Original subtitles

The chance to restore a Kurosawa was just mythical!

RAN The restoration

The film's quite recent, but we didn't know if the negative

still existed.

We didn't know what state it was in,

where it had been stored.

Nevertheless, we knew we were going to do Ran.

The negative was first generation.

All the segments

were stuck together with tape,

hence its fragility.

But it was the original,

taken straight from the camera,

so we were working on the master.

The negative was well preserved.

There were no problems on that front.

But the negative was a victim of its own success.

There may have been some "prestige" prints,

taken directly from the negative,

without any intermediary process.

They took the negative

and put it through a printer.

They are industrial machines, so they can be quite aggressive.

If a particular splice was weak,

it could just break.

We had several difficult accidents.

Folds, breaks on a few dozen frames.

We didn't expect so many snags on a film that recent.

This one won't be complicated because it's a still image.

The difficulty with filtering

will be not taking out the arrows.

First, we decided what was to be digitized,

and how.

On Ran,

it was 4k digitization, to get as close as possible

to the 35mm resolution which...

which is, some studies say, around 4k.

So the first stage

was to digitize the chosen elements.

We loaded the reels onto scanners,

and digitized them frame by frame.

Then we checked the scan,

to make sure there were no problems

in the initial stage.

The first stage after digitization

was to make sure we had all the best elements

and to rescan them

if we could find better ones.

That's when we started

the process of restoration and calibration,

which are normally done together.

You're taking out all the impurities of the negative,

white spots, scratches,

black spots, anything you find on the film.

It must be clean!

The film isn't old, it's from '85,

so it hasn't aged much.

The colours are practically the same.

Being a relatively recent film,

it wasn't in itself really a classic candidate

for restoration.

However, little challenges

presented themselves along the way.

The negative was manually edited,

stuck together by hand.

When we saw the digitized images,

we realized the shot changes were,

99% of the time,

affected by the glue,

so there was a slight undulation

on the first image.

On a static image or a wide shot,

that undulation was like a punch in the eye.

We soon realized we'd have to restore

every shot change.

We didn't know at which stage in the process it would be,

but we decided to do it.

Several sections

had deep scratches,

that is to say on the plastic part of the film.

In that case, we had to re-scan them in immersion.

The principle of immersion

is that when the film is photographed frame by frame,

it is plunged into a liquid

with the same refraction index as the film itself.

So the damaged parts which, in the air,

would reveal a fault,

are instantaneously repaired.

There were also internegatives,

third generation -

you have the negative,

the interpositive and the internegative

which photographically were worse than the negative.

We noticed that there were internegatives

in the battle sequences,

falling from horses, etc.,

very fast sequences.

We didn't know why they'd alternated negatives and internegatives.

Then we realized that certain shots had been faked

by using "flops".

There was a battle sequence maybe 2 minutes before,

with those shots, but reversed.

We adapt our repairs

so that they are as discreet as possible.

We don't put tape in the middle of a frame.

Everything is framed,

using durable tape that is made for the purpose.

Mr Ueda was there to confirm what he had seen

back in 1985,

what he had learned,

and to share that with us.

I felt Mr Ueda

had made

a considerable personal investment.

I felt he had a heavy ethical responsibility.

It's a challenge to be met:

not to disappoint him,

to make him leave with a smile,

because he'd seen those images again.

Kurosawa always insists on colour.

To start with,

the colours of the three brothers

were the dominant colours.

It's true that the images of Ran

are very pretty!

The kimonos had to be

the same colour in every scene.

So it was very important. It was a colourful film, so...

And they won a prize for that.

The challenge was to restore the colours of the time -

the real material,

which cost a fortune, from what I've been told.

So it was very important to do that.

He was very pleased to see

the yellow, the blue, the red...

with the same vividness.

The challenge was

to keep the skin colour normal

while making the clothes stand out.

You have to find the happy medium

between the material and the faces.

We tried to restore the grading of the time.

That's what the DP wanted,

and he didn't want to touch

certain sequences that were intentionally dense.

We could easily bring out all the sequences

and make them less dense, bring out more detail.

No. He wanted

to keep the atmosphere of the time.

That's what's important:

to know when to stop

before becoming destructive in what you bring to the film.

On leaving, he said:

"I've rediscovered my 35mm copy that I saw at the time."

So it was a pleasure for us to have succeeded,

with digital tools,

in reproducing the 35mm film

without the defects of 35mm: scratches,

white spots, etc.

It's an honour to have been able

to do that film. It's...

For me it's one of the mythical films, so...

We're proud they agreed to it.

It was a pleasure. Roll on the next!