Author, If It's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die: The Power of Color in Visual Storytelling	September 2005
	"We are talking about something that is universal and that’s why this book is so important. So, for example, take the idea of rage and that rage somehow is always red, or has red as a component in expressing that emotion. It may be that red in New York is rage. Red in Hong Kong might be joy. But the one thing rage and joy have in common, they both inspire intense, visceral emotions."

Can you tell me a little bit about your background—for instance, where did you earn your degree? How did you start out? Where have you taught?
I have a BFA in Graphic Design from Syracuse and I have an MA in Fine Arts and Fine Arts Education from Columbia University. I was a professional designer and my own design studio. I was a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where I taught color and visual language as well as design at Cal State, LA. At the AFI [American Film Institute] Conservatory I taught seminars in color and visual storytelling to MFA candidates.

What was it that first got you interested in specializing in the field of color?
Well, it’s very hard to answer that directly because there were so many things that became very synchronous. I’ve always had a very special connection to color. I had a near-death experience as a child and that left me with a very strong, even more-than-strong, interest in color. My professors told me that I had the most unique color sense they’d ever seen. I didn’t know what that meant. But as I began to teach at the university level—this was more than 20 years ago at the School of Visual Arts—I became aware that my students had no idea whatsoever about how to use color, whether it was to set up a reaction with a film audience or working in an interior design concept. For example, I had a woman who designed an environment for her teenaged son after she had spent some time talking about how his loud music was driving her crazy. She designed a room for him in bright red. It simply showed me that she didn’t make the connection between a very powerful color and the kind of behavior she wanted to affect in her son’s environment.

How did you come up with a plan to heighten your student’s awareness of the power of color?
After seeing the students’ arbitrary use of color, I decided I had to do something. Almost out of nowhere, I announced “Next week I want you all to bring in red.” I made very sure I phrased it that way. Of course, they all wanted to ask questions, like “What do you mean?” But I would not take any questions. “Just bring in red,” I insisted. This was a real test because this wasn’t how I normally taught. I just wanted to see what they were going to do. I somehow knew without any doubt that this was really important for them to understand, and it was the best thing I ever did in my life, because what they brought in was not just the predictable paint swatches and fabrics, which were what I expected. They brought in red hot cinnamon balls, you know, those things you eat like jaw breakers. They brought in balms that make your skin hot and tend to relieve muscle pain, like Ben-Gay. They brought in salsa, of course, and jalapeño peppers. They brought in really loud rock-and-roll music. One young man brought in a toy fire truck that had a really loud siren.

So they brought in things that turned color into some other sense.
Exactly! But we didn’t plan it.

There’s a real connection between all those items.
Absolutely! They came in, they got very loud, they got very sweaty, they ate everything in 5 minutes, and in 15 minutes they all wanted to go home. It was complete compulsive behavior. We took a break and when they came back in, we talked about what had happened. I don’t go to casinos, but they told me casinos are often painted red and we went “duh, why do you think?” You know, there it is, right there—the compulsive behavior. I let them lead the dialogue— this is really important—so that it wasn’t being the Sermon on the Mount. That way, it was coming from their lives. But we didn’t set out to prove anything. That is what was key to the whole process, because it just happened. We all saw how we were manipulated by the color.

Right. So it came directly from their experience.
Yes, exactly. They decided that we had to explore another color. We had to see if this worked with another energy in the room. I said, okay, what color? They voted on blue. Now what’s important is these are the same students that did red. This time they came in with inflated pillows and New Age music. One guy, I kid you not, brought in a hypno-therapist who talked very quietly to people sitting on the big pillows. They all really spaced out. Nobody wanted to leave. By this time I was convined that this should go into the curriculum—we’re going to do this every year because this really works! So every year from then on, the students would, by majority vote, choose a color that they wanted to explore in terms of how it affects each of the five senses. That class was usually in the neighborhood of 20, so there were roughly, say, five groups of four or four groups of five. And the rules were that you couldn’t tell anybody what you’re bringing—you were sworn to secrecy. Each group was to construct an environment that devoted itself to the exploration of the color in terms of the five senses. I want to tell you about purple because that’s what led to the title of this book [If It’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die]. When they picked purple, I was ready to talk about the royal association with the color. As I say in the book, the associations with purple that were brought into class outnumbered the royal ones by 10 to 1. We had fortune tellers. We had wakes. We had altars--although they might have been to chocolate. We had confessionals. One young man went out in the courtyard and had made a cemetery by taking drawing boards and turning them into grave stones. Every class member had their name on one of the grave stones. No one forgot that one!

