89 - Vic Pratt & Doug Weir - BFI Halloween Special

Welcome to a special Halloween ish episode of the Filming Mentories podcast. This is Jamie Benning talking to you here from my code deep in the English countryside. The weather outside is best described as grim, but the fire is crackling away and the scene is set to talk to two gentlemen about some ghost stories. Before that, I just wanted to welcome any new listeners for joining. If you love film history, you're very welcome here.

Thanks also to any returning listeners, but particularly to those who continue to support the podcast to make it financially viable. I'm still looking for about another forty or so of you to support the podcast via Patreon dot com forward slash Jamie Benning. Just twelve dollars will pay for an entire year of episodes. That's twenty four episodes, but more than likely there'll be more because I do occasionally include bonus episodes like this one. Okay, so if you listen to episode eighty seven, you'll have heard my conversation with the British Film Institute Douglas Weir.

He's technical and remastering lead there and does great work with his team to restore and release films from British classics to Lost Gems, and he invited me back to talk to him and his colleague Vic Pratt, film historian and video publishing producer. So I got together with them both at BFI South Bank last week to talk about some of their new projects. One of their Blu Ray releases out this month is Short Sharp Shocks Volume three, a wonderful collection of short films which well, I won't say anymore just now you'll hear everything about it in our conversation. Just grab a glass of brandy, get a blanket, pull your chair closer to the fireplace, and I'll be back at the end for a bit more chabbering on.

All right, So guys, tell me about these projects that you've got that are coming out in time for Halloween. Where did they begin and what are they all about? Well, one of our sort of most popular series in the Flip Side range is a series called Short Sharp Shocks, which we're currently up to the third volume of this. And these are a kind of a collection of films that have an eerie or sort of spooky theme generally or something strange and unusual about them. Eccentric films, British films, short subjects, usually stuff that used to be part of what they called the supporting program at cinemas.

And we are just about to well, we've just released the third in the series, Short Shop Shots, Volume three, But this is the forty seventh flip scene. It is the forty seven flip Side. Yes, and tell me about Flip Side. Where did that begin? The Flip Side series?

Gosh, back in the dawn of time, there used to be a cinema strand down here at BFI South Bank where we're speaking today that I co created with a friend of mine, William Fowler. It was a it was called it was called the Flip Side, and it was just a kind of chance to screen things that perhaps had fallen off the critical radar, or were kind of undervalued by film historians, or perhaps didn't quite fit the notion the conventional notions of sort of the British cinematic cannon, and that that sort of We started this off as a series of film screens, which would have been around two thousand and six, two thousand and seven. I remember Durem one of the first ones, before we even knew each other, and I thought, look at that gay, he's famous.

It was you, yeah, and it was Deathlyne Deathline, Yeah, which was very much a flip side kind of film, which is, as all your listeners will know, is about sort of cannibalistic sort of sub humans living in an underground moment doors. Yeah yeah, yeah, great, sort of seventies from Shock a very strange. So. Yeah. The whole sort of premise of the flip side idea was that it would be things that people might not have seen before, or they might sort of half remember, or things that we wanted to introduce people to, and we also were quite keen to make it so it didn't have to be like some sort of higher flute and sort of critically acclaimed masterpiece to fit into the series.

It could be things that well, what they used to call a curate's egg, where some bits were better than others. It could be stuffed, slightly salacious, sleazy sort of stuff that perhaps in the olden days the BFI might not have been that inclined to champion perhaps. And so there came a sort of moment when we've been doing this for a few years where a couple of very good friends and colleagues I was Jane Giles and Sam done Doone in the Blu Ray DVD team Sam used to Sam used to run it, you know, and they sort of got together with us and we decided we'd do a sort of series of discs and releases to sort of fit in with this, and it was quite a sort of a new and unconventional thing for the BFI to be doing on its home entertainment label.

And yeah, these are all specifically branded as Flip Side and numbered to create a real sort of collectors series, because you know, I loved I love physical objects. You know, I got records and comic books and books and lots and lots of DVDs and Blu rays, and so I love things that have numbers on them, and we all decided this would be great. So you'd sort of want to fill in all the gaps in your series, and so yeah, we started that off with first three Let's Sit In with Richard Lester film and also Primitive London and London in the Raw, which, like I guess, the first films we ever showed in Flip Side at the cinema Me and William was Primitive London and so that was fitting that the sort of London set, sixties swinging London Mondo film would be one of the earliest, very likely to me, definitive flipside films.

Really, I mean I think every flipside to release flipsad release is a definitive flipside, But there was earlier ones. Really. I was thinking about Man of Violence the other day. Oh yeah, And which is a Pete Walker promissive? When is a really greasy sort of end of the hippy era?

Was the end of the nineteen seventy one Yeah, I mean a lot of these these releases sort of tend to be from that sort of urim Austea cinematic decayed when sort of British cinema was in a total slump and it just a sort of sex films and games, bond films, Yeah, and on the buses and Confessions of Window Cleaner sort of propping up the British cinema industry, you know, taking lots of money and masterpieces. Well, you know, some people would say they are. You know, I certainly have friends who would say they are. And where'd you go about finding these? Like, what's your first port of call to dig these out?

I mean that is there a list in the archives somewhere of these films that kind of fit into that category or as you're curating this yourself. I think the thing about the BFI in the past certainly was that it was sort of you know, if there are any lists, these would have been the list of films to avoid. You know. These were the films that were sort of slightly frowned upon, the ones that weren't made by proper filmmakers, you know. So it was all about the fact that there wasn't a list.

We were kind of trying to assemble an alternative sort of cannon of British cinema in a lot of ways, and television as well, because there's loads of TV that fits into the flip side idea. So we weren't trying to be specifically just cinema. We wanted cinema and TV. But it was all about stuff that wouldn't be in lists, wouldn't be in greatest film lists, wouldn't be the kind of thing you would expect of being a fine necessarily to be a claiming a bit. A lot of this though, would have inspired the filmmaker bridge filmmakers of today, and you know, you're doing a real service for those people as well to bring these back to the fore and remind them of what we've inspired.

