As Good As it Gets with Andrew Brischler

I caught up with Andrew Brischler to discuss his creative work, movies, physical media, and the actresses who shaped us.

On the May 1992 cover of Premiere, actress Sigourney Weaver stares down the barrel of the camera with a strong red lip, oversized diamond and pearl earrings, and potent cleavage with a faux tattoo pressed onto her left breast that simply reads: POWER.

I can’t get that image out of my head after meeting with Andrew Brischler. We met for breakfast a few weeks after he presented new work during the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Open Studios in Dumbo.

Weaver has appeared in Brischler’s Self Portrait series, frozen in a moment as Ripley from the Alien films. Awash in green and dotted black detail, the work is painstakingly rendered by hand in gouache, colored pencil, and graphite. Ripley is exactly the kind of boundary-breaking archetypal figure that repeatedly surfaces throughout Brischler’s work: a tough bitch navigating traditionally masculine worlds. Weaver’s strength became central to her appeal as an actress. She can be equally believable as an action hero, the First Lady, or an emotionally stranded suburban wife. It’s no wonder she was chosen for the cover of Premiere’s “Power” issue.

Over shared orders of scrambled eggs, thick-cut bacon, and broccoli rabe, our conversation revealed our earliest cinematic discoveries, our love of actresses, and the ways popular culture embeds itself into identity and memory.

Brischler’s Self Portrait series draws viewers in through scale, but the works themselves focus on tight and extreme close-ups of characters recognizable from films like Kill Bill, Halloween, and Psycho. Meticulously drawn eyes either dart off frame or look directly at the viewer while mouths tend to hang open in horror. Like a director tightly controlling what we see and what we don’t see, an element in Brischler’s paintings are obsessed with looking and being looked at.

The women in the series are a mix of classic and contemporary actresses, often captured in their most daring roles: Sissy Spacek, Elizabeth Taylor, Laura Dern — women who never play characters softly. There are men too, like Ryan Gosling in Drive, a toothpick dangling from pursed lips, or the murderous stillness of Christian Bale in American Psycho.

Beyond the portraits are text based graphic works that reinterpret fonts, typography, and shapes pulled from books and movie posters. “Cruising,” “Trash,” and “Virgin” appear in bold lettering stripped of any background beyond hard punches of color. The typography feels reminiscent of the opening credits of a David Lynch film — twisted, seductive, and precise all at once.

Words and familiar faces alone are enough to trigger memory, snapping viewers back to wherever they first encountered a slasher classic or flipped through an entertainment magazine as a kid.

During our conversation, Brischler discussed how childhood trips to local video stores and hours spent poring over movie posters, books, and advertisements shaped his visual language early on. Over time, certain actresses and genres became more than passive entertainment. They became deeply personal reference points.

Here’s a taste of our conversation:

Andrew Brischler photographed by Kay Hickman in his studio at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Dumbo

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I feel relatively competent talking about movies and keeping up with what one should see, what feels essential, all of that, but becoming an active viewer of art is relatively new for me. I go to a lot of gallery openings and museum shows out of curiosity. In some ways I feel like I’m in my early twenties again when I was discovering global cinema in a new way.

Recently I started watching a lot of YouTube interviews with artists. Then I thought, You know what I haven’t watched in years? Pollock.

I knew you were going to say that. I love that movie.

What struck me rewatching Pollock was the physicality of how he worked — standing over the canvas, constantly moving around it.

Then I started thinking about how all those men from that period were chain-smoking depressives, alcoholics, philanderers — these damaged men who were some of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

That group of artists are what Mad Men was dealing with, in terms of these incredibly wounded, scared, and angry men who did not have any emotional literacy. But they happened to be able to put all of their emotional literacy into their work.

Abstract Expressionism became one of the first American art movements that dealers, scholars, and institutions really figured out how to package.

I’ve spent over a decade in the art world, and I’ve gone through this arc of wanting to be invited to the party, then eventually getting invited into the party and seeing how the machinery actually works. Any time someone gets a major feature now, I immediately understand the conversations happening behind it.

There’s always been this tension between authentic creation and figuring out how to package that authenticity.

Marcia Gay Harden’s performance as Lee Krasner is incredible because she’s not simply playing the supportive wife. She’s managing his ego and believing in him before he was a thing.

It’s an inversion of that “I just have to support my husband who’s about to make history.” She’s the only reason why he made history because she corralled him and forced him to go to certain things. Lee Krasner is a very interesting artist and person.

That role could have very easily become “put-upon wife,” but instead you leave feeling like she could have her own movie.

I’ve always had a handful of actresses I’ll watch in absolutely anything regardless of quality. Julia Roberts is one of those people for me. I could watch My Best Friend’s Wedding every day for the rest of my life.

Julianne Moore is another. Charlize Theron too. Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Monica Vitti — there’s a long list.

Your work obviously returns to actresses constantly. Were there early performances or actresses that immediately connected with you emotionally?

A lot of the earliest drawings I made in the Self Portrait series were deeply personal. I made one of Marilyn Monroe from The Misfits because of what that film represented emotionally — the death of an icon, the tragedy surrounding that production.

