Of all the great places I get to go for transfer work, London is probably my favorite. First off, everyone speaks English, and there’s an abundance of great Indian food. But there’s also the excitement that when the workday ends, you end up at the pub. I truly believe that this is how most of the English get through the workday. Another nice thing is that it’s pretty easy to get to London from New York—just a little longer than a flight to L.A. And speaking of the flight, I get to fly on Virgin Atlantic, which has the best film selection, so the flight whizzes by. I finally got to see Control and Waitress, two movies I never got around to seeing in the theater.

The main reason I most recently went to London was for The Thief of Bagdad. This has been a really involved title for a lot of us. The film has been out on DVD before, so Karen, Maria, Heather, and myself spent a long time comparing existing versions to see what we could improve. Thief is in glorious Technicolor and was one of the first films to use multiple special effects, such as blue screen. It’s beloved by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas, just to name a few. As a matter of fact, Karen is working on some great extras for the DVD, including a commentary with Scorsese and Coppola, and a piece on the special effects with Craig Baron (Matte World Digital), Dennis Muren (Industrial Light & Magic), and legendary filmmaker Ray Harryhausen.

We enlisted Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who was married to Michael Powell, to help with this one, since Powell was one of the directors of the film and she has a lot of knowledge about his involvement in Thief and is invested in preserving his archive. Scorsese holds an original 35 mm nitrate print of the film in his vaults, and we set off to try and screen it together. This was no easy task. There aren’t too many places around willing to project nitrate, since it’s superflammable (think of that scene in Cinema Paradiso.) Then there’s the simple matter of finding someone willing to even ship it. But we managed to set it up in New York, and all got together to watch the print, along with most of Criterion’s QC and audio department. It was a pretty exciting opportunity to view an original print from that era—kind of like opening an old bottle of wine and hoping it has aged well.

After the “shrinkage expert” determined that it was safe to screen, we concluded that the film looked pretty good. After the nitrate, we also watched a bit of the BFI’s restored print of Thief, and we were able to compare the colors of more recent celluloid to the nitrate version. Along with Thelma, we talked about Technicolor and what it made sense to try and achieve in the new transfer. Scorsese would have some ideas as well. I then went off to London and looked at two original elements for potential transfer: a mid-nineties version and another, late-seventies version. I settled on the latter, as it had better color, betting timings, and better resolution. I was quite surprised by this, as I had expected the newer one to be better. But the newer one looked as though one of the three strips had shrunk a bit, causing a registration problem. This is often an issue in Technicolor restorations, which is why we see the “bleeding” of colors onto other colors.

After scanning the seventies negative in 2k resolution, I sent the data off to L.A., where Maria will finish the color correction, then show it to Thelma and Dennis Muren for one last check. Dennis has a really good idea about how the special effects should look, so his input is going to be really helpful. The images will come back to New York for restoration work, and we’ll author and replicate the DVDs. New York to London to Los Angeles to New York to your home—just another typical work flow for a Criterion title.

From upstairs at the Brasserie Lipp in Paris, you have a perfect view of the Café de Flore, directly across the boulevard Saint-Germain. Both are famous Left Bank institutions where filmmakers such as Louis Malle, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard rubbed shoulders with musicians, fashion designers, and literati alike. (A good shot of le Lipp, as it’s known locally, can be seen in Malle’s The Fire Within [Le feu follet], as Alain Leroy, played by Maurice Ronet, sits outside at the Café de Flore, facing the boulevard, and facing his first drink in months.)

Upstairs at the Lipp, surrounded by original nineteenth-century crystal sconces and wall-length mirrors, cameraman André Bonzel, audio recordist Sylvain Ripaud, camera assistant Juraj Krasnohorsky, and I were setting up the shot for a video interview with the major darling of the nouvelle vague, Anna Karina. The maître d’ told us that she preferred to sit by the window. “It would be a nice-looking shot,” he said, with the refined wood molding and metal detailing. “It will look very French.” “But it doesn’t sparkle enough,” I responded, “like this room sparkles and like Anna Karina sparkles.” The interview was to accompany our special edition of Pierrot le fou. And after a publicized marriage to Godard, a few suicide attempts, a miscarriage of her child with Godard, and her ultimate divorce from him, Karina still manages to sparkle in Pierrot.

We could have used another thirty minutes to set up the shot when Karina arrived. She was ready to roll, with her dangley heart-shaped earrings jangling softly under her panama hat. As the producer of our DVD, I had a plan, a story I wanted to capture with the interview. In 1965, at Cannes, Karina was interviewed for the premiere of Pierrot. “Marianne is really a combination of all the characters I played for Jean-Luc: Angéla, Nana, Veronique,” she had said. My idea was to explore this comment with her—how Marianne Renoir was like a retrospective of all her roles with Godard. To me this said a great deal about the point in Godard’s career when he made Pierrot, reflecting on the past and, in the same breath, bidding it farewell.