That must have had a chilling effect on your students.
Oh it did! But what was so important was that we saw that the association with purple was not carnal. It actually had nothing to do with the physical. I call it the “beyond-the-body” color. If it’s purple, it’s as if it can’t be touched. It’s in the realm of the mystical, of the spiritual, of the paranormal. And, then of course, it dealt a lot with death. And this was consistent over 20, almost 25 years. What’s important, too, is that this was evidenced in schools in New York and two different schools in California. So…

… different students, different locations, different times, but the same conclusion.
Yes, exactly. It’s very consistent. That’s another thing that’s exciting for me. I’ve been doing this for 20 or 25 years, and within all three of these universities in particular—the SVA, Cal State LA and AFI—there’s a large pool of international students. The color associations are virtually the same.

So these color associations are cross-cultural?
This question is asked of me all the time: Does this change according to what country or culture you’re in? I decided that it came up so much that I wanted to put it in the book. So I contacted former students of mine—and actually two of them were not students but neighbors—from Mexico, Singapore, Columbia, Germany, France and Japan. That gives you an idea of the breadth of the cultures. Via email or telephone, they chose two emotional states that they wanted to express. They picked rage and tranquility. I took them through a sense memory exercise much like they do for actors. So, for example, with rage, they were to close their eyes and take themselves back to a time when they experienced real anger. They were to stay in that place and visualize what the feeling looked like. Not, for example, showing you a scary-looking monster, you know, but what did those sensations that are coursing through your body look like? What colors were they? And while they’re in that state, the instruction was to simply put their left brain on “quit” and just reach for whatever paint color, impulsively. They had big bottles of paint on the table with the 6 colors in the book—red, yellow, blue, orange, green, purple, and black and white available to them. Each one painted “rage,” and then they did the same thing with “tranquility.” Immediately after it happened, each of them wrote a short paragraph describing their experience, and that’s the last chapter of the book. Cultural differences are apparent stylistically, but the color choices are essentially the same. In other words, a young girl from Mexico City who has a piece in the book, did hers by thrashing it with her fingers, and the guy from Columbia just did simple brush strokes. Tranquility was all pale, pale, pale, pale, and the majority blue with basically no texture, just horizontal with very, very pale colors. Rage was even more obvious, in a different way, because every single piece had red and black as dominant colors.

So there were only very slight variations across cultures.
Yes. We are talking about something that is universal and that’s why this book is so important. So, for example, take the idea of rage and that rage somehow is always red, or has red as a component in expressing that emotion. It may be that red in New York is rage. Red in Hong Kong might be joy. But the one thing rage and joy have in common, they both inspire intense, visceral emotions.

Your book, If It’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die: The Power of Color in Visual Storytelling, should be of interest to anyone who works with color.
Absolutely. The prime demographic is filmmakers and film students. And, of course, film lovers! The book contains information that is very profound, but it’s intentionally written in accessible, non-academic language. I wanted it to be in the vernacular because I feel messianic about getting everybody to understand that what they choose when they go and stand in front of their closet in the morning is going to define who they are, and how people are going to respond to them. There’s an anecdote in the book which was told to me by a student in New York. Her family was happy and well-adjusted. They decided they really wanted to enliven their dining room, so they painted it red. Over that next year, she said, they didn’t know why, but everybody started fighting at dinner. They finally went into family therapy. It was suggested to them that they alter the color of their dining room. So they took it back to what it was originally, which was a very pale yellow, and they stopped fighting altogether. Another story —this is one I participated in—involved an adult student of mine. He decided to paint his corporate visitor’s waiting room a pale blue because it was the color of a shirt that he liked—you know, that pale pastel blue. But after a while, he said he was really seriously considering instituting seminars for creativity and innovation for the 21st Century, because the current crop of job applicants just didn’t have any energy. They were listless; they were intellectually lazy.

So the room was affecting their behavior?
Well I said to him, you know what? You painted your room a color you liked, but what you didn’t think about was how that color affects the behavior of anyone who sits in that room more than 5 to 10 minutes. Pale blue makes people calm and passive, and it makes them introspective. So all the energy is going inside and what he wanted was dynamic people for his firm. I wrote in the book, under Pitfalls to Avoid: “Filmmakers should be careful not to make color choices based solely on an intellectual or abstract notion. If, for example, a director chooses blue to symbolize hope because the sky is blue in sunshine, he or she may find it possible for unwanted reactions to occur. Instead of feeling hopeful, which is what they intended, the audience may involuntarily respond to blue by feeling tired and even melancholy.” And then I tell the story about the guy with the blue office.

