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Restoring 'A Matter of Life and
Death:' An Interview with Grover Crisp By Morgan Gossett Oct 06 2000
Sony Picture Entertainment (SPE) and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held the American premiere of the restored print July 21 at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles. The new restoration from SPE and the Academy Film Archive, done in collaboration with the British Film Institute's National Film, Television and Video Archive, was overseen by Grover Crisp, Sony's vice president of asset management and film restoration and Michael Pogorzelski of the Academy’s Film Archive. CinematographyWorld talked to Crisp about giving new life to a timeless classic. Explain the process you went through to restore the film. What condition did you find it in and what did you do to rectify that? The work on this title actually began at the request of Thelma Schoonmacher, a film editor as well as the widow of Michael Powell. She wasn't entirely happy with some of the work that had been done earlier on the film and felt that it could be improved somewhat. We decided to start from scratch and take a look at everything we could. We went through material that we have here at the studio and got in contact with Ann Fleming at the British Film Institute (BFI) regarding their holdings and what kind of work the BFI had undertaken in the past. As it turned out, they were not entirely happy either with the work that had been done up to then on "Life and Death," which dates back a couple decades when it was first undertaken by the BFI. The later restoration -- as it was termed in 1995, when the film toured this country -- was a bit of marketing I'm afraid, since there really was no new work done in 1995, and the release relied on the earlier restoration, which was as good as could be done at the time. What basically happened was that some new prints had been struck from an internegative in London at Rank Lab that had been made from an interpositive element that was not really the best quality to produce what would result in good prints. In discussing this with Ann, I also brought in Michael Friend from the Academy Film Archive to join the discussion about what needed to be done. We determined that if we could get access to the original Technicolor three-strip negative -- which had not really been looked at in almost two decades -- that obviously would be the key to everything. What did these discussions involve? It was a matter of negotiation between Sony Pictures, the BFI and Michael Friend to move the film over here to the Los Angeles area so that we could work on it by going through and inspecting all the original materials. That took a good six months to negotiate how we would supervise the work and who would pay for it. Sony Pictures is paying for the entire thing. Hopefully, what we would get out of it was a film that had been restored as close as possible to the original achievement of the filmmakers. We didn't know whether that was possible or not because no one had looked at this negative for a long time. Once we moved the material over here, Mike Pogerzelski did the initial inspection of all the nitrate material and made some initial evaluations about what needed to be done in terms of repair or replacement. We moved everything into the Burbank-based YCM Laboratories. We started a process of testing various prints to see what they would look like and re-combining the negatives to see what kind of results we could get. Of course, this was right at the period when the change in print stocks took place from the old Kodak print stock to the new Vision Premier print stocks. That hit us hard because we had been timing from the original negative on the old print stocks and we had to start over to a degree. But the results were much better on the new print stocks because some of the problems we were having had to do with the color sections in terms of the blacks and the whites and the contrast. On the new stocks, the blacks actually are a little bit blacker, whereas they tended to go a bit milky in the previous stock incarnation. It did affect the black-and-white sections as well, because it tended to render the black and white with more of a hard edge and a little more contrast. That is just a byproduct of the film stock as it exists right now. We had two things to deal with primarily in terms of the picture and that was that the three separate strips of negative had shrunken over the years. They had some slight damage as well and there were inherent problems in the way the film was shot. So, the shrunken aspect of it makes it a bit more difficult when you're trying to re-combine them -- especially when they are shrunken differentially. It's difficult to get the three separate negatives to match perfectly when you layer them over each other, especially when it shifts from scene to scene in some cases. Complicating that problem is that there are shots in the film that were originally shot out of registration. However, that problem was not quite as visible as it is now, partly due to the fact that back then the negatives had not shrunken. Also, the optics and the standard printing technology was not as state-of-the art as it is now, so you just didn't see those problems as well, even though some of those problems were there even then. The effect of those problems when you look at the print now is that some of those shots tend to look a bit soft. They're definitely out of registration and will often have a slight red shadow to edges on one side of the frame. We're continuing to try and correct some of the registration. The print that we premiered at the Academy is about the best print we can make using the original negative, but we are continuing. We're making new masters and we're going to attempt to re-combine them and re-register the images even tighter. On the topic of the red fringing, is that because magenta strip was mis-registered? It's because the three negatives are not in registration so you have that little fringing, which you can see on sharp edges, especially on people or chairs. It's a very typical result of mis-registration of your YCM (yellow cyan magenta), but it's not just that one strip is out of a registration with the other two. It's that all three will not re-register properly, but it can also vary from reel to reel as to which of the three color records is more out of register with the other two. You worked with YCM Laboratories on this. Why didn't you use Technicolor for the Technicolor process? This really needed a lab that specializes and has an enormous amount of experience in working with this type of material, especially nitrate material, which a lot of labs, certainly the bigger labs, don't necessarily