long and had to communicate with so many people over the years that I found their communication was really straight forward which was nice.
How was tackling the caricatures of Ethan Hawke, Andrew Scott, Margaret Qualley, and the rest of the cast?
We did different passes for a few of them. Obviously I’m familiar with Ethan Hawke and Andrew Scott and the Irish actors surrounding them, but I hadn’t seen “The Substance” and it had been a long time since I’d seen “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood”, so I didn’t recognize Margaret Qualley.
The first thing we did was google caricatures of Ethan Hawke. And I began to realize even though he is very very familiar to me – he’s a very good actor, and he’s great on screen – when you start to try to draw him, it’s actually quite tricky. A lot of the caricatures we were finding online, I didn’t think really captured him.
But also at that point, I hadn’t seen any images of his makeup and him in character. So the first few test ones that I would’ve done didn’t connect really. It wasn’t until I saw what he was gonna be like that I realized I’m not drawing a caricature of Ethan Hawke. I’m drawing a caricature of him playing Lorenz Hart. There’s a double layer on it.
One thing I’m still trying to remind myself of is this, and I don’t know if many people will relate to this, maybe portrait artists, but you really need to know a person before you know if your portrait looks like them or not. It’s one thing if I’m very familiar with an actor like Ethan Hawke, but if it’s an actor I am simply being shown still photographs of, the best thing for me to do is go away and just look at them in their films because when you see them moving it’s completely different. When you see them moving, you get a much better idea.
When you saw the caricatures in the final film on the big screen, how did it make you feel?
This could be potentially embarrassing. I have looked at the trailers, and I’ve looked at everything, but I haven’t actually seen [the film] yet. I didn’t go see it because I literally didn’t have the time to go. People who work in cinema never have time to go see a film. I’m going to go see it next week. I’m looking forward to seeing it, obviously. The last thing you’d expect would have been I didn’t read the script, I wasn’t on set, and I haven’t seen the film. But to talk about what you had in mind, it’s very satisfying when you see your work in context.
You have a long list of credits on a lot of phenomenal projects, do you still get affected seeing your work on screen?
One thing I find very interesting and one thing I find, in quite a strange way, reassuring in my career is that I still get nervous by every single job. No matter how simple it is and no matter how many times I’ve done it before, there’s just that instinctive thing that kicks in where you just want it to be right. I think the flip side of that is, even after 30 years, there is still a little bit of excitement when you turn on the tv and see your name in the credits. You never grow out of that.
As we come to an end here, is there anything you’d like to share that I missed asking about?
There are so many art related jobs in film and the lines between them are kind of fuzzy. Like my job title is scenic artist, which might be a bit misleading because I’m not actually painting scenery. But when you look at these caricatures, I think they are a very good example of the very very specific part of the art in film.
They’re not artwork being physically made by a person in the film. That’s a different matter if you’re making a painting that’s a work in progress because an actor is supposed to be able to paint on it, and you’re half into props and half into set [decoration]. And it’s also not a backdrop that you’re painting out the back window, which is a whole different kind of painting job again. Then there is all the decorative art that the specialist painters will do.
Often a lot of people don’t realize nearly everything you look at in a film has been built. Every marble floor you see people walking across is actually plywood that has actually been hand painted. Everybody has decades worth of film watching, but it’s only when you start to work in film that you realize these films you’ve been watching all your life, some of which are your favorite you watch again and again and again, are all made on sets.
Grant Keller is a freelance writer with a BFA in screenwriting from Chapman University. He was previously a film columnist for Cheddar News.