Setting the Scene

How the steamy opening credits for HBO’s True Detective came out of a studio in less-than-steamy city Sydney.

In early 2014, HBO began airing True Detective, an eight-part TV series about serial killers, hardboiled policemen and the occult. Starring Woody Harrelson and a newly respectable Matthew McConaughey, the show quickly became something of a pop-cultural touchstone for anyone with premium cable (or a working internet connection).

By the time the last episode aired in March, more than 3.5 million people in America were watching (legally, at least). But it wasn’t just the show’s nail-biting plot and star power that had audiences captivated: it was the look and feel of the series. An aura of menace permeated the show like the muggy Louisiana air its characters breathed. And while True Detective’s plot may have been as American as apple pie and a sixer of Lone Star beer, it actually owed its tone, in part, to Patrick Clair and Raoul Marks – two Australians who created the show’s now much-praised opening credits from a ramshackle studio in inner-city Sydney.

To hear Clair tell the story, things could have been very different. When he got the first call about it, he was pacing around the dark streets of pre-dawn Sydney, anxiously trying to jolt himself awake. The director was already well known in the Australian film industry for creating smart-looking title sequences and infographics for local TV shows, including The Chaser and Angry Beast. But HBO was next-level.

Clair had spent his early adulthood watching The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, the network’s first tentpole programs. Their long, cinematic title sequences had introduced him to the idea that credits could be something of an art in themselves; now, just over a decade later, he was being asked to come up with an idea for an opening sequence all his own. He’d need all of his mental faculties if he was to land the job, but despite the dual efforts of caffeine and adrenaline, things weren’t going well.

Clair describes himself as a “bumbling mess” when the phone call came in, “half-asleep from being up with my infant son overnight”. An as-yet unknown literature professor named Nic Pizzolatto was on the line from the U.S., where he was making his first TV show. Pizzolatto wanted Clair to pitch him an opening title sequence – a short reel that would succinctly sum up True Detective’s mood and themes while crediting its cast and crew. But as well as being terribly sleepy, Clair didn’t have the slightest idea what the show was about.

“It was honestly the most unimpressive phone call of my life. But I knew then we had an idea that could work.”

Chatting with Pizzolatto didn’t help, either. The fledgling showrunner was talking in a stream-of-consciousness about sex, death, religion and the apocalypse, and Clair couldn’t keep up. He was desperately trying to think of some ideas that might grab Pizzolatto’s attention – a theme he could express through graphic design or animation – but nothing was coming. Then the filmmaker said something that struck a chord.

“Nic was talking about how the show used broken and exploited landscapes as a metaphor for broken and exploited people,” he remembers. “While we were talking, I was staring at this print on my office wall of a double exposure portrait where the person’s image was fragmented by the branches of a tree, all broken up and hard to make out.” As the conversation finished and Clair hung up the phone, it hit him: he could make broken landscapes into broken portraits, representing the characters’ inner turmoil. “It was honestly the most unimpressive phone call of my life,” he says now. “But I knew then we had an idea that could work.” 

Over the following days, Clair hurriedly gathered copies of photographs and books that Pizzolatto mentioned had influenced him while he was writing the show, and requested footage HBO had already shot. “I created hundreds of these portraits where the actors’ faces were broken up by oil refineries, flames, sea creatures,” Clair says. “Then I put my favourites in a PDF and sent them off.” Several weeks later, he got another call: he had the job. “It was surreal,” Clair remembers. “I was standing in this dirty little courtyard that we shared with a struggling private art gallery in Chippendale, and suddenly we were working for HBO.”

Clair’s composite photos were beautiful on their own, but they were just static images. To create compelling credits, he needed to turn them into scenes with movement. So, Clair turned to Raoul Marks, a young motion designer he’d recently hired, and asked him to breathe life into his photos.

“We needed to introduce motion in a way that wouldn’t detract from their beauty,” Marks remembers. “A photo can have an iconic quality to it that would be dismantled by real-time motion.” He points to photojournalism as an example. “Those static, haunting moments are usually what comes to mind when we remember an event, not the footage.”

Clair had stumbled across Marks’ work on the internet when he came across a short 3D animation he had made about the Arab Spring, and reached out to suggest they work together. Marks agreed (he was already a huge fan of Clair’s work), moved into the Chippendale studio and began designing visuals for a video game Clair was working on at the time.

The pair quickly discovered they had a lot in common. They both adored HBO – a given in their line of work – but more interestingly they also shared an appreciation for Ridley Scott, the British filmmaker. Clair had studied the director at university, while Marks, like most kids who grew up in the ’80s, still remembered the first time he saw the original Alien. “I was at a friend’s house in Fremantle when I was nine years old,” he says, “and he had a bad copy on a crackly VHS.” Unlike most kids, however, it wasn’t the infamous chest-bursting scene, or even the alien itself, that caught Marks’ attention. It was something far more mundane: the film’s opening credits.

Up until that point, most of the movies Marks had seen began with unremarkable title sequences – a perfunctory reel of names you either endured or fast-forwarded through. But this was different. As the names of the cast and crew flickered over a backdrop of outer space, five white bars appeared across the top of the screen. Then, slowly, over what felt like many minutes, they morphed to form the letters of the film’s title.

Marks recognises that now for what it is: “a simple typography trick”. But at the time he wasn’t nearly so analytical. “It scared the hell out of me,” he remembers. “It was great.” With its haunting orchestral score and minimalist lettering, that simple sequence gave him more than just nightmares. “It left me with an indelible impression of the power of moving images and sound.”

A few decades later, in Clair’s Chippendale studio, Marks was able to wield some of that power himself. Working with Clair’s brief, Marks took footage from the show, slowed it down and combined it with photos of industrial wastelands and swamps. “For some shots we used super simple techniques – just overlaying images in very basic ways,” Clair says. “For others, Raoul built 3D worlds of strippers and truck stops and petroleum factories. It was a balance of complexity and simplicity, digital shots grounded with tactile analog textures to make sure the images never felt digital.”

The result – a mélange of landscapes and silhouettes – made for hypnotic viewing: a highway wrapped around Woody Harrelson’s face like a band of muscles, while gas flares turned Matthew McConaughey a menacing shade of crimson. The response was instantaneous, as were the accolades. “One day I’m doing animation in a shoebox in Chippendale,” Marks says, “the next moment I’m buying my first suit to wear to the Emmys.” (They won, for outstanding main title design.) “It was a rush.”

The win saw the duo in hot demand. Clair moved to Los Angeles to work as creative director at Elastic, the production company that had helped him score the job with True Detective, while Marks moved down to Melbourne, and found a shared working space at Magic Johnson, a warehouse in Collingwood. “It’s half falling apart,” Marks says, emphasising the similarities with his old Chippendale studio. “But it’s full of an eclectic bunch of people: sculptors, photographers, tech startups – even human rights lawyers.” He appreciates the communal aspect of the place. “Things can get pretty isolating, working remotely with the U.S., so it’s great to have some people around to keep me in touch with reality. Having a neighbourly chat is a good release valve.”

In the years since they made True Detective, the pair have continued to produce more eye-catching credits. In 2015 they were nominated for another Emmy, this time for their work on AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire. But perhaps the greatest accolade of all was being tapped to do the credits for The Man in the High Castle, an Amazon Studios production, whose executive producer is none other than Ridley Scott himself.

“It’s a very special experience to have something you’ve made hit the zeitgeist,” Clair admits. “It’s quite thrilling.” Marks agrees: “There aren’t many other spaces where you can make abstract, almost nonsensical visuals and get them played to an odd few million people.” Your idols included.

From Smith Journal vol. 19