But generally speaking, as a kid, I was always drawn to women who made me feel safe.

I was this little sensitive gay kid growing up in a chaotic household where my parents were constantly fighting. My mom was wonderful, but there was always tension. So actresses, teachers, even the women on QVC became comforting figures for me. I watched QVC obsessively because these women felt like companions.

One of the first actresses I felt that connection to without fully understanding it was Helen Hunt. She was on Mad About You every week, which felt like this very sophisticated New York world to me as a kid on Long Island who already knew he wanted to move to New York.

Then she was in Twister. I still remember the first shot of her standing on top of the van in oversized cargo pants and a white ribbed tank top. I came home from seeing that movie and immediately started trying to redraw the poster.

That’s such a great connection — recreating images as a way of becoming closer to a movie.

Then As Good As It Gets came out and I saw that in theaters too. I loved movies that made me feel older or more adult than I actually was.

There are also actresses associated with horror or psychologically intense films that became really important to me. Janet Leigh in Psycho. Sigourney Weaver in Alien. Those women guided me through those films emotionally.

Ripley in Alien feels especially important because she wasn’t originally conceived as a woman. There’s nothing stereotypically feminine about how she’s written. She simply becomes this incredibly capable survivor.

I rewatched The Ice Storm recently. BEYOND!

That’s one of my movies. Family dysfunction, repression, people incapable of articulating what they actually feel — that material always resonates with me.

There are actresses I still feel deeply attached to. Julia Roberts is definitely one of those people. Erin Brockovich is one of those movies I can endlessly watch.

She had such an incredible run throughout the nineties.

Completely. But I think what really shaped me weren’t necessarily actresses with perfect careers. It was performances. Horror heroines. Women surviving impossible situations.

Sigourney Weaver in Alien made me feel safe. She shepherds you through that movie.

I’ve spent a lot of my life slightly embarrassed by my more populist tastes because my interests are actually very eclectic. But there’s a reason filmmakers like Steven Spielberg connect so deeply with people. He understands visual storytelling on a primal level.

And I say this as someone who’s actually not the biggest Spielberg fan, which always feels strange to admit because he’s obviously one of the defining filmmakers of the last fifty years. His movies are a part of so many people’s childhoods and cultural memory.

But his films can feel overwhelmingly manipulative.

Totally. And I’ve also never fully connected to Janusz Kamiński’s cinematography.

There’s definitely a clear pre- and post-Kamiński divide in Spielberg’s work.

Some of those movies absolutely make sense with him, but sometimes I miss the warmth of Spielberg’s earlier films. Kamiński’s lighting can feel so blown out and stark. Which is obviously his signature in the same way Roger Deakins has a signature, but I don’t think it’s always for me.

That said, I revisited Minority Report and A.I. last year for the first time since they originally came out and really enjoyed both.

A.I. especially really affected me. The whole time I watched it I kept thinking: this is a movie about a gay boy. David’s attachment to his mother, his desperate need to be loved and validated, his desire to prove himself worthy of being considered “real” even though he’s fundamentally different from everyone around him — all of it felt deeply queer to me.

Completely. And the Blue Fairy figure he spends the entire movie searching for is voiced by Meryl Streep.

Exactly.

I listen to The Big Picture podcast, and they recently did this entire Meryl Streep Hall of Fame episode after The Devil Wears Prada.

There are so many Meryl performances I remember feeling a deep, DEEP connection to growing up — Postcards from the Edge, The River Wild. And somehow I still haven’t seen Sophie’s Choice.

Me neither. Or Out of Africa.

I still haven’t fully made it through The Deer Hunter.

I’ve started the first fifteen minutes probably five different times and realized, this is not the right night for this movie.

I’m a completist. I don’t like to turn on something and halfway through decide it’s time to go to bed.

I also didn’t see The Godfather until COVID.

I think some movies fundamentally change depending on where you see them. I hadn’t watched Amadeus in years until I saw it again at the Paris Theater and suddenly it completely clicked.

Same thing with Barry Lyndon. I’d seen it before, but seeing it theatrically felt like experiencing it for the first time.

Barry Lyndon is a as otherworldly and alien as any science fiction movie. The way that it’s shot, there are no words. Kubrick and David Lynch were filmmakers I knew I wasn’t ready for when I was younger. I tried watching Twin Peaks in my twenties and kept imposing my own understanding about narrative structure onto it.

I had the exact same experience with Antonioni. The first five times I tried watching L’Avventura I thought, I don’t get this at all. Then eventually something unlocked.

I watched it again last summer during the Monica Vitti retrospective at Lincoln Center and afterward the entire audience applauded. I remember thinking, this may be one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen. The first thirty minutes alone are phenomenal.

It’s also so meandering in a way that feels radical now. People forget those movies were made to be seen theatrically. There was no other option.

L’Avventura really is a hangout movie.

If you focus too much on the plot, you’re probably watching it wrong. It’s about composition, lighting, and blocking.

