Legend FAQ interview with Arrow Films' LEGEND Blu-Ray producer James Flower

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This interview by Sean Murphy with James Flower (Arrow Film's Legend Blu-Ray producer) was posted on September 18th, 2021. You can find James on twitter @jamesflowerfilm. He works as a producer for @ArrowFilmsVideo.

Interview with Arrow Films' LEGEND Blu-Ray producer James Flower.
September 18th, 2021

Legend FAQ Maintainer Sean Murphy: Tell me a bit about yourself and your background in film, Arrow, special editions, etc.
 
James Flower: Sure! I’ve been a film nerd since I was a little kid and have always wanted to work in film. As DVDs and ultimately Blu-rays came around, I was definitely interested in working in that side of the business but had no idea how to crack it. I finished a masters’ degree in Film Archiving at the University of East Anglia in 2011, which was a great fusion of my interest in film history and the minutiae of shooting formats, differing versions, release histories… it definitely re-calibrated how I think about film and I use my training from it all the time in my work with Arrow. It was just a shame that when I graduated, there were no new jobs in film archiving anymore! I moved to London and within a year I got a job at an indie film distributor named Soda Pictures doing all their technical work, including supervising the production of their DVDs and Blu-rays. During my time at Soda, over six-and-a-half years I worked on a number of really interesting and eclectic projects, including boxsets of work by filmmakers like Chris Marker, Kelly Reichardt and Jim Jarmusch. My proudest achievement was the first Blu-ray issue of a cult British/Canadian horror film called The Reflecting Skin that I brought to the company, and directed new bonus features for which I interviewed, among others, none other than Viggo Mortensen as it was an early role for him. (It was definitely a bit of an audition piece for Arrow in hindsight!)
 
As Soda changed its name to Thunderbird Releasing and became more commercially-oriented, I became a bit disillusioned and wanted to do more boutique stuff along the lines of the work being done by companies I admired like… Arrow Video! I never thought I had a chance of getting a job with Arrow since, as far as I knew, they never publicly advertised for producers, and my attempts at getting similar work in places like the BFI weren’t bearing fruit. So, drunk on Christmas party Prosecco (which I wouldn’t advise), I registered a company of my own named Skeleton Pictures, the idea being I would acquire the rights to films I admired and do sporadic releases around my day job, using resources and contacts from it. No sooner had I acquired the rights to my first film – 1979’s Over The Edge – then Arrow suddenly advertised a producer job! The rest is history; I applied, got the job and have never looked back. (My rights to Over The Edge were eventually transferred over to Arrow, and I produced the Blu-ray finally released in the UK earlier this year.) Some of the projects I’ve produced at Arrow since include Tremors, RoboCop, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, True Romance, Gamera: The Complete Collection, Weird Science, Sixteen Candles, to only name a few!
 
Sean: How did you get involved in the Arrow Video Legend Blu-Ray?
 
James: Arrow Video has an excellent relationship with Universal Pictures, and indeed they’re the major studio that we work with the most – they’re really supportive and appreciative of how we’ve been able to upgrade and reinvigorate titles from their library over the last few years. I first heard Legend mooted as a potential acquisition in 2019, and was immediately excited about the potential for it due to the various versions of the film and its rocky history, so quickly put my hand up to get the assignment. It took a while until it officially got the greenlight, but work started in earnest in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
 
Sean: What did you already know about the history of the film? Were you a fan of Legend before this project?
 
James: I had seen the film (probably just the International Cut) more than once when I was younger but it had certainly been a long time. However, I remembered it fondly, and it goes without saying I’m a big fan of Ridley Scott, especially Alien and Blade Runner which I revisit quite frequently. I knew enough to be excited when the possibility of doing a new, definitive edition of Legend came my way. The work done by DVD producers like Charles de Lauzirika on previous editions of Scott’s films was a big role model for the kind of work I wanted to do at Arrow: exhaustively comprehensive but thoughtful and fascinating.
 
Sean: How do you approach putting together a special edition Blu-Ray?
 