We've definitely got some big filmmaker fans. Yeah, who write in and say you should do this, you should do that. Yeah, writes a big fan. It's a big thing. Nicholas Winding Referens were necklace Wending ref and helped us out on a few of them.

Yeah. Yeah. He went very because he was the big film collector, so he came in with his own materials and some very very there was. I mean, there was a little case history. There was one film that we did.

We did a couple of films by a film maker called Andy Mulligan who I am absolutely fascinated by Andy Milligan. His films are awful. Not most of them are well, you know. I mean some people would say the masterful, some people would see the master pieces, but I think the man himself and his and his technique and the whole history of it is fascinating. But essentially these films went missing, you know, because they were shot un reversal film, which meant there wasn't a negative and they were the reversal film from the camera was cut and then a lot of instance situations that was also projected because he was making them originally for little cinema clubs.

He was an American American guy America for these films, so they went missing, but he came to them at the UK and the sixties light sixties, early seventies is he made a few films over here. One of the one of them is called The Body Beneath and the other one was called Nightbirds, and we got we managed to find a thirty five mil print of Nightbirds. It belonged to Nicholas Well. It was belonged to Nicholas Winding ref And and had sections missing from it, and doing my technical bit, I realized that the bits missing from it were actually the trailer, so they'd used the only film print they probably had at the time to make the trailer. So it's like thought about tatting a Novas by the fifth.

But then I did some more research and we found that the original camera reversal sort of being Hector sixteen mili sixteen mile magnetic ordeal, which is very unusual. That's what they used on newsreels, direct ordeal through the camera. Found it in the collection of make Vareny something with video. But that was a real bit of digging about. So I think with the flip sides because because of the way the nature of them, like Vick was saying, that technically also puses a challenge because quite often there's literally one filmail and it looked bicker.

Yeah, so I've got a sixteen mil print from Sonsor's lost, you know. Yeah, I was going to ask it. I mean, do these things appear in collections and archives or do you sometimes find them and somebody's in a bedside and draw kind of thing. They're both, but quite more often than not, they're not in national archives. No, these are very much the kind of things that haven't been archived.

Haven't been there haven't been loads of prints made. I mean, I guess one of the most acute cases of that is what the work we did on The Appointment. The Appointment, Yeah, which I think I give you a copy of before, terrific film by a guy called Lindsay Vickers. Amazing spy, sort of psychically flavored ghosty sort of story which deals with well, it's got Edward Woodwood in it, who everyone will know, you know, the Wickerman, and he plays a sort of an uptight father who doesn't go to his daughter's violin concert that she has sort of some kind of strange power which starts to sort of suggest that he might regret not going to a violin concert. It's quite quite an astonishing and brilliant film.

It's only film that Men's he ever made because he sort of retreated from the business afterwards. Is he had such a tough time making it. And it would appear that only one print was ever made of this film, one or two, and they're both lost and the negative is lost. And so it was always our goal when we started off doing the Flip Side label that we would do the Appointment, But there was just nothing we could you to master it because all there were were sort of a few You've got a brief release on VHS and Beta Max. Yeah.

At one point, I can't, yeah, just types. We were going to compile the film from the best ex rental and unopened sealed vhs is from the eighties, and they looked awful, just because I held out news that I don't know about this. And then eventually I had gone through Douglas, I'd gone through a capt archive and every possible contact, even like Japan, everywhere, nothing, and then for whatever reason, I returned to the Sony Columbia Archive looking for something else, and I asked Rita, there was great. I sided just to I'll ask again, and then she did turn up a one inch tape and NTSC one inch broadcasting and a lot of the time people would say, oh, yeah, we've got something, and it was that O Marsha refilm.

Yeah there's enough. Yeah, And I thought it'll be the it's a studio vault, it'll be the old marsh refilm. But it wasn't. It was the film. I couldn't believe it to remember.

Yeah, she said you can use it because we've got no rates in this anymore. Yeah, that's what we ended up releasing. But that's a great example of the importance of the flipsider. Yeah, sometimes these films aren't in national archives like your Libraries of Congress, and because maybe those archives overlooked them as well as being not worthy of But we should also know that your colleague Peter Stanley did an amazing Peter, yeah, so amazing, who works with me and my team is the whiz and he went through that pretty much shot by shot and so look as good as it possibly could. That it was from an old video typeseeing traveling mats and wrote a scoping and sorts of painting the Yeah, because it was video.

It's a whole different world of film preservation and restoration than film, very different. So, yeah, often the materials are very compromised and you have to spend a long time finding the materials and then you have to there's also a lot of chasing around to locate where the rights and these films are it too, so that can be just as lost as the film. Yeah, I think. Yeah, when when we did tam Lynn made The Ballad of Tamlyn, which is a sort of Roddy mcdell film with a regardner, We only eventually came to be able to do it after a long and tortuous route, a sort of checking where various sort of collapsed companies had sort of gone on and where the catalogs, because all these catalogs, they sometimes tiny little companies go bast after one or two films, and then it's sold to another collection, and then that collection that cattleg goes bast and it's sold to another.

And it's a pay per trill. It is a pay per trail. You have to follow paper trails, so that that is the other actual paper Yeah, yeah, actual paper has not been scanned or digitized. It's all on off site storage. It takes a long tale.

I mean, I can't mention the title of it at the minute. But there's a film that I've had in my possession. I bought the film Elements and it's the one of only two prints in the world of this film and two film Elements. Two prints are the only films off Eba for fifty quid and it's quite astounding. I can't tell what it is, but it's quite astounding considering what it is.

I bought it off Eba for fifty quid because if there was a misspelling on the listing. It's a Scottish film and the so I know the director I'm friends with. He's in his eighties and we are basically he said, oh, I gave the rights to the star of the film, so we got in touch with the start of the film, who's a pretty well catastrophically catastrophically an unbelievably huge Scottish figure. And he said, oh, I can't remember that, so I don't have any I don't have any proof of that, sorry, and we're like, oh, so the rights were just suddenly nowhere the original distributor crumbled and disappeared a long long time ago, like that was saying. So we've been for the last three years.

