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Part of the strength of our company is that we can make a disc that will put "Nights of Cabiria" or "Grand Illusion" in front of somebody who may not even know it has a reputation as one of the great films. Look, we caught a lot of flak when we first did "This Is Spinal Tap" on laser.

With each release we're dedicated to finding a film that is exemplary of its type and to making the best possible disc from it. We caught a lot of flak for doing "Seven" with David Fincher, who is one of the most amazing natural talents behind the camera, one of the smartest, sharpest minds, and an amazing guy to work with. On the other hand, we also found a lot of people who were happy to find our quality and style of work being done on behalf of that film.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

Is there a commercial imperative for you to do films like "Seven" or "Armageddon"? Does it pay for "The Passion of Joan of Arc?"

It's not as if one thing pays for the other. Well, maybe it is to a certain degree, but we would never make that trade-off. If there's something that we don't want to do, we won't do it. This place is in spirit democratic -- our producers have a strong impact on what we produce and how we produce it. Their names are the top line on each release. And they have, if not total creative control, at least creative direction of each release they work on. They essentially dedicate themselves to a film or group of films one at a time.

For example, one producer's working on an Eisenstein restoration set now. When a new title opportunity comes up, there has to be a producer who's willing to take it on, personally. Sure, we were never worried that "Armageddon" wouldn't return the cost of producing it -- it was at the time the highest-grossing live-action movie that the Disney company had ever distributed. So the commercial prospects of the property were probably relatively safe, particularly because the main capacitors of sales are the buyers for the major chains, who are certainly more aware of "Armageddon" than they are of, say, René Clair's "A nous la liberté." One walks away from profitable activities at one's peril, but there was, honestly, never any concern that we'd walk away from "Armageddon."

Even people who hate "Armageddon" have to admit that one of the best things about your collection is that it's not stuffy. In addition to the high art, it's got some glitz, and it's got some cult items.

In that vein we are just finishing up work on what is going to be a landmark edition. It's a two-disc set of the cult horror film "Carnival of Souls." We've got both Herk Harvey's later director's cut and the original theatrical release (which is also sort of a director's cut). There is validity to both versions and different film on the two and since it can't be programmed in a way that you can play one or the other, we're presenting both, with tons of supplements.

That's a film that desperately needed to be done right, because it was always treated as public domain, with a million different versions out there. We worked closely with the screenwriter [John Clifford] who survives and was Herk Harvey's partner. Harvey made industrial films for the rest of his life for a company called Centron in Lawrence, Kan. This one picture is his landmark. We went into that release with the same degree of reverence and excitement that we'd go into working on "The Third Man." If we don't feel that we can do it right and well, we just can't do it.

Speaking of "The Third Man": As a fan of the director Carol Reed, I love that on your DVD of "The Third Man" you have Welles' friend, Peter Bogdanovich, do an on-camera talk in which he says that it really is Carol Reed's film, not Welles'. It's like the dictum in politics, "Only Nixon could go to China."

Peter was the only one who could disown it as an Orson Welles film and declare it Carol Reed's show.

In terms of how you present those and other extras -- there's no dictatorial editorial voice telling a viewer how to go from one feature to another. You present us with a wealth of materials and in some ways ask us to create our own program guides.

We want to lead people into these films and give them areas to romp around in afterward. The viewer's mind is a free mind; why would you want to cage it up? We try to reach into film archives all over the world and take treasures that are buried in basements that you need credentials to get into and allow home viewers to put them on their shelves. It's a great privilege for Criterion to be able to go and poke through what exists in film archives -- but poking around is part of the fun that we should pass along. We'll definitely err on the side of including things that might be of marginal interest to some people if we think they may be of essential interest to others.

I'm thinking, in particular, of "The Passion of Joan of Arc" disc. The goal was to create something definitive that would present the film in a way that would attract new viewers, which it has. When you dig through the disc there's a lot of content that's sophisticated enough in its analysis of the different versions of the film, and the history and context of the film, that it will stand up to the scrutiny of scholars. We're very conscious that we contribute not only to people's home collections but to libraries and universities. When we do things that have an academic as well as a consumer attraction, we have to pass muster.

I think we've accomplished most of what we set out to do in our first two years in DVDs, which is carry over the Criterion sensibility into a new format and figure out how to employ that format intelligently. In many ways the greatest contribution we've made over the 15 years we've been doing this is raising people's hopes and expectations of what watching a film at home can be -- and then trying to live up to that standard.

Next page | Rediscovering "Grand Illusion"