James: There’s a lot of things to consider, especially working at the scale we do at Arrow! We always want to try and make our releases the definitive editions of each film, at least as much as we can. If a film has multiple cuts, we want to try and include as many as possible; if it’s missing vital footage and there’s the possibility to restore it, we want to do so. If it’s had poor video masters in the past and we have the opportunity to do a new digital restoration from the ground up with original film elements (preferably the negative), we want to do so. It’s a strange hybrid of archival and creative remits mixed with an obvious business imperative – we want to make an attractive product that appeals to a knowledgeable, demanding audience, and give them all the reasons we can to persuade them to buy a film they may have already bought before on DVD or Blu-ray.
 
One aspect of this is commissioning new artwork, which in many ways is probably the most thankless part of the job as there’s no way you can commission something that everyone likes, so it’s invariably the first thing that you hear people complaining about! That said, it’s often a necessity when you want to breathe new life into a film and give it a new lease of life in the marketplace. For example, Matt Frank’s artwork for the Gamera films was one of the main things that made the Complete Collection boxset an instant sellout in my opinion. I know I wanted Legend’s art to have a storybook feel to it, and when I saw Neil Davies’ work I knew he’d be a great fit.
 
In terms of putting together a package of bonus features for the disc, the process is actually very similar regardless of the film, as you’re almost always asking the same questions. What bonus features have been on previous editions, if any? Either way, what new opportunities are presented by the research you’ve done into the film? How many untold stories can you bring to light, and which ones are most worth telling? Are there surviving cast and crew who might be willing to speak about their experience making the film? If so, who do you prioritise? If not, is there an expert on the film or the director who can speak confidently to camera or on a commentary track? The final product is almost always a mix of however you’ve answered those questions, plus the inevitable compromises dictated by time, budget, availability and other factors – you start out big then narrow in focus.
 
Sean: Can you talk about how you rescanned/cleaned up/restored the film for Blu-Ray?
 
James: Right from the start, we wanted to upgrade the picture quality, as we felt the old Universal master for the U.S. Theatrical Cut was quite lacking, not least due to oversaturated colour grading and overzealous edge enhancement that was quite representative of Universal’s HD masters from the mid-2000s. (They’ve gotten much better since!) My dream was to have a release of all three main cuts of the film (U.S. Theatrical, International and Director’s) with picture quality and grading that was not only a big improvement on what had gone before, but was consistent in appearance across all three cuts. 4K was an inevitable part of those early conversations as we were making our first steps into Ultra HD Blu-ray around that time.
 
The process was largely supervised, as all of our in-house restorations are, by my colleague James White, who is incredibly experienced in this area and has overseen a lot of award-winning work for us. The original camera negative (meaning the ‘first generation’ film that originally went through the camera and, as such, theoretically offers the best image quality for a restoration), which was conformed to the International Cut of the film and in immaculate condition, was scanned at 4K resolution by Company 3 in Los Angeles (along with some other interpositive elements relating to the U.S. Cut), and then the actual picture restoration and colour timing was handled by Silver Salt Restoration here in London.
 
I’ll try not to repeat myself too much as I covered this in some depth in a Twitter thread (see below) when the Blu-ray was officially announced, but in a nutshell: it quickly became apparent that a 4K restoration of the Director’s Cut was not likely to be feasible logistically and financially due to the quality of the surviving film elements and the limited capacity for an A/V upgrade they offered. Furthermore, although the negative was conformed to the International Cut and was physically owned by Universal, who allowed us to scan it in 4K, we could not include the International Cut as a bonus feature without the permission of Legend’s distributor outside North America – 20th Century Fox, by now of course owned by Disney. We tried very hard to make a deal with Disney/Fox to not only include the International Cut, but to also release our edition in the UK; sadly, we couldn’t make it work. Once it became clear that we couldn’t include all three cuts, and that the only version we could restore 100% from the negative was not available, then a definitive UHD release was off the cards. We could have tried to release just the U.S. Cut on UHD with the Director’s Cut as a Blu-ray bonus disc, but the picture quality would still have been inconsistent due to the mix of elements involved (more on that below), and there was scepticism that customers would want a UHD of arguably the least popular cut (certainly the most compromised) of the film.
 