That’s how I feel about 8½. The point of that movie is to just be with Guido for two and half hours and just endure it because he’s not easy to deal with.

I used to decorate my apartments with film posters. In college I had the yellow Breathless poster. Then La Dolce Vita. Then the iconic red Blow-Up poster.

At some point I wondered if movie posters in your apartment were juvenile and got rid of most of them. The one I kept was a framed Out of Sight poster with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. It’s such a sexy image of Jennifer Lopez holding a shotgun in heels with George’s head behind her.

What’s your relationship to movie posters and physical media?

We had two video stores growing up: Blockbuster and St. James Video, which was like the mom and pop video store in my little town on Long Island of St. James.

At the local store you could actually claim old posters when they rotated them out.

Above my bed I had posters for Scream 2, The Faculty, and West Side Story.

I used to spend hours on movieposter.net. When I was a kid I would fantasize about what life would look like when I lived in New York. I would have my own apartment and I’m going to buy real movie posters, so I have.

Now I collect selectively. I have a Polish poster for Fatal Attraction. Polish movie posters are terrifying and beautiful.

I also have a French poster for The Exorcist, a poster for Badlands, and a Yugoslavian poster for Deliverance.

Some of my first favorite artists were movie poster designers.

Saul Bass did not do a lot of posters for Hitchcock, but he did do Vertigo. And he did the credits for Psycho, North by Northwest.

Drew Struzan. They’re not my taste, but his posters are a universal cultural understanding. He did the posters for all of the Indiana Jones movies, he was ubiquitous.

Bill Gold who died a few years ago was an incredibly important movie poster designer.

Movie posters are incredibly meaningful to me.

Criterion seems more popular than ever now.

I got a Blu-ray player for Christmas last year and slowly started building a physical media collection.

I bought After Hours, No Country for Old Men, The Player, Silence of the Lambs, Seven Samurai, Citizen Kane. Arrow Video put out this beautiful edition of Cruising with essays, fold-out posters, and incredible packaging.

I’m not interested in getting a lot of things for movies that I don’t care about. I’m not a collector who amasses things. I like feeling like I have something that brings me closer to the movies, which part of what my work is.

I did the Criterion truck when it was in Dumbo a few years ago.

I’m jealous.

You had to wait forever, then suddenly had thirty seconds to grab whatever you wanted.

I bought An Unmarried Woman, but I also chose Malcolm X, and I think either Metropolitan or The Last Days of Disco for my Polaroid portrait.

But I still love physical media because it preserves the artistry around movies — the packaging, the essays, the cover art, all of it.

I’ve become increasingly interested in opening credits, typography, and title design. Great credit sequences can completely transform how you experience a film.

The typography in Sofia Coppola’s films is incredibly considered. The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette — the fonts themselves become part of how you read a film.

I love the notion of continuity in typefaces.

When I saw Goodfellas theatrically again recently, those opening credits speed right by. I think they’re Saul Bass. It’s such simple typography. I love when it’s considered and it feels like a filmmaker is consciously making this feel like an entire experience.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how interesting it would be if Premiere came back in some form. Maybe as a quarterly object, a Substack, something. Film culture isn’t dead.

Film culture is more serious and voracious and intense for the people that care about it. It’s feverish and more considered than when it was a mono culture thing.

We used to pore over Entertainment Weekly as kids. We pored over Premiere magazine.

I think because film culture is no longer the default way of looking at the world, it feels more special now because it’s not like what it used to be.

That’s why if Premiere came back it would be something released four times a year in this glossy thing you could buy at Casa Magazines, and it would be this incredibly cared for, designed object.

That’s something I think we’ve gained versus Entertainment Weekly that just needed to come out every week.

Movies are one of the few mediums where there all of these things. There are tentacles to physical media.

I see the movie and the design and the scholarship and the physical media release, I see all of these things as the same thing. It’s all cultural detritus that I’m sweeping closer to me to make sense to either own or make work out of.

What’s something you’ve seen recently that you loved?

I really loved Send Help with Rachel McAdams. She’s giving so much to do. It’s so fun, it’s such a good ride.

It lets Sam Raimi cook. It’s disgusting and scary. It’s not even that scary, it’s great.

I also really loved 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Those movies do what I want horror movies to do, for me, which is make me think about big things.

I really, really liked those movies.

Were those home watches?

No, those were in the theater.

I watched the first two John Wick movies. The world is nonsense, but it’s incredibly considered. Everything is thought out. The action scenes are like ballet.

I love movies that make me feel closer to my masculinity than I normally feel. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that there were many movies growing up that I felt like that I was not allowed to like or even see. Like The Godfather, Goodfellas, or Scarface.

I rewatched La La Land. If you just let it happen, I was swept away the first time I watched it. It has this weird cultural footprint in that people love to hate it.

Then I watched my first Fassbinder movie, Fox and His Friends, and I ab-so-lutely loved it.

And then I saw the Rosetta Stone of the romantic comedy, It Happened one Night. I’d never seen it. It was on the Criterion Channel. It’s pretty good.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it’s pretty good.

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