We've been going through a digging process of digging up original bits of paperwork proof that the director, who's also the producer, can plain rights. It just takes a lot. I meanwhile, the film prints SIT's under my desk. It's fine, we scanned it, but it's just sitting there. We've even done artwork and everything for the release.

It's all setting ready to go up, but we can't do anything until literally every box just take because of you know, it's a long game, isn't it, Because I mean, I know getting the classe, we're getting close. I mean that there are films that you know, we've been putting on the short sharp Shocks sets that you sort of sometime around nineteen ninety eight I wrote it down in a book that that would be quite good to do, and then sort of maybe we showed it around two thousand and five, and then sort of another ten or fifteen years later, you're eventually getting around to putting it on a disk, you know, Like I mean, skin Flick are on the new Yeah, skin Flick has been floating around for years. Yeah, we've had the masters for a long team.

It's very harrowing film, aut sort of political dissidents, kidnapping a government minister, sort of torturing him. We should say that it's on the news shop short shots. I think it's probably the most disturbing film the set. But it's a brilliantly made film, brilliantly scripted film with Henry Wolf in it, who I remember being in kids shows and Rutland Weekend television in the seventies playing this sort of sort of quite fierce terrorist, very threatening performance, a great performance Tony beecat film seventy three. And yeah, I mean we wanted to do this rages and me and William wrote about it in our book which is called The Bodies Beneath the Flip Side of British Shulman Television, and we put a chapter about it in there.

And now that was like sort of five or six years ago, and we were just waiting quite I remember late over ten years ago we talked about Sam it's a big important thing, absolutely, but some and we were chatting about it and we have the master materials. It was all there, and we were about over ten years ago. This be sicking. Yeah, for a long time. We've got an Arson Wells film on here as well.

I'm just looking at the back at the disk. I forgot about that. Yeah, i mean, you know, we were talking about how we're not going into the conventional canon, but on this occasion we are Wells Wells, Arson Wells. He's in it as an actor, alright, yeah, that's right, but he's doing it as a favorite. Yeah.

Yeah. He was making a fellow around that time, and there was a sort of halting production while they were waiting for more money, and so he went and as a favor appeared in a film called Return to Glenni School, which is a little sort of Irish spooky short story type tale. Had the Award nominated. Yeah, yeah, that's right, Yeah it was. It's it's really good, really lovely, spooky little film with a sort of eerie hart soundtrack.

I particularly enjoy the shots of him driving when quick clearly the car station and someone's just rocking it. Yeah that's what can it makes it. But they have these little jokes in it, like he picks up this hitchhiker and he says, oh, I've got trouble with my distributor talking about his car, and Austin will says, I have trouble with my distributor, so you know, classic awesome Wells. One line is going on in it. But yeah, really brilliant film.

So yes, I think one of the things another factor about the flip side is we like to where we can collide stuff that might feature in the cannon with stuff that never ever would. So we like to draw these sort of connections across the circuit board of cinema, maybe that you might not actually make, so we can have awesome Wells in there along with some good safe I'm just sorry because I only work on the technical side of the things. I don't actually see the copy, even though you do send it to me. Yeah, he never reads. I never read it.

It never looked at it actually read. It's called The Terminal Game. Neededity Too. A computer programmer investigates a colleague suspicious death in this long, last, ominously presient tale of the pearls of big corporations and new technology. I think, yeah, this is a very maturally groovy.

It is. It's a very groovy film, and it was a very lost film as well. This is another one that was recovered sixteen mil print sixteen mil print that was brought on by Yeah yeah, yeah, and even the director didn't have a copy. So but then you've got Wings of Death, which is from the original nag, isn't it. Yes, yeah, Well the Wings of Death, which is by Nicola Bruce and Michael Colson nineteen eighty five is an actual BFI film.

So back when we were when we were so the BFI used to give a very quick one two sentence history used to have it does the film Fund now, But it's a very different thing, the BFI Film Fund. We used to have the BFI Production Board, which funded the making of feature films and then also the short films. Before that there was the BFI Experimental Film Fund, which is similar but slightly different. But we have the rights to all those films and shorts and generally we have the original materials told them as well, So it's a great library to dig into. And Wings of Death.

Wings of Death is originally screened with Nightmare on Elm Street is the supporting it's a short film, is yes again, it's about twenty minutes. It's about it sort of young junkie who sort of checks into this bizarre hotel where kind of weird stuff happens to him, and it's it stars Dexter Fletcher giving a very early and very good performance. And apparently this was the film the directors told me where When Derek Jarman saw this film, he said I must have him for Caravaggio. So it was directly after this that he was signed for Caravaggio. And it's a real terrific clear disturbling that visuals, you know, yeah, incredibly sort of paintily poetics and mixture of images and sounds.

It's very disturbed drug addiction. And yeah, it's quite I mean around London. You can see why they appeared it with Elm Street because a lot of it's like a Dreamline Street Dream but without Freddie Krueger. You know, I wish they would bring back short films before me and features. Yeah it's great, wasn't it.

I mean now you just get a load of chrummy adverts for cars and watching it. I saw Main Streets the other afternoon on Monday afternoon, the new four K restoration and I went along because you know it was the afternoon. I thought, oh, go along watch it and then I'll get back to work. I wasn't skyving, but the there was half an hour of adverts. There was two trailers, but half an hour of car adverts, And so I see I could have you know, then I just I look at the start time and add twenty five minutes and arrived.

Then I thought it'd be it'd been different at one o'clock on a Monday afternoon. It wasn't so strange, isn't it here talking about the short shot shots here that there's something about kind of spooky ghosty stories as very sort of prime audio, isn't there there's sitting around the campfire sort of telling stories and the black unknown beyond just beyond the flame of the fire. There's something super creepy for me about those ghost stories more than horror movies. Yeah, I think the real British tradition which is different to see the American tradition of the campfire and Britain it's more like the fireplace fireplace. Yeah, maybe with a sort of a glass of brandy brandy stiff there and sort of the crackling of the logs.