want to work with -- even if they can. YCM has a really sterling track record working with material like this, so we felt pretty comfortable in going to this lab. I've worked with them on a lot of titles over the years. How did you approach the restoration of the black-and-white sections? The black-and-white sections have their own separate set of problems that are totally unlike the color sequences, and it primarily have to do with the way the film was made. Those weren't shot on three-strip, which was how Jack Cardiff had wanted to shoot it. In fact, they shot the film on a single strip black-and-white negative. They edited it and then made from that one negative a fine grain master positive. From that positive, they made three separate black-and-white negatives, which would all be spliceless. They then edited those black-and-white duplicate negatives with the original color three-strip negatives. The result was that we have a sharper and cleaner image for black-and-white sections, so it's a bit of a trade. We're losing images that are a little softer -- more like they were originally -- for something that's a little sharper and cleaner. We felt that it was a trade-off because the blacks of the color sequences are so gorgeous and do not have all these inherent problems that the black-and-white sections do. Still, the black-and-white sections really have more problems than the color sequences. They have a lot of vertical trim line, minus density scratches running through them that are built into the negative, and in traditional photochemical printing there's not really anything we can do about that. You chose to use the magenta negative for the black-and-white. Was there a specific reason or was it simply in the best condition? There were a couple reasons. One is that it was in essence, in the best condition, which was nice. It also provides us with the best contrast in density overall for black-and-white. How did you approach the sound restoration? On the audio side, there had never really been a restoration at all. The original nitrate track negative had been copied a number of times. For the last theatrical release of the film, they re-recorded the track on safety and ran it with the duplicate negative at the time. It had the typical problems from materials that were manufactured 50 years ago with a lot of pops, crackles, distortion and other anomalies that have affected the material over the years, as well as some degradation in the nitrate. We used the original nitrate as supplied by the BFI. Working at Chace Productions, they went through and tried to clean it up as best they could to take out some of the obvious problems that should not have been there, while also maintaining the original ambiance and sound of the original track. I think we were pretty successful. I thought it sounded really good and we had a lot of positive feedback on the track. What were Cardiff's reactions and contributions during the process? I talked to Jack a number of times while we were working on the answer print stage. We had questions for him and asked for some direction in a couple instances. Once Mike Pogorzelski and I jointly looked at every single print with Bob Raring, the color timer at the lab and were happy with what we were seeing, we wanted Jack Cardiff to look at it. After all, it's his film. Even though we had a number of original IP tech prints to look at as references, frankly, I'm not as keen on relying on that because there was no real consistency in that manufacturing process. Anyone who has seen four or five original Technicolor dye-transfer prints for a given title would know what I'm talking about. They all look a little different. So I sent the film to London and Jack came into the Sony Pictures screening room there with a few people from BFI present as well.
You described this as a work in progress. What do you see as the next stage? The next stage is to create new master positives from each of the three-strip negatives and try some different approaches to the re-combination of them in making a new negative and seeing if we can maybe pull in the registration a little bit tighter. It's pretty good right now we feel, but there are a couple of places where maybe we can improve it a bit more. Working with it at that duplicate level gives us a comfort level because these negatives are fragile and we don't want to have to keep continually running them through printing machines if it's not absolutely necessarily. Eventually, the goal would be to create a whole set of duplicate materials that you can use, so you don't have to continually go back to your original materials. You want to preserve those and lock them away in a cold and dry environment. Do you have plans to work on more Powell-Pressberger films? I am going to look at a film that Columbia Pictures released and we released it in 1969, called "Age of Consent." It was not a Powell-Pressberger film but was directed by Michael Powell and produced by him and the star of the film, James Mason. It's one of those things that are in the back of my mind once we get "A Matter of Life and Death" out of the way. We probably will during this next year and see what needs to be done. It may or may not need restoring. There's not a way to know that until you've gone through a film and evaluated and analyzed every piece of film you have on it to see if it is indeed protected well and if it needs restoring in some way. Are there any long-range distribution plans? I'm hoping that there will be additional theatrical releases. There already have been in Great Britain. The BFI released it in May and it got a very good reception. At that point, I think we sent them three prints for that release and it has played one or two film festivals, too. For this country, I don't really know. I'm hoping that there will be some places that will be interested in showing the film again. It certainly is an improvement over the 1995 release. Also, Columbia TriStar Home Video has the home video rights, so it may come out at some point on home video and DVD. We have never released it in a format other than its American version, which was called "Stairway to Heaven." That was absolutely one of the first requests from Thelma, that we make sure that we release it only under the original title of "A Matter of Life and Death," because evidently the "Stairway to Heaven" title was something forced on the filmmakers when it was released over here. According to Thelma and every other account including the directors, Powell always hated that title. But it's the title in this country that most people know it as. You'd be surprised at how many people, when they found out about the screening said, "This is my all time favorite movie."
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