Alex Pardee on Sucker Punch, ZeroFriends, and his Badass Future

by Trina Calderon

I caught up with Alex Pardee at Comic-Con, and in the week since there has been a lot on the nets about his awesome poster art for the new upcoming Zack Snyder film, Sucker Punch. Truth be told, he did a lot more than posters for the film.  Yes, Alex has been a very busy bee and we can only expect all kinds of more awesomeness from him as his art/clothing company ZeroFriends has been expanding (making films!) and he is now in serious prep mode for a big solo show in L.A. next year.  Read on for our lengthy chat that took place in the only quiet place we could find at SDCC this year: outdoor in the corner of a patio off the 2^nd floor of the exhibition hall!

Tell me how it happened to you, what was the bridge from Chadam into Zack Snyderland?

I love when things work out this way.  Sometimes I always consider myself to have bad luck, but then when I look at my professional life, I have the best luck in the entire world.  I will walk around and stub my toe and a bird will shit on my face and I’ll get a crazy bruise, so I have bad luck in certain aspects, but every time I complain, it’s like, but dude, look at this stuff, this is awesome.

The Zack connection was actually a blessing.  It was weird, and it’s really interesting.  I’m a huge fan of Zack’s, first of all.  But I am also a huge fan of Watchmen, so I was looking forward to the movie before it was coming out. I did a Watchmen fan painting for the NY Comic – Con and I didn’t do it with any intention, except I just wanted to do a Watchmen.  The movie hadn’t come out, but the stuff that was coming out for it was awesome.

At the same time, the Chadam offices we were working from were above the Cruel and Unusual offices and those two teams would cross paths once in awhile.  One of my friends showed somebody that worked at Cruel and Unusual, just in passing, the Watchmen piece and they were like, ‘That’s cool.’  They ended up showing it to Zack, and I got an unexpected phone call that was like, ‘Hey, is there any way we can get Zack a print of the Watchmen piece?’  I was like, are you kidding me?!  I told them, well, I’ll do even better, I have the original painting and I’ll just bring it down to him.  They were like, ‘That’s brilliant, because his birthday’s coming up.’   So I drove the painting down just for his birthday and that’s how we met.  We formed a mutual like, this is awesome, nice to meet you, thank you, let’s talk about stuff, and we became friends.

A few months later, while Watchmen was getting released on Blu-ray and DVD, they were getting ready to announce Sucker Punch but they hadn’t even really started anything on it.   It was a last minute announcement, and Zack called me up and said, ‘We don’t have anything to show for Sucker Punch.  I would love for you to be involved, can you make the very first image that anybody’s gonna see for this?’  So, I traveled down and Zack and I basically talked about Sucker Punch for 3 hours.  That was a year and a half ago, before last Comic-Con.  There was nothing really there, just the script and the idea.  They had some loose things going and the movie is full of so many visuals and different worlds.   It was overwhelming.  Zack and I would talk about it, ‘Well there’s so much stuff, how do we get this into tee shirt, or how do we get this into promo image?’  We were trying to go iconic, and we were trying to do this and that...Finally, he was like, ‘Just do what you want, do it.’  I’m all, alright.  He’s like, ‘I trust you.’

So, we did it, and they loved it.  Warner Bros. loved it.  When they released the image last year, nobody knew what the movie was, they just loved the image.  That snowballed into, ‘Let’s keep you on board, let's do a couple more things.’   It would start with just a simple phone call, ‘Hey, Babydoll holds a little stuffed animal, can you draw a little a stuffed animal?’   Yeah guys, awesome.  Then it was like, ‘We love that, can you do this?’  Then all of a sudden, I was in prop design. Then it was, ‘It would be cool if the weapons had some flare, can you play with the weapons a little bit?’  I would get these scans of weapons, and do this and that.  So, I ended up doing some weapon design, and some set design, and it just kept snowballing.  It was the most surreal thing in the entire world because I was just sitting at home, in my house, while there’s this huge team of amazing people building and working on all this stuff, and I’m scribbling like on a receipt, going, is it cool, can we do this?  Zack’s like, ‘Perfect.’  I didn’t see the billboard until I actually got to go up and work on set.  I got to see all these things in actual real-life that I drew.  That was the first thing that’s ever happened to me like that - which was very cool. 

Gentle Giant collectible - Bunny Mech (anything remind you of Alex Pardee?)

Gentle Giant collectible - Babydoll (check out the weapon flare on the sword and the gun)

My relationship with the Cruel and Unusual guys was great.  I’ve never worked with a more supportive group of people, who are more trusting.   I’ve worked with larger corporations before, and I’ve had some good and bad experiences.  My general fear is on the big budget stuff you don’t have any control or anything.   I was nervous.  I was afraid of pissing people off.  They were so like, ‘Yeah, that looks great, thanks.’  Really, that’s it?  There’s no changes?  ‘No, nothing.  We trust you, we like it.’  I’m like,  I love you!

