If you’ve seen a movie poster sometime in the past 25 years, chances are you’ve seen the work of Kenny Gravillis, co-owner and creative director at Los Angeles-based Gravillis Inc. Since starting his eponymous agency with his wife, DeAnna, in 2000, Gravillis and his team have produced posters for such films as Alien, Avatar, Challengers, Nickel Boys, The Wild Robot and for such TV shows as Apple TV Plus' Government Cheese, Prime Video's The Boys, and Paramount Plus' Star Trek franchise. Gravillis also has had the honor of collaborating with such directors as Spike Lee, James Cameron, Denis Villeneuve, Steven Spielberg, Luca Guadagnino and many more.

Most recently, Gravillis designed the posters for Ryan Coogler’s horror hit, Sinners, starring frequent Coogler collaborator, Michael B. Jordan. 

Gravillis joined Spotlight to discuss how it all began, where it’s headed next, why it’s important for students of color to be able to pursue an arts education, how the best leaders know when they need to ask for help and what he thinks makes a cool movie poster. 

‍Spotlight: How would you describe what Gravillis does? And you just launched a branding division called OK – can you talk about why that was something Gravillis felt it needed to do as a company? 

‍Kenny Gravillis: We are a creative agency that works in branding and entertainment. We launched OK because we were already doing branding projects for clients but we wanted to define it more and give it its own lane. Entertainment is its own little cottage industry unto itself. We want to be able to expand beyond entertainment when it comes to branding. But a lot of the brands we work with are still very entertainment-driven; for example, we have done the branding for the Oscars for the last two years.  

‍Spotlight: What has that meant for the Oscars? 

‍Gravillis: The Oscars might have been looked at as a little stuffy, a little highbrow, obviously there’s a grandeur to the Oscars. We wanted the Oscars to come across as a little more relatable, a little cooler, when you think about what the Oscars do. It gets tagged as being this old institution that’s maybe not growing with the times. We got in to visually help with that.

Spotlight: How did that happen? What was the connection that brought you in? 

Gravillis: Spike Lee (editor’s note: Gravillis frequently collaborates with Lee) knew Bill Kramer who was the director of the Academy Museum and is now CEO of the Motion Picture Academy and he connected us. The Academy Museum did a Spike exhibit when they were opening. We ended up doing some work for the museum on Spike’s exhibit and on a Bruce Lee exhibit. We became connected with the museum and then Bill got the bigwig job at the Academy.

‍Spotlight: It's an interesting time to do what you guys do and be who you are, in light of how much DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) is getting attacked in the political arena. How are you navigating that? 

‍Gravillis: The advertising design fields in general are just not well represented when it comes to people of color. Nothing much has changed in terms of my goal to push the agenda of bringing in more kids of color, specifically, more creatives of color into the industry. Regardless of the political situation, that hasn’t changed. 

In 2020, when people were politically wanting to do a lot, the one thing myself and BLT’s Dawn Baillie, who is on the board of the Otis School of Design in Los Angeles, did manage to navigate and get over the line is a program for entertainment marketing and creative education at Otis.

One of the biggest problems with arts education and people of color is that it’s very expensive and there’s no real job that you can look to after you get an arts education. The percentage of Black people who go to art school is very low. So we came up with a program that is specific to entertainment advertising – poster design, trailers, illustration – a lot of photo shoots that we do still use traditional sketching to plan them out. We came up with a 14-month program that actually teaches and focuses on those three tracks and we got Netflix to pay for it.

The program started last September. After the 14 months is over, you put the students into agencies. They are there for six-month paid apprenticeships and the hope is that they end up getting hired. It doesn’t really matter what the political landscape is, I’m going to be consistently trying to push this agenda just because it’s needed. 

‍Spotlight: You got your professional start designing album covers, correct? How is designing album covers similar to designing movie posters? 

‍Gravillis: I think they actually are pretty different in the sense that albums are way more personal to the artists. Back in the day, the record companies had way more control of what the album covers were, because there would usually be art departments within record companies and they would just have way more say. And now it's just not that way. 

I love music. My first two years of living in NY – before I got a job at DefJam -- I got fired four times working on different packages. All of those firings led me to what I actually really care about, which is music and movies. When music started going downhill, movies seemed like a natural pivot. But movies are such a different world from music. The executives are different and what the product means is different. 

When we were trying to make the transition to movies, we had done a bunch of albums and obviously a lot of hip hop. People would say to us, ‘you guys are really urban,’ and that was the first thing that was problematic. The second thing that was problematic was that we had done all of our designing on squares so they couldn’t envision anything we had done as being a poster. 

I didn't think we were gonna be able to break in and then – and I always make this joke but I know it's like saying Voldemort – but the Weinstein Company took a chance on us and gave us our break. Obviously, I didn't deal with Harvey and those guys, but the marketing people there were amazing and they were the ones that gave us our first opportunity. They were the ones that saw the album covers and were like, ‘let's see what these guys could potentially do.’ 

Because of that, we did work for Weinstein, starting with Factory Girl.

From there, we ended up getting tagged as the indie kids, which was way better than urban kids. We definitely lucked out with that. As independent film rose, we sort of rose with it. 

In 2009, we ended up doing Alvin and the Chipmunks and Avatar in the same year. After that I felt like we couldn’t be pigeon-holed anymore. 

‍Spotlight: How deep do you get into the movie or the TV show before you create the poster?