Now. Yeah, I think that is one of the ideas we celebrate through this and I guess through the ghost stories for Christmas. And I thought, we've got the ghost stories for Christmas, so the sharp shots you can buy that. No, but ghose storys for Christmas unbelievably, I can't remember. I never remember release days.

But it will be out in Tame for Christmas. That's also, yeah, it is, Yeah, it's done. But the Yeah, they've got the BBC Goods stories, the mrtms and Charles Dickens. In fact, there's I only learned recently the BBC good Stories are not all Mr Tams. No, I find there's like two or three that aren't.

One of them's well, the Signalman is Dickens. The Signalman's Dickens, and then there was I think the Stigma's not and the ice House is John Bowen. That's right, that's it. So we love John Bowen. I think he's one of the greatest writers of spooky stories.

We've done some of his stuff on Play for Today collections in the past, we did a photograph and long ago one of the first films that we showed in Flip Side was a TV film called Robin Redbreast, which is full corner. That's what they call it now, funk corror. I mean when we were showing that back in the sort of only two thousands, there was no such term, so we called it the sinister funk was the kind of blankets, and we kind of devised for it then. But since then, I mean, various people have put their flags in the same to decide that they've invinted funk horror. But there's I was actually just reading the other day are Yesterday people.

I love putting the term folk in front of spooky British things. There's a book that I was thinking of buying, and it's about walking around Britain, around you know, stone circles and things and folks, and the title I don't think it was for got to do with that, but it's becoming a bit of a catch all time, which is not it is. I mean, you know it's said of like but yeah, I think there's something specifically spooky and far aside about those those customs. Yeah, talk about the book of walking around stoning circles. That's a very British thing.

And the ghost stories and the sharp sharp sharks are rooted in that sort of you know, tradition of of you know, maybe you know, I don't want to I'm trying not to say folk. I call it the sinister funk. The sinister folks sounds like sinister people. Yeah, I know, well, thing of you trying to create blanket terms and for everything into reason. I think it's a very it's a very British thing because I guess they don't have that sort of storytelling anywhere else like we do in the UK, and the m R.

James films fit perfectly into that. And well, this is volume two that we've done, and this is I don't know if this is the last one of them, but it's definitely the biggest. It's the last of the classic cannon of the ghost stories. Some of the newer ones are on there as well. Some of them are very good.

Something Yeah on the Hill's very good. Yeah, they're a lot better than I thought I remember them. But actually they all have a certain very British ghost story theme going through them, and that they're quite austere. They're all about sort of men. They're very sort of male.

They're quite bookish on there. It's also about academics researching in our coin. There's one or two of them that they travel into the rural countryside and they stay in a guest house. It's just full of other academic men. Yeah, it's you know, they're all studying, you know, excellent breakfast.

Yeah yeah, yeah, breakfast. So I'm just checking some of the films on some of the programs on one of the day the other days, not seeing how every single one of them has sort of scenes of sort of fusty old men sitting down to practice. It seems to be a recurrent trope through the whole series. All Their favorite one is a Signalman, which is basically a haunted tunnel. I guess, and it's probably it's dnhim Elliott.

I forget that the other actor, but they is basically about a man who's on holiday, are walking home on his own in like the wind, it's always in winter, and he stumbles across Dannim Elliott who's sitting in his signal box on his own. Because it's youen early nineteen hundreds, I decided to spend his holidays just hanging out in a signal box with dnhim Elliott. I mean they're shamelessly old school. Oh yeah, what the time period are we talking about here? For these twenties.

Well, but the actual broadcast of the broadcast seventies, seventies, it comes into the eighties, really, I suppose towards the eighties. So much of this sort of style of film is linked to sort of imagination and dreams and feeling of that sort of empty feeling when you're alone and you can oh, yeah, absolutely. And I bet if I watched these back, I'll have memories of seeing snippets of them on TV later, back when I shouldn't have been watching team Right, Well, I thought you were going to say something else, so I thought what I was going to say was quite often the threat in the films, the paranormal threat, like a warning to the curious, which is another brilliant one about the Crowns of Norfolk, about horrifying folk.

All right, sinister folk, but you can call it for Cora, it's right, full Cora. But it's based on the legend of the fact that England was defended from protective from invasion because the Crowns of England were buried along the Norfolk coast. And this academic character finds one of them, and then he's haunted by this sinister figure. And I always think that in these films a lot of the terror is actually inside the person's head is the dread, you know, it's about someone's s. Yeah, I mean you could just say they're all about the sort of that internal horror of your own psyche repression.

Yeah, well with not of repression, but yeah, I mean you don't even necessarily have to consider the ghosts to be supernatural. The ghost could be just the ghosts of your own wheels, sort of turning around in your mind, you know. There. I think they're all only half an hour, which is perfect. And from a technical standpoint, they're beautiful because there are BBC films and whenever we work with the BBC, I used to work at the BBC archive years ago because of the nature of the way they were produced.

So the BBC was I mean BBC was still filming dramas and sixteen mil up until about ten years ago. Fully, I mean, my sort of really bad fact is Monarcha of the Glen was shot in sixteen up until they canceled it. Yeah. The but because they're shot in sixteen mil, the original negatives are an excellent condition that because they weren't distributed in cinemas, so they to take the ghost stories as an example, they all film all film well, I'm having on video. Look, the Ghost Stories are all film up until the new ones from the last ten to fifteen years.

I think the new ones are shot in the video, some of them standard definition, but the seventies ones are all filmed. There's none of that cutting to an internal studio and the gag stories, which some of the play for Today's did. But on the Ghost Stories, you've got a complete sixteen millimeter negative, or to be more precise, and ab negative, and that would have been printed once to turn into positive and then to a negative and then a print, and then they would have tell you scented the print, they'd have made a tape, and that tape until recently would have been the copy that you would have seen on TV. That's why they look a bit roady. We're going to try it.

