Animal Kingdom, trailer & posters

This looks like one to keep an eye on. In a profile/preview from Sundance, the LATimes Kenneth Turan wrote:

[Director] David Michod has always been taken by crime stories, feeling “there’s something innately fascinating about people who live dangerously marginal lives where the stakes are so high.” When he moved to Melbourne and read a series of true crime books about the city, “I started getting excited about doing a big crime story set there.”

“Animal Kingdom” is a fatalistic, operatic tale of what transpires when a 17-year-old (James Frecheville) moves in with his terrifying trio of criminal uncles and their even more unnerving mother and comes to attract the attention of a somber cop, played by the film’s biggest name, Guy Pearce. “Initially, I just wrote it, the idea of directing felt like a pipe dream,” Michod remembers. “As I kept going, I fell in love with the characters and wrote for particular actors,” like Ben Mendelsohn, who plays the frightening Uncle Pope, and Australian icon Jacki Weaver as a scary mother named Smurf. More than that, “as the years passed, I became so emotionally attached I feared giving it to someone else to screw up.”

(continued, with 3 versions of the poster after the cut)

Because his vision for the film was so specific (“dark and violent yet beautiful and poetic at the same time”), Michod found he had trouble getting potential backers to see it. “I realized people were able to read the script in different ways: as a Guy Ritchie movie, a Quentin Tarantino movie, a Michael Mann movie. So I made a short film [2007’s award-winning “Crossbow”] that was able to communicate what I wanted it to be. It worked wonders.”

Far from regretting the time spent developing “Animal Kingdom,” Michod says he’s glad “no one offered me the chance” earlier on. He spent many of those years working for a top Australian cinema journal Inside Film. “I loved learning about the craft and the business and I met people it was handy to know,” he says. Finally, however, “I got tired of writing about what other people were doing.” It’s not something he’s going to have to worry about again.

(click to enlarge)
*Three poster design philosophies happening here. Which works best for you?