Isn’t it difficult to put color into the written or spoken word?
Adjectives for color are subjective. What one director thinks of as sky blue, another would call azure. The experience of reading or hearing a word and the physical sensation felt by seeing the actual color is not the same. Actually Jasper Johns, in an exhibition in the early 1960’s in New York, illustrating the dichotomy between a word and the thing that a word describes by hanging an actual teacup on a canvas and then writing the word “cup” on the painting with an arrow pointing to the cup. There was a lot of dialogue that took place about this, but the consensus seemed to be that Johns was pointing to the fact that the two are not equal.

The book points out the important fact that you really can’t just talk about color. You have to see color right in front of you in order to make a color decision. My teacher, Josef Albers, proved that color recall was next to impossible. There are over 90 selections from films in the book. The book is broken down into six parts for the six basic colors—red, yellow, blue, orange, green and purple. The research I’ve been doing suggests that every color has at least six characteristics. But if you want a certain reaction to a color, you can’t just read it in the book—this is very important, and I say this up front to anyone—read it in the book and then try it out on yourself. See how that color makes you feel. These emotions have surfaced in my research, but this is not a check-off list. I want to make sure that people, especially students, don’t go down the index and go “hmmm, red, the caffeinated color. It’s powerful, lusty and defiant. Or it’s anxious, angry and romantic”—which are the six characteristics for red—and not think for themselves. So there’s a caveat in the book: To always have colors in front of you when you’re making a decision. Observe how you feel. In that way, everyone is on the same page.

So color is actually visual emotion.
Absolutely. What’s also interesting is that there’s an element to color that resonates. That is what really affects you, and that’s also what you feel when you walk into a red room. It’s like a tuning fork. You begin to resonate with the resonance of the color. This is important with red. Remember when we had all these unexpected things happen when we first did the experiment I told you about? Red is going to accentuate whatever behavior you either consciously want or that you bring to the table. So the point is, don’t wear red if you’re feeling angry! I had an experience directly related to that in New York. I was going to work and I was walking up the stairs from the subway to the street when a woman in front of me struck a match to light a cigarette, and it singed the hair of the woman in front of her going up the stairs. I automatically gasped, because all I could see was this woman’s hair potentially going up in flames. The woman who struck the match heard my gasp, turned around and went “shut up, lady,” and then she smacked me. Everybody kind of stopped and, of course, being New York, they all then continued on up the stairs and I walked to class. Now what’s important is, I was wearing a bright red jacket with a red hood. It’s a perfect illustration of what that woman did when she turned around and saw me. She saw red, literally. And just acted on it. So, there you go. I never wore that jacket on the subway again.

“Seeing red”—now that expression makes sense!
Yes, exactly. So does feeling blue.

Yes. Wow! What else are you involved in outside of classroom teaching and your consulting work?
One of the most exciting things I do is design, direct, and host a film festival that’s held in a health spa in Mexico outside of Guadalajara. It’s called The Spa Rio Caliente. Rio Caliente means hot river. It’s a health spa that is very cutting edge in the middle of nowhere, and it’s very, very upscale. I’ve been going there for more than 20 years. They have a great film library, and we started showing and discussing films at night when there was nothing else to do. Gradually, more and more people started coming to these little impromptu meetings, so the director of the spa asked me if I would do this as an event. We just had our 6 th annual Rio Caliente Film Festival. People are now coming just for the festival. It’s very exciting. These are the demographics that I am very interested in reaching. They are the film lovers, the regular people who aren’t involved in making or studying, but who simply see—as the director of this spa sees—the value of sharpening your senses. It’s a visceral education, as it were, because we’ve become so dull.

Do you address sharpening your color senses in the book?
Yes. We possess the ability to really know what kind of a color to pick to affect a particular kind of emotional state. We all possess this ability. We just don’t know we have it and that’s precisely the reason for the book. Can I just read you a short paragraph?

Absolutely!
“How do you develop this ability…this facility with color? How could you use this powerful force to layer a story? ... First, and most importantly, you select your left brain and click ‘quit.’ You have to relinquish control of your thinking self and give it over to what you are feeling. This is not easy in a culture that prides itself on hard-nosed reason, and in which our softer perceptual skills are often dismissed. Most of us love to analyze films and love to talk about what we analyze. Indeed, we are often so busy analyzing the plot points that we are unaware of how we are being affected by what we see … We watch, but we don’t see, and we miss out on an experience that enriches our emotional core.” That’s my sermon.