So we were only going to release the U.S. Cut and the Director’s Cut on Blu-ray, which was obviously disappointing, but we knew we could still put together a big improvement on what had been done before. Using the scans from the negative and taking unique material from the interpositive, the U.S. Cut was painstakingly reassembled manually to ensure the best possible picture quality, using the Ridley Scott-approved grading from the Director’s Cut as a reference. We also took the opportunity to make some minor tweaks to the Director’s Cut HD master, such as correcting some slight vertical squashing. I think the results speak for themselves, and it’s the best Legend has ever looked on home video.
 
Sean: What kind of materials and content did you get from Universal for a Blu-Ray release?
 
James: Aside from the film elements we got to do our restoration and the Ridley Scott-approved HD master for the Director’s Cut, Universal also supplied us with their 2006 HD master of the U.S. cut. As well as the original stereo mix (which hasn’t been on the previous DVD and Blu-ray releases), this had the ‘music and effects’ track we’ve included as a bonus feature on the disc. Music-and-effects, or “M&E” tracks, are basically the film audio but with the dialogue taken out so distributors in other territories can dub the film into their own language – so not the kind of thing that the public is necessarily meant to see but it’s there for the die-hard fans. Bizarrely the M&E track does not feature Tangerine Dream music all the way through – on some scenes towards the end, it uses library music that is quite out of place! I don’t know for sure but my theory is that the M&E track was produced sometime in the 2000’s so Universal could exploit the film in Latinx or Quebecois outlets, and that Universal didn’t have all the music stems so had to plug in the gaps with whatever else they could. (It makes no sense that a M&E track would be produced for the U.S. cut otherwise as it wasn’t intended to be distributed outside North America!) Universal also delivered all of the old archive bonus features produced for the Ultimate Edition DVD. As their holdings are somewhat limited on this title, we had to lean on collectors for some other material that’s included in the extras, namely the 1985 EPK featurette, the storyboards and the TV cut narration.
 
Sean: Why was the European cut (94 minutes) not included?
 
James: As I mentioned earlier, the distribution rights to that version of the film are owned by Fox/Disney, and as our license was only for North America through Universal, we could not include that version without additional permissions from Fox that were sadly not forthcoming. I just want to clarify something, however – some people have unfortunately (but not unreasonably) interpreted my remarks on Twitter about this as Fox/Disney maliciously or callously denying us our request, which simply isn’t the case. The sad truth is that, as a result of the Disney buyout, the mechanisms in place to facilitate a deal like that at Fox, or even just to authorise what may seem like a simple request, aren’t really there anymore. (Things just don’t happen quickly at major studios unless you have an unimpeachable trail of legal paperwork saying it’s okay and/or a big personality at the studio who is determined to make it happen.) Hopefully one day Disney will appreciate the opportunities that licensing films from the Fox catalogue to boutique labels like us can offer them, but at the moment their central focus is their streaming services, so I’d advise everyone not to hold their breath for a UK or even 4K release. As I type this, Legend isn’t even available on Disney+ over here!
 
Sean: How did you decide on the extras you included? What were any extras you wanted to include but could not?
 
James: Once we confirmed that we could carry over all the extras from previous editions, we looked at what else could be added to the package to help make it as definitive as possible. Charles de Lauzirika and J.M. Kenny did such a great job getting all the main participants to speak for the Ultimate Edition, so we didn’t want to repeat what they had done. The interviews with UK-based crew members were filmed by James McCabe, who has an archive of career-retrospective interviews with UK film veterans he’s licensed to us in the past; the interview segments with Annabelle Lanyon were outtakes from an interview we filmed with her for the bonus features on the 1988 horror film Dream Demon. Given his history with Ridley Scott and Blade Runner, Paul Sammon was my first choice to record an audio commentary – he’s recorded commentaries for RoboCop and Dune for us in the past too, and was very happy to do so for Legend. Daniel Griffith from Ballyhoo Motion Pictures put together some exceptional featurettes on the two scores and the make-up effects that I know fans will really enjoy. Travis Crawford has recorded commentaries for us in the past and is a big fan of the movie, so leapt at the chance to write and narrate a visual essay about the different versions.
 