I was chatting to the head of the ARKA recently and hopefully we're going to be repatrating our two k restorations into the BBC archive so they'll be on TV. But the yes so because there was only one run on the film elements there are BBC elements, especially the negatives are an excellent condition and the beautiful sixteen other meter so they look really great, and people who already have Volume one don't know that. Yeah, So anytime we get a chance to work with BBC materials, it's always I'm trying to go to its enjoyable. I find it enjoyable from a technical nerd standpoint. It's enjoyable for just remembering the time and work you put into doing nineteen ninety four.

Well, gosh, yeah, in nineteen eighty four, which I think we chatted about in the last podcast, because I mean that is your classic kist of where this film mixed in with video, right, and all that existed was a sixteen millimeter print which included the video elements printed back to sixteen milli and what's called the Telly recording. So our little part of history is that the BBC shot thirty five mill black and white until the late fifties when Richard Attenbrough was going off to the Zoo Quest, he convinced them to let the shoot sixteen mill because it was smaller, lighter and cheap up, which actually they shot in color and they rediscovered the color print about text Richard old divid sorry, David, I get them, yeah, Dickie Attenborough, Richard David Attenborough David David Attenborough correct, he convinced them to shoot sixteen mil.

They actually shot color and they rediscovered those color prints about ten years ago and zoo Quest was put out for the first time in color. It was amazing. So the BBC moved to sixteen mil and they were the first broadcaster to do that in the late fifties and everything from then forward, unless it was prestigious, was shot sixteen mill. If it was a mixture of video or entirely video. What they used to do was they create a thing called the Telly recording, which was a very very early method of printing video back out to film.

If you watch early episodes of Doctor Who or Top of the Pops, so you get, yeah, you get that aliasing, which is basically because they're they're filming a ceur team monitor and it's so sor from a four hour five line exactly. Yeah, yeah, because of the five to two five yeah exactly, and because it was shot on video. The BBC were infamous for deleting video tape. And then they'd send out the Telly recordings to other territories sixteen minutes yeah, like Africa, sounds Astra, yeah yeah. And then they those will be the only copies of these films.

So nineteen eighty four was a good example of that. But nineteen eighty four was shot on both video and film, so every time they went outside into location, it was shot. And it was in the era of when they were still shooting thirty five mil and they still had the thirty five mil negative for those shots, but they had none of the video materials, so we had to work from when you started White, it was you pretty much, was it you? Well, for each shot it was me and a few you know, Peter, the team and all the people. But the Yeah, so you have this disparity between beautiful thirty five mil and then compromised sixteen mil tailor recording.

But it's literally all that exists for the film. Yeah, we did a lot on that, and I think I was never fully satisfied with the outcome of that. We could have gone in various different directions, but it's one of these things. It's one of these projects where you just have to start up and let it go because it will never be perfect. Well, I think it's also kind of in all these things like the short Shop Shocks and like the Appointment, and in the case of nineteen eighty four.

You can never please everybody however you do it, and you have to compromise on one thing to do it a certain way that's going to please somebody else. Inside there will always be I mean, there's a puritanical view four that you should just tell us any a print. Yeah, sure that, so you have to. I guess you have to make choices and try it. And I mean my thing is that you should reflect the original experience as wisue possibly mean cants won't reculate a lot of the time, sit down with a couple of teas and discuss how are we're going to present this, and I'll see, well I think we should do this, and what do you think of that?

And we'll sort of band it about just to try and get an authentic experience. Yeah, you don't want to. I mean, as I always say, you're trying to represent these things as the director achieved, known as the intended, which is why i'm sometimes. I mean, I know when we were a long time ago, we were doing a film I think it was called Song of Paris, which was an Adelphi only fifties scalf comedy, and there was a hair in the gate on the original neck and there was a big question do we take out that hair? But we didn't take out the hair because when they went to see it, they would have seen the hair.

So yeah, I mean, now you can tell you o the hair, then you couldn't take out the hair. So yeah. I remember on a short film years ago we were transferring it and it was one of my colleagues was doing it, and I would for whatever reason, I was in the suite. The audio was sweet, and there were all these people around a computer and it's one of the labs and saw and there was this noise and they're like, what's because sometimes you can get that noise if the optical track drifts into the perforations and struck holes. And they were trying to work at it.

No, I should sixteen mil and I've got sixteen more cameras And instantly I went, that's the sound of the camera. They haven't blinked the audio because it's cheap. I think it was a production board film and they were like, okay, so how can we what we got filters your this was a deluxe so they have all the technologies. Okay, we can remove this and there's and I said No, we shouldn't remove it because that would be on the print. Now we could have actually removed that and that made it sound brilliant.

No we didn't. We left it in. So there is a there is a you know, you do sometimes have to sort of control yourself and stay right. Yeah, and that's pretty good at that because I think the least you do to these things the better. Anyway, the more you do.

There's a lot of film restorations that and remastering that goes out now, and you know big Hollywood films and you think, wow, they've done too much there, They've squashed all the life out of it, they've costed a light of it, or you can see exactly then what's going I saw some big Hollywood films recently in the Imax and on in like you know, the you know Picture House wherever, and you know these are big films, you know. I guess it's the sort of byproduct of doing this work is you'll see from shot to shop that they've done different things and you think, why might have done this? You know, we shouldn't have done that. But then with your you know, love of lucasfilm, you'll be more than well aware out when the director is still alive.

There's a whole other layer of complexity because if the director wants to come back to the work and start changing it, then that's sometimes you can't stop. That's another factor. So there are all kinds of questions. We have been in suites or in previous theaters with directors. I know, I know, I'm pretty sure you have as well, Vic, maybe together where the directors going great, can I move this here?

