When I started preparing for a new transfer of The Ice Storm, I asked director Ang Lee if he wanted to supervise the session. Ang said that he’d like the cinematographer, Fred Elmes, to supervise, and that he would come in at the end and review the color correction with us. That’s typically the way many directors go about the process these days, although they’re all different. Years ago, it wasn’t so easy to get a director in the room for a color-correction session, but things have changed. As Ang put it, “More people are watching the film on video than they are in the theater, and this is the way the film is going to live and be seen.”

I often find that directors are noncommittal about coming into a transfer session. When I asked Lars von Trier to come in for Zentropa recently, he said, “Thanks, but we trust you to do a good job.” That’s while I was in Copenhagen, mind you, just a few miles away! (Luckily I got to screen an original print at the lab while timing, therefore keeping the original ideas intact.) Then there is Jim Jarmusch, the complete opposite. Jim not only wants to watch the color correction, but he wants to review any fixes, check the compression on the DVD, and talk through the entire process. There were a few issues with Down by Law that had to be corrected in the transfer room, and Jim spent hours on one scene, making sure the black and white levels in the swamp were just right.

Like many filmmakers, Ang Lee knows that it’s as important to grade the video master as it is the prints. He also knows that you have to emphasize certain things for the small screen that you wouldn’t normally for a print being projected on a huge screen. I called Fred Elmes to come in for the Ice Storm transfer, and Fred wanted to try grading the film in the theater at Technicolor in New York. I hadn’t had this request before, since the theater is typically used for digital intermediate work—color correcting a digital scan of the original negative that will eventually be output back to film. It’s not normally used for video remastering. I phoned Joe Gawler at Technicolor, one of our favorite colorists, and told him Fred’s idea. Joe was intrigued and set about getting his engineers to do some tests. After a few weeks, Joe felt confident that it could work. Fred came in and was thrilled that we were doing it this way. We color corrected for days like this, and I have to admit, it was pretty nice seeing the film so large on the big screen. Ang finally came in, and vetoed the projector idea. He felt that although it was nice to see it like this, it wasn’t going to be representative of the typical home viewer’s experience, since most people would be watching on CRTs or 30- to 50-inch LCD or plasma screens. We then sat in the back of this giant theater gathered around a 24-inch CRT monitor, finalizing the color of The Ice Storm. I told Ang that we might want to trade the CRT for an iPod since lots of people are watching stuff on them as well. We all cracked up imagining ourselves gathered around an iPod for eight hours grading The Ice Storm. Is it really that far away?

I didn’t create the Criterion office’s word-of-the-day bulletin board, but I’m the latest logophile to carry the torch, er, dry-erase marker and update the white board in the kitchen. Occasionally someone will ask me what a certain word means (psocid was particularly popular), but for the most part I just write one each morning while I’m waiting for the coffee to brew and imagine that it’s quietly fomenting an atmosphere of word appreciation throughout the day.

I often get the word of the day from one of the countless scraps littering my purse: words discovered while reading and compulsively scribbled on the back of bookmarks, receipts, Netflix envelopes, or gum wrappers. Some are only suitable for the Urban Dictionary (um, deekis?), but many (especially if I’m reading Cormac McCarthy) find their way to the board later on. For a peek at the dense and violent verbal jungle of Blood Meridian, or simply a preview of some words of the day to come, here are the latest bookmark scrawlings: suzerain, ciborium, groundsel, argosy, esker.

It was Michael in editorial who caught on to my favorite word-harvesting technique: lifting them from the essays written for our DVD booklets. When John Simon’s essay for Sawdust and Tinsel was making the proofing rounds, adumbrate and etiolated (words Michael had also noticed) appeared on the white board soon after. Luc Sante’s “My Lost City,” for Stranger Than Paradise, was another treasure trove of great words: glassine, souk, dipsomaniac, and apotheosis, to name a few. Even just this week, when reading an older essay (Peter Cowie on The Seventh Seal), I jotted down louring for future reference. Cleaning off my desk always turns up at least a half dozen crinkled Post-it notes that at first glance may read like an incantation: boreal, pandect, superjacent, jeremiad. But if reading them can conjure up a desire to sit down and watch the film they described, perhaps that impression isn’t too far off the mark.