We weren’t given restrictions about what we couldn’t include, but I’m sure there are plenty of other people we’d have loved to interview if time and money were no object – I’d have loved to try and interview Kiran Shah about playing Blunder, or Arlene Phillips about choreographing the Dress Waltz and Fairie Dance (as well as babysitting Ridley Scott’s kids!) – but I’m pretty pleased with the spread of people we got, all things considered (not least the pandemic). It would have been nice to trawl through the vaults for more deleted footage (such as the actual Fairie Dance footage), but this is often a very costly endeavour and COVID-19 made it an impossibility anyway.
 
Sean: What expected challenges did you run into with Legend?
 
COVID-19 was obviously a challenge in many regards, from having to work on the restoration remotely – especially difficult when it turned out we needed some changes made not long before the discs had to be signed off! – as well as securing interviews while people isolated in their homes. Luckily, we managed to pull it off, and hopefully people won’t be able to tell for the most part that it was put together during the pandemic.
 
Sean: What unexpected challenges did you run into with Legend?
 
James: How difficult it was to manually reassemble the U.S. Cut! That was tremendously difficult and time-consuming – I can’t imagine doing it all over again in 4K! Again, the results speak for themselves though, and it was totally worth it.
 
Sean: What should I have asked you about but didn’t?
 
James: What I’m doing next! I’m in the thick of producing two boxsets of Shaw Brothers martial arts films, the first of which comes out this Christmas, 2021. It’s another instance like the Gamera boxset where I didn’t really know anything about the films but had the opportunity to do lots of research and imbue my journey of discovery into the finished product, so it’s as accessible to newcomers as it is die-hard fans. We don’t have any other Ridley Scott films on our slate, but I hope we can do another in the future – he’s such a visionary that it would be a thrill to bring more of his work under the Arrow umbrella.
 
I hope you all enjoy the Legend Blu-ray when it comes out. Obviously it’s a shame that it’s not a UHD of all three versions, but at the very least we know that if that day ever comes, we’ll be very well prepared from having done this edition.

Postscript: James was nice enough to thank me (Sean) and several others in this tweet and the follow on tweet. I've captured them both below.

Tweet 1 - James Flower @jamesflowerfilm: The @ArrowFilmsVideo edition of Legend is now officially signed off, one of the most bastard-hard projects of my career! All very much worth it though. We were even able to add some more bonus features, see the full list below (with new or expanded stuff in bold)...

Posted: 10:01 AM · Jul 26, 2021·Twitter Web App

Tweet 2 - James Flower @jamesflowerfilm: In addition to the new featurettes by @ballyhoofilms, the enclosed booklet also contains an additional essay by Simon Ward and an archive intro to the script by writer William Hjortsberg. Special thanks to @Figmentfly, @Lauzirika, @FidelityUHD and all the other folks that helped!
Posted: 10:04 AM · Jul 26, 2021·Twitter Web App

I (Sean) am glad that I was able to help out by sharing a copy of the opening narration from the edited-for-television version with the voiceover and the complete set of storyboards with James for the Blu-Ray release.

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This is the James Flower Twitter thread discussing why there was no 4K UHD version

When the Limited Edition Legend release from Arrow Video was announced on June 25th, 2021, some folks noted that there was no 4K UHD version. James Flower, a producer at Arrow Video, addressed this on twitter the same day. The thread starts here: James Flower. You can read the whole thread in one place at threadreader. The twitter thread is reproduced below.

"So, the big controversy from today’s @ArrowFilmsVideo announcement: no 4K UHD for Legend. As I hinted a few weeks ago, there are sound reasons for this, and I’m going to try and explain why in this thread.

Obviously we wanted to, and it’s not Universal stopping us (they have no plans either AFAIK). It’s a visually stunning film and I understand people’s dismay when Alien and Blade Runner are both on UHD and they want Legend to sit alongside those. Believe me, I get it. But...

It’s important to understand Legend’s post-production and release history and the materials issues relating to it, which is much more complex and fraught than Alien or even Blade Runner, both of which have enjoyed multi-million dollar restoration projects by Fox and Warner.