I’d heard Karina likes champagne, so we ordered a bottle, popped the cork, and sat down to record. Pretty soon into the session, I posed the idea about her role of Marianne being “retrospective.”

“No, not at all. All my roles with Jean-Luc were so different. I loved to change my character, be someone new. My work with Jean-Luc was like a gift. My characters were all so different every time. Natasha in Alphaville has nothing to do with Nana in Vivre sa vie, has nothing to do with Angéla in A Woman Is a Woman, or with Marianne. And I looked so different in each one. Different hair and makeup, the way I dressed . . .” My plan had been swiftly foiled. “But I saw the interview from ’65 when you said . . . ” How could I say that, charge her with changing her mind, charge her with contradicting something she said almost forty years ago? Well, you can’t. Or at least I couldn’t. Nor did I have to, since the ’65 Cannes piece would be included on our DVD release.

So we can let the pictures speak for themselves. Anna Karina was captured vividly, and with total clarity, by cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s lens, every time. She beckons us to watch her, wearing a new wig, new coat and dress, in 1.33, in 2.35, black and white, color—but always sparkling as Anna Karina.

Appropriately for Fassbinder's fifteen-hour masterpiece, the process of coming up with a design for Berlin Alexanderplatz was epic. With a monumental film like this, there's obviously no shortage of possible concepts, but the biggest challenge is finding a design that can speak not just to one aspect, but to the film as a whole. At first I didn't really have much conceptual grounding beyond a sense of the color scheme I wanted (the particular browns of the film). The obvious solution was to focus on the main character, Franz Biberkopf, so that was where I started.

This was probably the best simple portrait image we had, but I was having trouble finding a compelling way to present it:



I tried incorporating this interesting archival photo of the actual Alexanderplatz in Berlin, but as I realized later, focusing on the history rather than the character wasn't going to be the way to go:



The birds on this next one (which are some sort of clip art, I forget from where--I probably would have sourced better imagery had we gone forward with this idea) are, of course, a reference to the canary that Mieze buys for Franz. (As an aside, having worked on Miss Julie just after this--what's up with the homicidal grudge these filmmakers seem to have against birds?) The birds were also inspired by John Gall's design for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle cover, which I was obsessed with for a few weeks there.



There's something about this gesture, where Franz grabs a woman by the neck as prelude to an embrace, that seems very evocative of the film to me: it's brutish and violent, but it's how he shows his affection and love. It's typical of the way Franz seems to lumber through his life. Unfortunately, I was never quite able to capture it in any visually interesting way.



Normally, I do my comps in Photoshop, but for whatever reason I did all the above in InDesign--and quickly remembered why I normally do my comps in Photoshop. So I switched back to try to rethink the design. As I found in the first batch of comps, the existing black-letter title treatment from the film was difficult to incorporate into the design in a bold way, mostly because "Alexanderplatz" is such a long, unwieldy word (and I say that as someone who took seven years' worth of middle- and high-school German classes). So I tried breaking it up and playing with scale, and wound up here (with the idea that we could print the type and ornamentation in gold foil):



Then I took that same treatment and applied it to the archival image.



But I was quickly becoming bored with that approach, so I went looking for design inspiration. Through some convergence of Google links, I stumbled on these posters advertising Egon Schiele shows:



There's no direct connection (that I know of, anyway) between Schiele and Fassbinder, but they seem to have a few of the same preoccupations, and something about these images just clicked with me--finally, something that evoked the period of the film without sacrificing its modernist ambitions. So I decided to steal Schiele's type idea: I broke out some Sharpies and started drawing the type. Once I got something I liked, I combined it with some photography, and voila:



That image fit the space well, but I was a little worried it made the film feel too much like a traditional romance. (Mieze's bloody nose certainly adds a bit of darkness to the photo, but a quick survey found that very few people noticed without having it pointed out to them.) So I tried the old standby Franz-at-the-pub shot:



I liked where those were going, but I began to get a little nervous that others wouldn't like the hand-drawn type, so I tried a similar effect with regular fonts. Contrasting the portrait of Franz with the violent image above seemed like an interesting way to add some complexity that had been missing from the previous "portrait" comps.



I liked that idea enough that I tried it again with the other title treatment:



We all talked through that second batch. Producer Issa Clubb and I (as well as some others around the office) had a fondness for the handmade type, but Peter Becker had some hesitation, and no one was quite jumping up and down for joy about any of them, so I went back to the drawing board to try to come up with some new directions.

