DVD / SCHMOOZE: JOHN LANDIS

d i g i t a l m o v i e t a l k

Director, John Landis: The Dean Speaks

Continued

Q	But hopefully, they'll all get that kind of attention during the remastering.
A	Well it depends. Ultimately, unfortunately, it is up to some technician. For years, there were problems where, for instance, you'd shoot something for television, and a technician is told that this particular needle needs to be between two numbers for broadcast standards. You might want something to look darker, but television was about being bright. So the technician would get your film, think that it's wrong and turn the brightness up and blow out your picture. Now they're a little more lenient with shows like "The X-Files." But you can always get screwed.
Q	And you can have your hands tied if you shoot something in widescreen and it gets mastered in pan & scan.
A	I've shot tons of films in regular widescreen, but I've never shot in Panavision or CinemaScope. I almost shot Three Amigos! in Panavision, but something made a big impression on me: Gone With The Wind, when it was on NBC years ago. That is still the top film in terms of attendance figures, you know, people in seats. That first time on NBC, more people saw it than had ever seen it in the theater. And that depressed the shit out of me. It became clear that I had to protect my picture. Now that the letterbox editions are showing up more and more, I think I might try to do something in Panavision. There's an interesting thing that many people don't understand. You know how they released this "digitally remastered" version of Gone With The Wind earlier this year? They said it was restored beautifully, and if you saw it in the theaters you saw that it wasn't. It was that they restored the home video beautifully, and to get to press they re-released it theatrically. It was a bummer because, if you see it in the theater, it's some funky old print. But if you see the home video it's gorgeous. It's beautifully restored if you watch it electronically. The thing I will say about DVD, and I'm sure many people realize this, is that when a new technology comes in, the real reason is to resell the software so that it doesn't cost you money. It's great for movie buffs because the distributors have to come up with these reasons to buy the new titles. So they were doing director's cuts and stuff like that. Like The Blues Brothers DVD that came out has 12 minutes of film no one has ever seen before. But, for me, the real boon is these documentaries. Some of them are real good. I just watched The Wild Bunch on DVD. There's a documentary on The Blues Brothers that is particularly terrific.
Q	Is there some kind of commentary track on this release of Animal House?
A	No. There's the remastering, which is beautiful, and a behind-the-scenes documentary. It's an hour long and is very entertaining, because they interviewed all the survivors from the cast and people like Elmer Bernstein (who wrote the movie's score) and the editors and studio executives. It's really fun because it's sort of like (Kurosawa's) Rashomon; you hear everybody's story but from a different point of view.