Reputation is an important factor too. Alien and Blade Runner are undisputed classics, one an instant franchise-spawning hit and the other a hard-earned unlikely triumph. Legend has still never quite enjoyed that level of respect, as much as we may love it.

There are three versions of the film (not counting TV edits): the 113-min Director’s Cut, restored by Universal in 2002 (SD) and 2011 (HD); the 93-min International cut, released outside the US by Fox; and the 90-min cut with Tangerine Dream score released in the US by Universal.

The Director’s Cut was restored from one of only two surviving 35mm answer prints, with additional post-production by Universal. There is no better quality source for this version, certainly not a negative. So why not scan the answer print in 4K? I mean, go big or go home right?

These are Scott’s notes from the 2011 Blu-ray explaining the inherent quality issues on the Director’s Cut master. He sums it up well; even though an answer print is often struck direct from the negative, there is significant generational quality loss that cannot be reversed.

In addition, the answer prints do not wholly represent what is in the Director’s Cut HD master; they contain unfinished effects and other issues that would need to be corrected all over again in 4K.

Universal spent a lot of money in 2011 getting the Director’s Cut to look as good as it does in HD, but make no mistake: its imperfections would be utterly naked in 4K, and the diminished dynamic range would make HDR a moot point.

Some wise aleck might be piping up with one of the rare examples to prove me wrong. “What about the Cannes cut of Dawn of the Dead, restored in 4K HDR from a CRI!” True, but the Cannes cut is a curio, not Romero’s preferred cut that most people would reach for before any other.

The negative of Legend is conformed to the 93-min International Cut... and here’s where things get tricky. The negative is owned by Universal, there’s even a Universal copyright at the end... but Fox/Disney own distribution rights to that particular version of the film.

We went ahead and did a 4K scan of the negative anyway, knowing we could still put it to some use and hoping that we might be able to pull off a miracle and clear a US/UK edition with all three cuts, which might make UHD a little more feasible logistically and financially.

We tried very, very hard to make headway with Fox on clearance to include the International Cut as an extra, but no dice. Ever notice that the International Cut’s never been released in the US, nor the US cut in the UK? You need both to sign it off and we couldn’t make it happen.

You may ask, “Why not use the negative to make the Director’s Cut look even better? It’s only 20 mins shorter, right?” In fact, there are so many tiny cuts and minute differences throughout that less than an hour of negative material could be used in a Director’s Cut restoration.

So even if we used our 4K negative scans to upgrade portions of the Director’s and US cuts, what does that leave us on UHD? Two compromised, Frankenstein masters that would inevitably fall short of people’s high expectations, no matter what we did.

Make no mistake, if Arrow does a new 4K master, whether it’s Tremors or King of New York or Donnie Darko, and spend as much as we do on restoration, UHD authoring etc, we want it to be a massive improvement. Legend in this form would not qualify.

So here’s the deal: the Arrow Blu-Ray, in addition to awesome new extras, has both Director’s and US cuts in the best quality they’ve ever been seen in. It’s still a stonking upgrade, thanks in no small part to those neg scans of the one cut that’s unfortunately missing.

(Side note: if you desperately want this cut of the film, it is still available on Blu-ray from Fox in the UK and elsewhere – for now! Just a shame you haven’t seen our master of it which looks even better…)

If Disney ever play ball and the opportunity ever comes to do a UHD with three cuts, we can re-assess what to do with the Director’s Cut, whether it’s a rescan or AI upscaling with fake grain and fake HDR (as I know one non-US label has done without you lot noticing)...

Because at least then there’ll be one cut of the film that looks amazing, 100% restored from negative, which would make the visual flaws in the other two cuts a little more forgivable. I sincerely hope it happens one day... but knowing what we know, don’t hold your breath.

Once again for those at the back: there is no surviving negative of the longer cut, and any 4K improvement on what’s been released before would have been nominal and not currently worth the substantial hassle and expense. One day, that may change... but not today.

Until then, the story of Legend remains, such as it ever was, one of messy compromise. We’ve done the best we could with what we have in the meantime – so, enjoy! (FIN)"

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