Laci Nikon brings to life the style and streetscapes of 1980s New York's "Golden Age" in his Netflix series Eric. His work can also be seen in quite a few other film worlds, where he appears in several graffiti and hundreds of different street doodles. He is the only one who can be found doing graffiti and illustration work for filmmakers.

Tell us about the start of your film career

I got my first job in front of the camera in 1998 or 1999. At that time I was already trying to be active in graffiti and I was still occasionally painting with an old dear friend and former OMC group mate Clor Lacy. Clor's girlfriend at the time's dad was either a film studio owner or the owner of one of the film production companies, but he was certainly someone important in the film world. So when they were looking for a graffiti artist for one of their foreign commercials, they went straight to Clor Lac through his girlfriend.

The designer has dreamed up a variety of graffiti backgrounds, mostly in the style of the famous Japanese manga or anime. Clor couldn't and didn't want to paint characters, but I had both, could and wanted to. Fun fact, the name of the graffiti team we shared when we were young was the now rather lame-sounding OMC, Original Manga Crew - given that we were very into manga and it was a very popular style in the mid-90s. With this little knowledge and enthusiasm I set to work on what was, by the way, a commercial for Orange's mobile network in Israel.

I got the job from Péter Kovács, to whom I will be forever grateful. I worked with Peter and BK many times later on. I did the job for 2-3 days. It was the first work I did for any kind of motion picture production and it automatically attracted more work to follow. The client likes a contractor who is reliable, who works well and who can be relied on once he has a proven track record and as all of these were true for me, I stayed in the loop.

How long have you worked in the film industry?

After the Orange commercial in the late 90's, I worked steadily for commercials and films from time to time. I worked together with director Bence Miklauzic, that's when we met Csaba Pindroch and by chance I did extras with Pál Jávor's great-grandson Bence Jávor, who probably doesn't remember me.

The first Hollywood production I worked on was Hellboy 2, which was shot at the Korda studio in Etyek. It should be noted that I had the help of my former scribbler friends Band and Crape. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first big production at Korda and the time when the production of American films in Hungary really took off.

From the streets to the film studios

I saw the first film work not as a new era but as a new work. As for the people working in the world of film shooting, I must mention that I am just a piece of dust in the machinery and - I am thinking mainly of the professionals in the domestic film industry - almost everyone has a much more important and highly skilled job. These professionals are very good at a lot of things, but for a task they are less familiar with, they tend to go to someone more competent in the field in order to get the best possible result.

I know graffiti painting and the representation of this cultural environment, and I know this world, so since quite a lot of productions are set in a "world" where graffiti is present, I got and stayed involved in the film cycle. It was a slow and gradual build up.

What it was like to be an active creator on Netflix Eric mini-series?

I've worked on quite a lot of productions so I didn't feel any different, it just started out as the same work as all the other films. However, it was a little different from the other productions in that the atmosphere was much more friendly and the collaboration was more flexible. My dear and old friend Mátyás Vándor was the production manager who invited me to work on this project, but it was important that it was not just a friendly but also a professional and trusting relationship.

Also thanks to my dear friend, Zoe Nemes, I was able to help the costume department by designing T-shirt designs for the production, so in Eric, besides the graffiti, the audience can also see several T-shirt designs designed by me.

Coming back to the team, together they brought the work much closer in spirit than other similar jobs usually do. The atmosphere for me and, as I have heard, for others, remained much friendlier. It was really good to work together.

Who have you worked with?

As I work alone, I did not have any colleagues closely related to my work. The truth is that I only met some of the creative staff, and he only met them occasionally. I worked outside on the set all the time, that is, I went to the sets that were being built, which were usually always in different locations. My supervisors in the graffiti work were the scenic designers Alex Holmes and Peter Findley, but it's not a boss-employee relationship, it's more of a collaborative working relationship.

Because I'm the only one who really knows my work, even the best visual designer can't necessarily tell the difference between graffiti and graffiti, obviously they can see and understand the styles but they don't understand it as well as I do, but they don't have to, it's my responsibility, it's enough if I know my stuff.

We also had closer collaborations with Veronika Toldi, one of the art directors, but we only met Krisztián Király, the illustrator who also wrote a story in Forbes, after the production, on a reshoot, and I remember that we met Luca Panna Gulyás maybe only once. I should also mention my friend Márton Máté-Tóth.

Marci is also a former graffiti artist, so he comes from the graffiti world himself, but in the film industry he is a first-class sign painter, but in this production he worked alongside me as a scenic painter, painting the walls and dirt on the sets. I painted and wrote and he aged right after me.

Design processes

The design in this case was similar to that of Continental. There I had to recreate the New York style and streetscape of the 70s, here the 80s. First, I invented and wrote down dozens of fictitious names, teams and all the text that might appear in the real world. I also digitally drew ten or twenty elaborate styles specific to the time and place. However, these are only enough for a very small number of locations, the rest I make up as I go along.

The placement, colour and density of the styles are all determined by the location, so it is not possible to plan very precisely in advance. The subway scenes have quite an interesting history. As you can see from my photos, the photos of the empty subway car have far fewer tags and doodles than the film that appear while the main character is talking to the monster. This is because this otherwise built - and therefore not real - single subway car actually played two or three subway cars in the movie.

I have really good photos of the doodles for the first scene, when I was working alone in the studio on the metro. By the time the subway was quite and then later on very spread out, as you can see in the film, the shooting was already going on with the whole crew and a few scenes later, so I couldn't take spectacular photos of them, because the crew was rushing around inside in the car. I also took photos of these scenes from the monitors exposed to the crew, and only saw them later in the film.

Set in three "different" metro cars, the scenes were filmed in a single day. Between the scenes, during the camera changeover, we had 10-15 minutes to get into the carriage, where both the entire crew, in full equipment, and some of the actors were present. During those 10-15 minutes we had to quickly wash off the tags and scribbles that had already been shot and write completely new ones in different places, which Marci immediately aged.

Meanwhile, the set decorator swapped out the ads, posters, etc. in the background, so we were practically making another subway car for a next scene in no time.

It was very tense and fast work, by the end of the day we were very tired but we did a good job so we could finish the day satisfied.