Yeah? And at the moment actually on the Scottish film, I was talking about the director wants to move a shot to the before the credits because he said, oh, that's always how I intended it, And I'm saying, no, you can't do that, And usually we kind of get them. But I guess sometimes if there's a lot of power involved and maybe a lot money, you have to make two versions. And sometimes you see that, especially on Blu Ray and UHD, there'll be two versions of a film. I think in the last podcast we talked about Blade Runner, that's not readily Scott's fault.

He just wanted to finish the film the way he wanted it. That's that's actually a bad example. It's a different example. But the you do sometimes get versions of films where there's been added effects, and then you also get the option to watch it in the original way, which I think is important. Did we talked about Jaws last time when I had the Film and Film Festival oh year, about you know, watching that film with the original color timing at the monomix and all of that stuff.

And there is something about that that I sort of described it as time travel because you're if you over restore something, you're removing the sort of atmospherics on you of that era that it was made in. So in that print you couldn't see, oh, that's clearly a different day. Well, you know, as somebody who's watched it in different pertaining. Wasn't perfect because it had been done manually if theyd done for two chemically on a machine. And I think one thing I mentioned that I need to correct actually on that pod cast was that you can't actually hear them.

The mono sound is on the new UHD disc. But I think a friend of mine was at that screening Stewart, and he's like, you know, a big sound guy, he's worked with Altman and all these people, and he said, oh, I mean, I think I said this before. One of the big takeaways for me was that beautiful mono sound, but it was a slight distortion on it because it was an optical track. So even then, the mono audio, which is the original mono audio on the latest UHD release is amazing. It will be perfect, whereas that print still had what would you call it, those imperfections and give it that realness.

I mean, your brain never sees the same film ever. So you could watch Jaws a million times, but your brain's seeing it differently because what you think you're seeing is to do with memory, but when you see it on a print, you're actually just physically. Your brain's a very logical thing. What it's seeing is thinking, oh, this is a different thing. But you're recognizing your memories, recognizing what you're looking at, but your brain's processing it different ways.

So that's when you see a thirty five old print. Quite often, a lot of people say, oh, it's like seeing it for the I've never you know, there was an amazing experience, and they can't work out why. It's because it's a mental thing. It's a brain thing, and I also think imperfection is where it's at. Absolutely it gives her the realness.

It's a Leonard Collins somewhere sing's cracks. That's where the light gets in. And I think that's that's totally I mean, that's what it told absolutely, and that feeds into like the other guys you've interviewed from ILM talking about practical local effects versus CGI. We've got some colleagues that sometimes work with ILM and they do effects editing, and they'll talk about pixel management, management, managing every single shot down to the pixel to make it perfect. And I was at the cinema the other day and I saw two new Superhero trailers and I just turned around to my friend and went, I don't know what's going on.

Everything is so perfect, You're it's just hard to follow. Whereas back in the day with the practicalities, you may be able to see the scene in the US whatever. But it was more believable because I didn't saying that it gives it that slight imperfection, which is I guess true. And also, you know, just chucking money at stuff isn't the way either, because I know Bobin used to say, you should be able to make an interesting scene at two people sitting at a table and then protect it on a sheet. You know.

That's another key part of that. Was it your man used to see you see a goal and a gun? What was his name? Work and god God a goal and a gun or something that. But Bergmann doubled down and just said two people, two people break the same.

So with these releases, then are you is this the end of flip side? Stuff isn't to continue if you've got stuff in the pipeline. We've got as like Vic said, there's a list that will always be trying to work out. Yeah. Yeah, we've got wats of things still under Dog's desk.

Yeah, put his feet down. This is actually true. I can't put my legs under my desk, mainly because of my poster collection, but also just the creative tapes and bits of stuff. Yeah, and I still have a seventy email printing. I still have notebooks going back for years, and I go through when we're so, oh we tried that one five years ago, we tried that one ten years ago.

Maybe we'll try it again. You've got a list of every single film you've watched. Yeah, yeah, I do try them, isn't it. Yeah? Well, you know it keeps going right, keeps the demons at the well.

I've been very useful when they throw it in the skip after they drag out my corpse, right some Yeah, no, it's good. I think it's good to always keep a list, always keep stuff. And yeah we we yeah, we haven't. We have no intention of stopping while and I'm glad to say that there's still quite devoted following for our stuff and just generally the physical medias do. Yeah, the rumors of the demise of physical media were greatly exaggerated.

I remember ten often ten years ago being told there was only a few years. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. Actually, if anything, since COVID, I think it's strengthened it because it's become a bit of a vinyl thing, and younger people are now there's stats men in bowl of hats and clipboards have found out that younger people are beginning to pick up on it. And there also people are getting wise to streaming platforms a removing things and be compressing things. Yes, and also there's the extra features there.

I mean, we go through lists of films where there's availabilities for maybe rights and things, and we distill things down and a lot of the time nothing may come of it, but sometimes we pick up whole collections of a certain director, and there will be films that will go into Blu Ray box sets, but there might be some other things that will go onto our streaming platform because that's getting bigger or bigger than more popular as the day goes by. I mean, the B five players a gold mine in itself, or for things that maybe we don't have the budget or can't spend the budget to author on a Blu Ray because maybe it's not the sort of thing enough people would buy copies of. Because you have to think about how many copies this is going to shift.

It has to make, it have to basically wipe its nose. That's to make its money. So that's not to say the film or the content is not good, but that's where streaming really comes into its own, is like, okay, we can actually put that there, so people who have a subscription can see things that maybe we can't just put onto one disc, you know, whereas this is kind of more your sort of if you're into lovely objects. Yeah, this is this is what these disks are all about because and we all try and do them the best we possibly can within the limited resources we have, you know. So and yeah, as someone who never gave away his records or never threw out his VHS tapes, you ask his girlfriend.