It’s a good sermon.
Well, you know, I feel very strongly about this and it goes back to my being a teenager. When I was valedictorian of my high school class, every single guidance counselor, every single faculty member, plus parents and family, tried to dissuade me from majoring in art because that’s not what smart people did, you know. And so it’s really, really important to me to talk about this because this is what I really see as diminishing our level of a profound experience, and that’s very important.

Are color choices in films always planned?
I always get this question. And the answer is yes and the answer is no. I ask this question of cinematographers and the answer that I consistently get was that you can plan and plan and plan, but suddenly you’re thrown something, and you’ve got to make a decision on the spot. When John Seale talked about shooting Gorillas in the Mist, he said that they were walking through these gorgeous mists with all the native guides schlepping very heavy camera equipment, and when they turned a corner there was this gorgeous mist hovering over this mountain. So he just said throw me the camera, I’ve got to take this. You know, it’s very exciting to see how it’s a combination of planning and then also being ready to drop that plan because you’re shooting in a live environment. What’s wonderful is, especially for filmmakers and film students, is “all the best laid plans”—but you need to have those plans. In Malcolm X—I think Malcolm X is an absolutely brilliant movie—Wynn Thomas said he didn’t want any red in the movie until the assassination because he wanted that to really have impact. So they’re in Egypt shooting the scene that is supposed to take place in Mecca and the only carpet that he could get for a prayer rug in all of Cairo was red. So he had to quickly switch and go with it.

I interviewed the most incredible people who are either cinematographers or production designers for the book. There are eight of them. The production designers include Henry Bumstead, who has won two Oscars and is still a production designer at 92. He was the production designer for Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River, and Unforgiven, as well as To Kill A Mockingbird and The Sting going way back. There is Robert Boyle, to whom the book is dedicated. He was Hitchcock’s production designer and did North by Northwest andThe Birds. And then there is Larry Paull, who did Blade Runner. There is also Wynn Thomas, who did Malcolm X, and just finished Cinderella Man with Russell Crowe, directed by Ron Howard.

And then there are four cinematographers—John Seale, who won the Academy Award for The English Patient, Witness, Rainman and—you name it, he’s done it; Roger Deakens, who did The Shawshank Redemption; Ed Lachman, who did The Virgin Suicides and Far From Heaven.; and Amy Vincent, who recently won a cinematography prize at Sundance for the wonderful Hustle & Flow.

Is there any research going on in the field right now?
Not that I’ve been able to uncover. One of the reasons I wrote this book is there isn’t any accessible long-term, in-depth analysis on the effects of color on behavior; as well as the difference between the effects produced by transparent and opaque colors.

So this is very unique in a way.
Well, I think in a lot of ways. What is very encouraging to me is that in the last 2 weeks I’ve had lunch with vice presidents of both Technicolor and Color by Deluxe, and with people who are at ASC, the American Society of Cinematographers, and they have all expressed their gratitude to me for finally highlighting cinematographers and the production designers. These are people who are sometimes unsung. It’s true. You know all the actors’ names. You know all the directors’ names. But how many people know the names of the cinematographers and the production designers?

That’s so true. And they make the movies. Or I should say, they make them what they are.
Yes, so it’s only fair. It’s not against anybody; it’s just trying to highlight people who are extraordinary professionals.

I have one last question: Do you go to the library very often?
Actually, not a lot this year, although Venice, where I live, has a wonderful library. When I’m writing, I don’t like to read what anybody else is saying about the topic I’m writing about. But ask me how many times I had IMBd online, which is the internet movie database, and you’ll get like over seven times a week.

But, no, you know, I’m wrong. I do use the library because I go to the AFI library. I’m glad. I feel better. I was just thinking in terms of a public library. I get a lot of my information in terms of questions I have from the AFI librarian, Caroline Sisneros. She is just a wealth of information. So I’m using library services but mainly through the institutions where I teach. I do most of my research online, beginning with reading The New York Times online every morning. Google has become my best friend.

I love books. I’ve got a great personal library. I’m one of those people who would rather have the books at my disposal. If I know the book I want, I want to keep it! So I have, oh, hundreds and hundreds of books.

That’s the “thing” with the library-they want those books back!
Exactly!

Click here to email this article to a friend
Click here for more information on If it's Purple Someone's Gonna Die: The Power of Color in Visual Storytelling

This article by Joanna Drummond
j.drummond@elsevier.com