This next one was an attempt to capitalize on the shock value of the image--it's repeated several times throughout the film and is clearly a defining event in Franz's life. There's something compelling about an image that says so much about Franz without actually showing him--in fact, the photo is all about his absence, really--so I thought it was kind of a bold choice for a cover. Ultimately probably not expansive enough to represent the whole film, though:



Another simple, elegant (read: boring) take on the portrait idea:



And then this one, which I have no real justification for other than trying an unexpected approach:



But none of them had any real staying power. After a lot of back and forth, we had pretty much whittled it down to two options that stuck with everyone:



At some point, we started to frame the debate in terms of artistic confrontation vs. what Peter self-effacingly termed "bourgeois sensibilities." The gold foil black-letter title treatment with the nostalgic cityscape photo came to represent a monument to the film's capital G Greatness, and the gold foil idea would have gone a long way toward convincing people they're getting their money's worth when they shell out their hard-earned cash. The hand-drawn type came to represent the particular ambition and more confrontational sensibilities of Fassbinder or novelist Alfred Doblin, an attempt to engage the film on its own terms rather than from a critical distance.

After submitting that "nostalgia" comp, I had become convinced it was the wrong way to go--the film doesn't really feel like a period piece, and I think that image promises a kind of nostalgia that doesn't have anything to do with the film. So I was pushing pretty hard for the hand-drawn type, but there were still some reservations. Peter was worried about evoking what he called the "Mickey Hart Drumming Around the World" look. (Speaking of that type, which I don't really think is that close to the Berlin type, actually, here's a very interesting article on the bizarre, "jingoistic" use of that particular style of typography. (link via India, Ink.)) So we asked font guru F. Ron Miller (designer of such Criterion titles as Kind Hearts and Coronets and Masculin feminin) to delve into the history of that type, to double check that we weren't making any references we weren't comfortable with, and he sent us the following background info:

"According to The Modern Poster, (Museum of Modern Art, 1988), the second image you referenced--the one of the figures at the table reading--is a lithograph solely attributed to Egon Schiele. I assume the whole thing was created by his hand. The poster is dated 1918. The style of the type is by no means his alone, though I'd say it's emblematic of the expressionist movement. I'd call the style Germanic rather than German per se. The Austrians affect it, as do the Swiss. Birds of a feather. Here's a couple more in the same 'style'. The first is Oskar Kokoschka (1907), and the second is Max Oppenheimer (1911)."

So with Ron's help we all got more comfortable with the type on an intellectual level, but something about that comp was still rubbing Peter the wrong way--eventually he came to the conclusion that he just didn't like the way it was interacting with the photography. The original posters, he said, had a coherence that was lacking here, since they were all produced by a single hand. That's hard to argue with, especially considering the hand in question was Egon Schiele's!

So, as kind of a Hail Mary pass at the hand-drawn idea, I decided to try drawing it myself. Apart from the Wajda box, I've been kind of out of practice with actual hand-drawing the past few years--I've definitely focused more on Photoshop and InDesign. I decided to take an old drawing style I hadn't used since college out of mothballs, one that I thought had a bit of Weimar flavor without being a particular reference to anything other than itself. Certainly it doesn't look anything like Schiele. Using that as a foundation, I built an image of Franz to fit into the existing title treatment. I wound up being pretty happy with it, and everyone else was too, as that wound up being the approved cover:



(For more on the technique involved in creating the final image, check out my design process blog, Cozy Lummox.)

We've received a number of letters recently inquiring about the various versions of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. I've been immersed in the film for several months now and wanted to clarify a few misconceptions.

When I started working on the project, I began with the assumption that we would be releasing both versions of the film--the original theatrical version (165 minutes, on the NTSC version) and the "director's cut" (218 minutes, NTSC). Knowing that mastering would be the first step in the process, I reached out to the cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, as we wanted him to be involved in a new HD transfer of the film for our release. He wrote back right away, mentioning that he had supervised a 2K transfer of the film in Rome a year or so back. I had accumulated the various European DVD releases of the film--all of which featured both versions--so I asked him which version he had transferred. His response was surprising. He said that the director-approved version of the film (and the one he supervised) was the one we all knew from seeing it screened in theaters in 1987--the 165-minute version.

Not long after we began corresponding, Storaro came to New York, and when we met he explained the story behind the two different cuts. The filmmakers had been required to deliver a four-hour television version as part of their original deal. They delivered four 50-plus-minute episodes, accounting for the 218-minute length. Gabriella Cristiani, the editor, and Bertolucci then continued editing until they had the picture they wanted. The film screened in movie theaters in 1987--and which swept the Oscars--is Bertolucci's final cut.

Because we wanted this to be a "director-approved" release, I contacted Bertolucci, and he confirmed the above with the following response, which I cherish:

"I would be very pleased to present the theatrical version for The Last Emperor, but I'm perplexed on presenting the director's cut, because I wouldn't know what else to say about a version that in my opinion is not much different from the other one, just a little bit more boring (as very often the director's cut can be). That's my sincere feeling."

It seems that in the past few years, the television version has been improperly marketed as the approved "director's cut." Our four-disc edition will also include this longer version, which is fascinating in its own right, but it will be called precisely what it is--the television version. In the past, we've released television versions of films (Fanny and Alexander and Scenes from a Marriage, to name two) that were the directors' preferred cuts. In this case, we wanted to show the alternative--the different ways a director can refine and achieve his final vision.