Lee Ferdinand works as a producer for Home Vision Entertainment, a boutique video company that puts out an impressive slate of underseen recent foreign films and older titles with cult appeal. Ferdinand's most significant recent project was the six-disc box set The Yakuza Papers: Battles Without Honor & Humanity, a collection of early-'70s Kinji Fukasaku gangster films cited by many as one of last year's best DVD releases. The set's success is largely attributable to Ferdinand's efforts in compiling its sixth disc, an assortment of interviews about the series' significance in Japan and elsewhere.
The Onion: What does a DVD producer do?
Lee Ferdinand: We're integrally involved in every step. We have much more hands-on involvement in the creation of supplements than anything else, but we're the mouthpiece and face of the project all the way through, from packaging to menu design to authoring to securing the supplements that we don't make ourselves.
O: How do you know what you're going to be working on?
LF: That process starts with acquisitions. Home Vision is in kind of an interesting place right now. We have an equal number of new acquisitions that we get by actively going out to film festivals, and we also have a longstanding relationship with a lot of studios around the world, via our relationship with Janus and Criterion, so we put out a number of catalog titles a year. We're getting more away from that just because it's harder to maintain a steady stream of older films, but we've made some headway in cataloguing Asian titles. We're still actively pursuing the kind of '60s Japanese films that we've had successes with.
O: Do you get assignments, or do you get to pick and choose?
LF: These days, I'm pretty much involved in everything. Typically we have two producers here, but one recently left. Ordinarily, though, if Home Vision does 50 titles a year, we split them 25 and 25, and if one of us has a preference, we get that preference.
O: What's a typical project budget?
LF: Depends. Something like The Yakuza Papers, we knew we wanted to sink a lot of time and energy into it because we wanted to build on the awareness of Fukasaku that was just starting to build, via Kill Bill and whatnot. But a typical budget? It varies so much. We could get a new film in that hasn't been damaged in any way and our transfer process goes very smoothly. That's a huge part of the cost of building a DVD. Whereas if we do older titles, we have to do a lot of restoration work. Being a sister company to Criterion, we learned very early on that the quality of the image is the most important thing. So we tend to sink the most resources into that area. Then there's other considerations that go into it, like "How much are we realistically going to sell?" This may be one of the greatest films ever made, but if you can't generate the kind of awareness you need to sell a number of units, your budget's going to be pretty tight.
O: Do you watch what other companies are doing, and try to compete?
LF: Yes and no. I mean, I do a little bit. Every time I get a Criterion DVD, I immediately devour that. I know Warner Brothers for the past year has been doing a lot of really great stuff, so I'm really into their DVDs and seeing how they're changing and what they consider to be important. But in large part, I think we just kind of go about it with our own sort of philosophy. On some level, we think of it as stewardship. We've got these great movies that deserve to be put out on this archival format. In some ways, we're curators. And if there's not a lot of available materials to help this mini-exhibit, then it just stands on the strength of itself. We take a pretty simple approach.
O: Do you see Home Vision as building a brand identity the way Criterion has?
LF: I think so. I mean, we're not building a brand in such specificity as Criterion, where they can sum it up on the back of their packaging: "Film School In A Box." I think what we do is find the classics of tomorrow, and treat them as such. We really try to seek out what's interesting and new in world cinema. At the same time, we try to go after major periods of fissure in world cinema, where something interesting was happening. We're not the canon. Criterion's the canon. We're the people that get left out of the canon.