‍Gravillis: It varies. A lot of times on big, big films, we will get a script to read. People don’t realize it, but on big movies, we are doing work sometimes even before production starts because the studio wants to be able to pitch production almost before everything starts. Once production has started, it’s hard to find your way into the plan. 

For smaller and indie films, a lot of times we might just get the film after it’s produced. Sometimes we’re there from the beginning and we’re part of the photo shoot. Sometimes, there’ll be no shoot and we’ll just have to use whatever unit photography has been shot during the film’s production. It varies in terms of what we get and how deep we’re able to go. 

‍Spotlight: Do you always use photography?

‍Gravillis: No. Sometimes, especially on independent films, there is barely any photography. And that's where you have to be super creative. We're pretty renowned for doing that, just because it's something that we've done for a long time. We’re known for our unique approaches to films. So a lot of times we're called on specifically to provide that.

‍Spotlight: Do you find that some photographers are better geared to shooting key art than others? 

‍Gravillis: I would say when it comes to photography, you have to be super flexible, because even the shot that we planned on being the poster isn't necessarily going to be the poster. I can probably count on one hand how many times I've gotten a sketch where I'm like, ‘this is the sketch. We're gonna shoot exactly this thing,’ and then that's the thing that becomes the poster. You have to be open to exploration and where things could go. In this industry, you almost always know it’s not going to end up being the idea you started with. 

And often because there are multiple agencies working on things, you could be working on something and all of a sudden you aren’t working on it anymore. A lot of times the studio doesn’t necessarily even tell you. And then out of the blue it comes back. One of your comps from round two is now a thing. So in that sense, it’s always unstable in terms of where it’s going to end up. The big thing that everyone always says is I don't know what the poster is until I see it.

Spotlight: I want to talk about , which is Ryan Coogler’s movie starring Michael B. Jordan that’s out right now, and is doing really well. How did you start working with Coogler? 

‍Gravillis: We started with Coogler on his first movie, Fruitvale Station, in 2013. That was actually a Weinstein project. What I remember the most about that project that told me tons about Coogler, was that a lot of times the studios will show the filmmakers maybe a few options, even though there have been gazillions done. They showed [Ryan] quite a few options that we did, and he responded with notes specifically on every option. And they sent those to me and I was amazed by it. The notes were so smart for a first-time filmmaker who I think was 26 at the time. I just talked to him about that at the London premiere of Sinners. I kind of knew that he was going to be something just based on those notes. 

‍Spotlight: What was the thought process around the poster for Sinners? 

‍Gravillis: Sinners was a tricky project because, first of all, it was original and it was R-rated. They also weren't really pushing the vampire side of the story, because they didn't want it to feel like another vampire movie, because it isn't that. 

When it comes to big movies, movies that you want to do big business, there's this thing I call the genre trap. The genre trap is that you think you have to know what the genre is. Personally, as a creative, I love pushing and being subversive about genre, but it's almost the opposite when you think of it on the studio side, because they don't want people questioning what the movie actually is. 

I think the movie that Ryan made is sort of multi-genre. That makes it a tough thing to market. So there was a ton of exploration around that. The very first image is a shot of Mike or MBJ just looking a little pensive and like he’s been through something. There's action there, but there's also some drama. In the background, it's kind of stormy. There are some weird figures. It was really weaving a web for that project. And as it started to go, Ryan would come in specifically for certain requests. 

There’s also a piece that we did at the end that happened, I kid you not, a few days before the movie came out. It was an homage to Ernie Barnes’ piece called “Sugar Shack” that has inspired some major pieces of Black culture, including the TV show Good Times and the cover of Marvin Gaye’s album, “I Want You.”

There’s a line in the film where MBJ says “It’s gonna be a real ring-a-ding-ding!” Ryan just latched on to that phrase and we turned it into a social campaign.

That basically lit the internet on fire.

I think Ryan is super in touch with his authenticity when he makes his films. He somehow rallies communities behind his films, and I don't think he does it intentionally. It just seems to naturally happen. I think that's what's happened with Sinners. 

‍Spotlight: Beyond Sinners, what’s coming up for Gravillis that you want to highlight?

‍Gravillis: Yes, we are coming up on our 25th anniversary in July and I’m super proud about that. 

‍Spotlight: OK, last question, and I know it’s hard to choose among your children, but what are some of your favorite posters that Gravillis has done over the years? 

‍Gravillis: I’d say there have been a few. I already mentioned Alvin. The poster for the movie, Logan, makes such great use of negative space. That’s an example of how to do subversiveness within a genre. That was a beautiful thing for me, where we got a chance to do something for a quote unquote superhero film that didn’t feel like a superhero film. That poster still feels very dramatic to me, where you see him walking and looking down with his claws out and all this space behind him.

Another poster that I’m super proud of was for this documentary called I’m Not Your Negro, which is about James Baldwin. The studio, Magnolia, has been a long-term client of ours. They came to us with a great level of vulnerability that I don’t usually see. They brought us this project and said ‘we know this title is challenging and we don’t feel like we’re in a position to represent it the right way.’

Our pitch on that was “you can't be afraid of that title.’ We made this poster where the title was huge, it’s pretty much 90% of the poster. And they took it and said ‘we’ll show it.’

What that shows is that you can’t do great work without great clients. If I come up with something that I think is genius but the client doesn’t like it, it will stop right there. The clients are the ones who have to fight for it within their studios. 

I think part of being self aware and understanding of other cultures and other voices, is understanding that you don't know every fan, and that something could be beyond you. That's part of being a good leader and of being someone who is good at actually facilitating culture.