Our relationship built and the logo came up.  They asked me to redesign the logo.  Comic-Con came up, and they’re like, ‘We want to do tie your art into Comic-Con.’  This new Comic-Com thing was really cool because I got hired originally to just do creative for the poster.  We started coming up with some ideas to make one poster that was one composite of all this stuff and that way we could break it out if we wanted to.   But what was happening was when we took the girls out one by one, it kinda looked out of place.  Then they were like, ‘We’re thinking too hard on this.  We want to see what you can do with six different posters, of all the girls.’  That way I could embody their character.  I got the chance to fully draw and paint each girl, each character, in the style and tie it into the whole Japanese animation meets burlesque pinup meets fantasy.  It was a huge challenge for me because the two things that I never ever have drawn in my entire life are girls and guns.  And if you look at the characters, it’s girls and guns. Those are the two things that have intimidated me, because I have a very imperfect style and the girls, they are obviously sleek, and perfect and not wrinkly.  I’ve always been afraid to tackle baby girls because, you make an eye a 1/2 centimeter too low and the girl looks retarded.  Where it’s okay if a guy looks retarded because he’s all wrinkly and ugly anyways, so that was scary.  I didn’t have a lot of time to do it - it was just like go, go go!  I spent time researching.  What am I going to do?  I have to draw girls!  I was freaking out, but I didn’t let anybody know I was freaking out, so I was just scribbling, and doing stuff and everything came out great.  They loved it.  We made some changes here and there, but the final posters that are out  I’m so happy with and I’m so excited to be a part of it.

What’s it like working with Zack?

He’s incredible.  He comes from a creative background, obviously a visual arts background.  Usually, if you talk to a typical corporate person, somebody that’s not as visually creative, you try to explain to them something and they can’t visualize without seeing it, so you spend a lot of time putting something on paper.  And there’s the whole, ‘Yeah, no, I don’t like that, do something else.’  With Zack, it was almost the exact opposite. He’s like, ‘What are you thinking?’  And I can just say, I kinda want to do this watercolory thing, we’ll incorporate this and take some of their rough spirit of this, and he was like, ‘That sounds great, do it.’  Okay, well I understand something and I would hesitantly still kind of rough something up and he’d be  like, ‘Yeah that’s fine, do it.’

It’s incredible because he’s such a fan of art, and of fantasy and everything so loose.  One of the most inspirational things that happened was when I did get to go up the movie set and watch his team work.  I’ve never really been around a big movie set.  I’ve been around smaller sets, music video stuff, but I was intimidated going up there.  Watching him interact with his team and how much of an example he sets and how much they feed off of that and how much everybody’s happy because of that leadership was great.  Everybody works hard, and watching that team from afar was just like, oh shit, this is a incredible.  They’re making a movie right now and everyone’s laughing and everyone’s having fun, and punching each other. I was like, this is what I want to do! It was inspiring.

What did you think of the story when you first became acquainted with Sucker Punch?

I never read the script, because I got basically Zack acting out the entire movie, and that was one of the most surreal things.  Literally for an hour and a half, he was like, ‘We open up here and I’m swinging the camera down here and you see Babydoll running around…’  In a way,  it was the script, but I never actually read the script.  I think it will translate from what the original idea of what I imagined to beyond my imagination.  It’ll be exciting to see.  I’ve never got to be involved in something this early on as far a motion picture is concerned, so it will be really cool to see how its evolving now and when it comes out in a year, based on everything.

Has the experience of drawing girls and guns seeped into your personal artwork?

I just finished this less than a week ago, so I haven’t done any work yet.  But it did for sure.  I leveled up.  I gained experience.  My new perk is I’m not as afraid to draws girls.  I know that I can do it if I try.  There was problem-solving involved, there was frustration.  I would show somebody and I would be, the legs look weird, I can’t figure it out.  So, then okay, let me think about this.  I’d go and take pictures and study them and then it would be like, oh, I see what’s wrong with it – okay, let me fix that.  There was studying the girls faces, which I’ve never done, except for girls (like out in the world – LOL), so I do feel that I added at least something to my skill set whether I’ll incorporate it or not I’m not sure because I still like monsters.  I’m still an ugly monster weird guy, but its nice to regain a little confidence that I can do something if I need to.

What did you do to study the girls?

