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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Why didn't you do "Citizen Kane" again?
"Citizen Kane" is at Warner and we didn't own the rights or anything. And we never wanted people to believe that Criterion on DVD was simply going to be a replica of Criterion on laser. The collection is a living entity and constantly growing. When we did "The Third Man" on laser disc there were no supplements at all. We could have slavishly followed our old policy and put "The Third Man" out on DVD with no supplements but that would have been a dull thing to do.
Anyhow, on "Grand Illusion," we made two trips to France but really weren't happy. We were getting a better picture because the transfer process had improved since the last time we had handled the elements: We were seeing better grays and blacks and finer contrasts. But we were still seeing a lot of the artifacts that were the result of the 1958 release. Then we got this call from the Cinimathhque Frangaise saying that they had pulled in a bunch of films from the Cinimathhque Toulouse and that they thought they had something we would want to see.
We went over, hung it up, took a look, and there was the original camera negative of "Grand Illusion," with Russian leader on it. It had clearly been taken care of, though it had passed through all these hands. It was a piece of World War II history and cinema history. And it was an amazing moment, almost as if you had put your finger on a socket and all of a sudden all the circuits were buzzing all at once.
Because of this huge historic find, everyone agreed that this thing needed to be out in the theaters. Now I get to look at a beautiful Paul Davis poster of "Grand Illusion" and every time I see it be reminded that we had something to do with bringing the film back in front of people the way it was meant to be seen.
What projects are you working on now?
We're trying to determine what the right course of action is with "Gimme Shelter," which is going to have its 30th anniversary this year. It'll be back out in theaters the end of the summer. That's a film that is not in jeopardy, but has never gone out uncensored. And it's especially strange to have a piece of cinima-viriti, something out of the direct-cinema documentary movement, come out with bleeps in it.
Audio repair work has been done on it, but it was never married to film before. And you get into the whole audio question: the standard array for speakers in a theater has changed since a lot of these films were made, and there's an open question as to how one should handle certain kinds of films.
Do we think it was a good thing or a bad thing that "Yellow Submarine" came out in Surroundsound? There are lots of purists who would say it is a bad thing on principle, because that's not the way the film was originally released. On the other hand, the alternative argument says, if one can be faithful to the original intentions of a piece and make it more suitable for the current viewing environment, that might be the way. For us it ends up being a question of in general erring on the side of safety where subjective considerations are concerned -- there's nothing more frustrating than going to see something that is purportedly restored and hearing things that you just know are wrong.
We ask the question all the time: Does this need to be remixed? If it does need to be remixed, is the sound designer alive? In the case of "Picnic at Hanging Rock," it was Peter Weir's baby beginning to end. He's the one who helped us make that decision and said absolutely, let's do it. He thought the soundtrack was essential and should permeate the entire film and should fill the theater. He thought it would be better all-in-all if we went back and created a new Dolby Digital mix and took advantage of the new technology.
On the other hand, we're not about to pick up Reni Clair's "Le Million" and, just because it was an early sound-period film, split it into five channels. That's just wrong. When you cross the line from restoration and preservation to something else is the question. But I'm not sure that "something else" is inherently evil. One has to be honest about what one is doing.
And you have to be sure that somewhere the original will still exist.
Exactly. We want to raise awareness of what conditions these things are in out in the world. As people watch DVDs they expect to see a perfect digital image. People forget that these things are in trouble. When we put something out from a pristine element that didn't need any monkeying around with, I'll get a letter about a hair in some frame, with the frame number. It's like complaining about a Rembrandt because it has one of his eyelashes stuck in it -- or saying that if we make a postcard of it we should at least take that eyelash out.
In "Spartacus," we're looking at a scene where there's a light leak in the top of the camera -- and what do you do about that? I still don't know whether to fix the light leak. Kubrick couldn't for film when he made it; but for us on video it is relatively easy to do. I find it distracting but it is with great trepidation that I would go mess with it. It's a mechanical medium. I think people should get used to seeing that kind of thing -- and stay a little bit used to seeing the imperfections -- because it reminds you that way back there is an original piece of film.
When you see a piece of printed-in dirt on a piece of film (and generally we try to remove almost everything we can find that is at all distracting), in a way it's a reminder that there is one piece of film that passed through the camera that was being looked at through the eye piece by one of the world's great directors.
Just as there's only one "Mona Lisa," there's only one camera negative of "Grand Illusion" and only one existing print of Carl Theodore Dreyer's original version of "The Passion of Joan of Arc." And then there are many films that have been completely lost. People can become fanatical about wanting crisp clarity -- to the point where I also see that there's a subset of people who are annoyed by seeing film grain, which is part of the essence of film.
When we make DVDs, we try to preserve a sense of the grain even though we know that by the time it is fed through your television set it is nothing more than an impression of the texture of the film. That impression is important, and it's easy to wipe out -- just crank up your noise reducer and it will turn everything into television. This is not television, it is film, and that grain has its own elegant dance to do on your screen.
What has been the response to your up-market pricing? [Most Criterion releases retail at $29.95 and $39.95.]
It's been our pleasure to be able to be substantially closer to the market price than we were on laser. Our stuff on laser was about on a 100 percent premium compared to other discs; we were priced between $50 and $150. That was partly a factor in the difference in cost between lasers and actual DVDs. Now we're only about 10 bucks above market -- as far as street pricing goes, that may mean paying $23.95 instead of $18.95 -- and that's about as close as we'll ever be able to be.
But in the end we're putting so much work, research, actual money into making new film elements where necessary, doing digital restoration work, acquiring supplementary material, that we really have no choice but to share the cost with the people who are building their home collections. One of the challenges is to get people to come to the collection for the first time, because once they come they tend to come back. Over time they find that some percentage of their shelf is Criterion discs and that they like the way that shelf looks.
It's expensive to offer real value. We don't want to find ourselves in a position where we're cutting corners because there's no margin to support the work that we do. Part of the love of it is being able to do it right. On the one hand, if we were a huge deep-pocketed studio we might be able to write off any losses for particular releases on a line that would vanish in a corporate report.
In reality we're a small private company and we've got to float on our own. But in a large corporate environment it would be more likely for someone to ask "Couldn't you have done this without spending $15,000 on this new element?" The answer would be, yes we could have but the disc wouldn't have been as good. And it's important to uphold people's expectations.