But I think you're right though about this whole thing about streaming, you know, and people wanting to buy these physical objects. Again, there's something about that, you know, you say, records, something about that discovery isn't there and the record just flicking through the Renbold shop and pulling out and only sort of being able to base it base done the picture on the front and maybe some liner notes or you know, a gatefold, getting a better impression to view the band on just taking a risk, completing a risk. I mean, I don't want to dismiss streaming, up streaming. I think streaming has definitely got Yeah, but of course if you look on Disney Plus, they've got those extras. They even Disney's no coming back into the blue rear arena, so to speak, because a lot of these studios they were so quick to abandon it and go streaming that they're no coming back to to releasing things on discs.

Some of the big studios are no throwing a lot into UHD discs. And I also would add to that that one of the problems but the Internet is that you've got so much of an abundance there's no focus anymore. You know, you don't need you don't know which direction to go in, and every rabbit hole can send you down ten other rabbit holes. So one of the reasons I love object based media is that it's finite, it's got end, it's got walt you know, you get this short hump shocks there and that's all that's on there. There's a booklet, yeah, and that's it.

You've got enough there to dig that disc and what's on it and match a lot, you know. And but to add to that also, it's still got that idea that you can watch these films and then go, well, I'll look into I really like the Jeff Lord the Terminal Game, and then I guess the internet then becomes your Yeah, yeah, absolutely like going to the library and getting it. So you go on the internet and find out even more. I just I just think that in a while where increasingly all looking at stuff is just becoming open ended and kind of un uncurated. For one offul better words, proraxic, it kind of it's nice to have some focus and to be able to focus, I think is a skill that we need to retain as a culture.

And I think there's a danger in thinking that everything is available online somewhere. Yeah, that's just not true, Okay, And I will spend half an hour going through Netflix thumbnails and then go to bed having watched nothing. But I'll spend half an hour and the be a fire shop and I'll come out with a stack of discs because, like you say, there's something finite there. Yeah, I thought you corrote me for the wrong that. I don't think any of these are on this new shop Shop shops three.

I don't think any of these you could find online anyway, only when the pirates put them up YouTube. But yeah, so this is you know, the only way you can see these is by buying this. And obviously it's got all the extras because some new interviews on here, Yeah, some great interviews and commentaries. No, no, no, but I've done a lot all sort of video I say about there you are the Proud Luck Brothers and the Van Dyke production, so that yeah, we haven't mentioned. Actually this one with John Laurie on it.

Oh yeah, the Great is one of my favorite Scottish actor. Can you do an impression of youre a sculps from No, I'm not doing that? Is that not good? Mean people? Okay, okay, well I'll do it.

Then you doom? Do you doom? All empty bone? They go the old empty var I knew we'd I've actually got. He's in a film called Strange Stories, which is which is by this very small production company called Van Dyke Productions.

Also has Valentine dial in it, who was famously the Man in Black or the radio and television, a great storyteller with a very distinctive voice, and so that's like an early portmanteur. Ands Douglas says, this is the first time anyone's going to have a chance to have seen. Yeah. And John Laurry's in it as a sort of strange do you know at Clark I'm doing film I think three or four films right now, and John Laurry is in all of them. Because there was a period of cinema where he was the Scotsman.

It was him and What's your Man? The Ginger Feller, The Ginger Feller. He was in the Professionals Gordon Jacks, Gordon Jackson, so it was Gordon Jackson and John Laurie were Scotland for a few decades. It feels like that we've got I've been working with the Edge of the World and they're both Paul and Pressburger. I think it's John Laurry in that Yeah the World.

Yeah, he's on the Edge of the World nineteenth third. No, I'm just thinking, yeah, and I know where I'm going. And also the Return to the Edge of the World. He's in that. Obviously he pops up in loads of stuff.

He always play Graham Moffatt, Britain's favorite fat boy. I didn't know that, and I heard there's a book being worked on a Yeah, there is. I'm written a book about his life, The Life of Britain's Favorite fat Boy. I had no idea his films. Yeah, no, he is, Yeah, he's in that.

He was in a few Pale and press Bogs. Actually, yeah, well we're doing a Poland Pressburg this season that it runs for three months. I saw the person was up front. I must watch them. Yeah, I think it's almost the entire Yeah, every every single film, but there was a showing.

Plus for the first time in a long time, restored versions of his quarter Quickie b movies yeah, I find that just particularly interesting. Yeah, it's crazy. So are being shown in the cinema and we're bringing it on blu Ray. A couple of his short operas that people might not know about. Luber It's Castle, blue Beard's Castle.

Oh no, we're not bringing out the sources, apprentice, but it's showing in cinemas. But blue Beard's Castle is being released on blu Ray. You know, it's different. Person is that different? So that's actually a good example of where blu ray comes into its own.

So I think it's an hour long, yeah, but that So the archive on the National Film Archive have restored this nineteen sixties Michael pull opera and it exists in three versions. So there's the original version, which is sung in German, and then there's a re released version from the seventies where Paul decided to put in not subtitles, but they are they do take the manifit like physical manifestation of a subtitle, but it's more explaining slightly what's going on between scenes. So that was the re release, and then there was English an English dub made and I am not the authority in this, so I can't remember why the English dub was made, but I don't think it was officially released with the English dub, but it exists.

So when you watch the Blu ray, you can watch the opera in one of three versions. It's just the first time that that's been done this. Yeah, it's the first time the film's been released with this and it's possibly the first time. People they didn't see in the films. I think it was shown on television.

Yeah, it's one of those ones that sort of slipped through the Yeah, Bennette, it was in sort of Poll's Wilderness Wears were after you done Peeping Tom, So you did a CFF film. He did that Military, not military, but The Queen's Guard, The Queen's Guard. Yeah. Adri consent and did a few couple of these short operas. Yeah.

So this is you know, because of this big season, this is where you really get to dig down. And there's a touring program as well. It's not all just in London. That would be going around the UK. So I've been working I work on a lot of the theatrical of the theatrical releases as well, so I've been working on those that's been that's been going on for a few years, just getting those together.