From an interview with Ang Lee in the Northwest Asia Weekly:

NWAW: Two years ago, you recorded an introduction for The Criterion Collection DVD of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, a film that had a tremendous impact on you as a student in Taiwan. Does Bergman continue to be an influence? Is there a trace of him in Lust, Caution?

Lee: During preproduction, I was told there would be a delay in the art direction, so I got a chance to go to his island to see the man himself. This was a spiritual pilgrimage, to give me the strength to finish this movie. Lust, Caution is more film noir than Bergman. It doesn’t ask where God is. It’s a much more Buddhist, existential deconstruct.

In the time we had together, he mostly asked how I worked with actors. And I said to him, sometimes I hate myself because I tear them apart to see myself. I tear them (he pantomimes ripping something in half), kill them to expose what’s underneath—that’s how I feel about my relationship with actors.

Bergman said, “You have to love your actors.” He was a very warm, lovely person. Because of The Virgin Spring, it felt like 30-some years ago the man took my innocence. And then years later, he gave me a very motherly hug. It’s a strange, miraculous, magic power. I never think the way I make movies has any relation to his; he’s like God to me. I will take inspiration. I won’t dare to imitate. But a hug is a hug, filmmaker to filmmaker.

Longtime Criterionites remember the days when we were a part of the Voyager Company. Voyager had a long history of innovations, hooking up laserdisc players to early Macintosh computers to explore the world’s museums or inventing interactive software to explore classical music on the first consumer CD-ROMs, but what has always been at the heart of the Voyager ideal is the concept of publishing. The original circa-1984 Criterion logo, lovingly known as the “P” around here, was actually a book turning into a disc, and it wasn’t long before Voyager made the eBook a floppy-disc reality when it brought out the expanded book tool kit in 1992 and started publishing Random House’s Modern Library in electronic form. Many of the eighty or so CD-ROM projects that followed were built on the ideas behind the expanded book tool kit, and Voyager founder Bob Stein has continued to push the boundaries with his Institute for the Future of the Book. But the most recent innovation to come out of the Voyager legacy is from Voyager Japan, our intrepid overseas partner company run by Masaaki Hagino. Apologies for the Japanese link—the Babelfish-style English translation is not much help—but it seems Voyager Japan has created an eBook reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Congratulations, Hagino!

On another note, Lee had Vittorio Storaro in the office last week to ask him some questions about the transfer on The Last Emperor. For anyone who doesn’t know, Storaro is the cinematographer who shot Last Tango in Paris, Apocalypse Now, Reds, The Conformist, and on and on. There’s a game we play sometimes—Is so-and-so a master? We always say it takes three great films. Storaro is definitely a master, and it’s always a special occasion when someone of that stature passes through. The Last Emperor was transferred in Rome under Storaro’s supervision, and he had made some surprising choices. Lee and Stéphane went through the HD master in detail with him, asking questions about color, light, and framing, and Storaro answered them one by one. Afterward, Lee brought him around, and a few of us hung out and talked with him. He’s a whirlwind. Any question ties into a theory or an overlooked fact. Colors have absolute emotional resonances and inherent meanings. The ideal aspect ratio of film is 2.0:1 (so all future TV sets should be 18:9). Movie theaters in Europe project faster than theaters in America because of the differences in current. 50 kHz and 60 kHz? At this point I’m in way over my head, but it was fascinating to hear how he ties the world together. Everything is connected, and he seems to harbor absolutely no doubt about his views. As I listened to him, I couldn’t help thinking that even aside from his mastery of his art, I’ve never met anyone who so totally embodies the sentence from Emerson “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.”

And finally, the cinematic equivalent of "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall," but a lot more work!