I got a lot of photos from Clay Enos.  He’s a really awesome portrait photographer.  He did all the portrait photography for Watchmen and all the on set still photography.  He’s incredible.  I got a lot of portrait references from him and some of the stuff from the film and I would work with those.  I also got a ton of books on old vaudeville posters and pinup burlesque stuff.  I would look at those and try not to get the most cliché poses, but try to invoke kind of a spirit - one girl hanging on a swing, and there’s one girl standing like this.  I tried to incorporate those so visually they would all look different but at the same, you could look at each one and see that it looks like a mixture of Pinup and Japanese animation.  Those were the two big things I was going for the whole time.

Tell me about what you’ve been doing besides Sucker Punch?

I have been expanding my clothing and art company called ZeroFriends.  We’re doing a series of pop-up stores.   We opened a three month store in New York and now were doing a second one in San Francisco in September.  Then we’re probably going to do L.A. but we haven’t figured a spot yet, so we’re working on it.  That’ll probably be early next year.  We’re a small staff and a very small company.  With the retail game basically dying and the economy still pretty bad for retail shops, we would never want to commit to get a retail space for two years, not knowing stuff.  What we’ve been able to do is use the economy to gain back and secure little small three month things.  We can go to a city, introduce our brand, hang around for awhile, get people familiar with the brand, then direct them to our website and move on.  So far, it’s pretty cool. 

We’re working with more artists, Skinner, and Atta Boy again.  In addition to that, we’ve expanded into short films.  We started doing a separate ZeroFriends Films division.  I’ve always wanted to make films, so it’s me nerding out with Stephen Reedy, who writes and directs.  The ZeroFriends film thing was originally conceived because I’m a movie nerd, and I wanted to make movies, but it’s not what I do.  I didn’t get into it when I should’ve, so instead I do art.  Which is just as incredible…But I don’t want to be the person who’s put off something I’ve made good for myself to go do this, and then, oh man, I just blew off two things!  I’m very aware of that, but simultaneously my friend Stephen Reedy is literally the most talented person I’ve ever met, and he’s young (24) and he’s incredible.  When he and I met years ago, he was kind of like, ‘Oh I never need to make movies, I’ll just give you these, because we have the same taste and you’re awesome.’  That’s how it started.  He’s been editing for years and directing short films and we wanted this mixture of like, well…I just want to see him make stuff, he has a lot of ideas, how can we incorporate it, let’s make short films for our company and I can help finance it through that and we’re all happy and we can test out our advertising chops.  I was really happy after 7 to 8 months of making 4 or 5 short films that were really good quality, knowing that like were just a small art urban  clothing company.  I could be wrong, but I don’t really think that a lot of other companies like us have short film commercials because it’s not worth it.  There’s no reason to put money into doing that, when it’s an immeasurable amount of advertising - you can't really tell.  But with YouTube being so big, it’s almost like they’re missing out too, because we’re getting 100,000 hits on each one and to us that translates.  We’re still just playing with that and trying to figure out what gets more views and it’s been awesome.  I’m looking forward to expanding on that. 

ZeroFriends Aliens vs. Predators

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What lies ahead for Mr. Pardee?

As soon as I get done with this, I’m jumping right into (he has an anxious and excited pause)…I have a solo show at Corey Helford Gallery in January.  I’m very nervous, because it CH and they have awesome stuff!  I’m excited because it’s another challenge.  It’s another, okay, this is serious.   I can’t just scribble on a piece of paper.  I am for the first time gonna really really focus on painting.  Now I’m such an idea person, that I just scribble and want to move on, because once I’m satisfied with making something and it makes me laugh or it makes me happy, then I just like slide it aside.   I want to really see what happens when I spend a week on a painting.  There’s some rough ideas that I’m throwing around, theme-wise but I do like to do thematic stuff.  If its based around a cool property it gives an open for expanding on it, if the reception’s cool.  I can maybe do a book out of it, or I can maybe make a short film out of it, or I can maybe continue it and expand the story.  Because I like to do a lot of narrative now in some of my stuff.  I think I always have, but I was in denial.  Even when you go back to ‘96 and ‘97 when I was doing my own comic books, it was basically I would drawing something and to justify that being in a comic book I would have to write something about it.  Otherwise, I don’t think people are gonna buy an art book.  Back then nobody would buy an art book, so I would write stories to go around that and that always integrated it.  It’s another extension of the imagination.  I do a lot of work with shapes and I’Il lay something down and then I’ll be like, that’d be cool if it had two noses, and that’d be cool if this had this, and I could stop there.   But, then I can look at it and I can also extend my imagination, and I can make something out of this - this guy has two noses, because it’s actually two people trying to get away from each other.  When people see semi-relatable objects, and they go, ‘That’s cool, but it’s kinda weird.’  Then you go, well, you know why they have that? And then you tell them and then they go, ‘That’s awesome!’  It’s weird that people like having that meaning, that story, but I come from that world too, so I like it too.

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