Yeah, what are your next big projects on on Blu Ray. Then in the coming months a presence coming up for Christmas. Well, I'm just doing It's not out before Christmas, but I'm just doing Giant. Charles and Ali Cattle's new documentary about the Scala Cinema called Scala, which is a terrific dock which is very much in the in the flip side spirit actually a sort of collision montaging, sort of high and low film culture in the same place, you know, often for sort of subversive or political intent or just for pure entertainment. But yeah, their documentary about the amazing London cinema where I sort of used to go to all nighter shows.

I remember going seeing lots of stuff. There's Satan Sadists where the film caught fire on the screen, William Castle House on Haunted Hill where a plastic skeleton came flying across the room or did they do that? Yeah they did. He got stuck though, got stuck halfway. So yeah, very two lane Blacktop where they built one of the reels on upside down.

So last real candone upside down. It was before the term even existed. It was a graintowst cinema. It was a terrific place for the outsiders and it was there my child before the Prince Charles did that sort of thing, and it do the you know twenty four maybe whole weekend marathons of whole back catalogs of direct you know. Yeah.

Well, the Scala documentary. The one thing I got from it because obviously I would have been in Scotland because it scallout in the period the cover, I think it's the seventies through to the early nineties and you were just young as well. I was just like I was going to wee Bed, I was going to the movies, but I was in Glasgow and I wouldn't have been. They probably would have let me into the scalap but it would have probably you know, damaged my mind in a good way, in a good way. But the one thing that I got from that documentary is it's a great playlist of gonzo cinema.

So the credits at the end list all of the clips in the in the film, and to anybody, I'd give that list and say watch these because that will make you, that will enrich your cinema going experience. But the the other one working on we're doing another British Transport film collection. Now this is this is one of Douglas's trains favorite topics. Well, well it's well not trains he I love trade. No, no, no, but the it's volume fifty.

It is the last volume. We we think, I don't want it to be, but it is the last. No, I'm sure there's more. I'm sure there's a open a vault and they'll be like, oh my god, there's another ten years worth of train films. But these are the British transport films made by the British Transport Film Unit, who were a government funded unit that basically made films that promoted the British railways.

And you quite often had some very well known editors, filmmakers, directors, cinematographers who worked in these films and went on to shoot things like Get Carter, The Midnight Cowboy, John Slegend who did a few. And because of these guys worked on them, you have some really interesting artistry and really really beautifully made films and very very watchable films. Then you realize it's about an intercity trade, yeah, and how to travel to Scotland. You know about it's they're brilliant. They're absolutely brilliant, and they're very popular, and we've got volume I want to say fifteen.

Yeah. I've been done a couple of Blue Rear best ofs, so maybe we'll get one more Blue Red best off out of it. The one area we haven't really explored is the Canal's that'd be good. Yeah, that'd be good. We're about buses.

Don't know a few buses, Yeah, buses. He done bus films, but people those are popular. People do ask about those, and I think they're beautiful films, whether you like trains or not. I've showed them to people who really dismissed them and they go, oh, that was really the films of Jeffrey Jones. I mean, yeah, masterpieces, You're like ten minute masterpieces in editing.

If anything, I just want to I'm looking forward to the day where I'm in the Old People's Home, so sin watching Jeffrey a constant loop of British treasport films. That's green all right here trains, but we've got that coming up. Yeah, I can think of the minute. What working on stuff all the time. Yeah, we are we signed off recently.

Or the films of Lorenzo Azetti. Yeah, which she's an Italian documentary filmmaker who was part of the free cinema movement in fifties and she was with Lindsay Anderson and that crowd, and it was a very very short movement from how do you explain free cinema, you're probably better that doesn't me well, free cinema, Well, I mean Lindsay Anderson being one of the key of short documentary movement, primarily at first influenced by the New Wave of the late fifties. I'm just thinking, well, it's part of a parallel yeah, with the French New Wave. They're not films that have been unavailable, but there's been box sets and they've been available, but they're not really well known and they're just beautifully made little films.

Some of them don't have any dialogue or any audio. But so we've got a collection of Lorenzo Azetti's films company new documentary but her fascinating life, really nicely made documentary. Actually, so that's if not already it's so. And we've also got a new collection of a zoo Oh yeah, that's film's coming out just out there, just out now. These are all these are the Lorenzo Mazeti films have been restored by our own national for a walk yourzoo films have been restored in Japan, and I think there's a silent film in there.

Yeah, there is. These are not your sort of your top high hated, the sort of azoos. These are the ones that you're said in far. I mean, they're great, but they're not the ones that ever put sort of trip off. There's not not Tokyo no no no, but yeah, very fascinating cancer.

I mean, yeah, absolutely. But we're currently I mean, I know I am from a technical standpoint looking into next year and I can't say what we're doing. But there's plenty to get on with. Yeah, there's more to come, what lots more to cover. Well, I hope you enjoyed my conversation there with the BFI's Vic Pratt and Doug Weir.

Thank you to both gentlemen for their time, their stories, and their expertise. And I'm hoping to have both Vic and Doug back on the podcast intermittently when they have some new releases on the horizon. Next up on the podcast, I have, well, I have a number of guests actually to choose from. I have Creature creator Tom Spener, I have the creators of the new Robodoc, author and friend of the podcast, John Walsh talking about his new Conan book, and just next week I'm heading up to prop Store to record an interview with founder and CEO there, Stephen Lane, so watch this space. I'm still working on more people from ILM and Skywalker Sound alumni, so that should be in the coming months as well.

Please remember to subscribe, leave a review, and tell your friends about the podcast, And a reminder that our book, Return of the Jedi Unauthorized Timeline is currently on sale for twenty pounds on Amazon or your currency equivalent until Christmas. The book catalog's the entire history of the film from its inception right up to this year twenty twenty three. It's fortieth anniversary, so if you're a fan of the original trilogy, this is and must buy, or perhaps you have a family member that might like it. Justin Berger and I spent a year writing the book and we'd love you to take a look, So please search for Jedi Timeline on Amazon in your region, or you can visit Jedi Timeline dot com and there you'll find all the details.

Thanks for joining me again, and I hope you can do so. For the next episode of the Filmiamentaries podcast, have a good Halloween.