‘I heard you paint houses’ in 29 Languages
There’s a sequence in Martin Scorsese’s film The Irishman that consumed Randy Balsmeyer (Art BFA 73) for weeks. It’s a seemingly simple series of text seen a few minutes into the film. White block letters flash on black:
I HEARD (then a shot of a moving road)
YOU (more moving road)
PAINT HOUSES.
It’s code for “I understand you do assassinations.” But because this movie was released on Netflix, and would play in more than 190 countries, the text needed translation. As title designer for The Irishman, that fell to Balsmeyer, who worked with Scorsese’s editors and Netflix translators around the world. “My job is to make it all get on screen, make sense, and look good,” he says. “It was 29 languages that we did it for.” The back-and-forth to adapt that sequence, and others with text in the film, took two months.
For Balsmeyer, globalization is simply the latest adjustment in the ever-changing film industry, where he’s worked since the 1980s, doing title design, visual effects, cinematography, and directing alongside notable filmmakers such as David Cronenberg, Joel and Ethan Coen, Jim Jarmusch, and Scorsese.