Arrow Video Interview

• 17th Jun 2011

You may have noticed amidst the many genre titles we review on Filmwerk that a familiar brand on some of the box set covers we feature creeps up time and time again. Arrow Video have been around for some time but , in recent years have been releasing some of the best loved genre titles you are likely to see or even hear about.

We grabbed some time from Arrow and asked them a few questions about their special brand and what they are currently up to!

So can you tell us basically how Arrow came together and a bit of the history?

Arrow as a company has been going a long time, doing theatrical releases of films from way back, including David Cronenberg’s Shivers. Then into the 90s it became focused on home entertainment releasing all sorts of films on VHS and then to DVD and then in 2009 it established the Arrow Video imprint with Almar Haflidason, PR genius and genre fan, who engineered the whole thing with Alex Agran, the director of Arrow Films.

You are currently on a roll releasing some of the best horror and alternative titles from some of the greatest genre directors we have ever seen. They are getting the treatment on some of the discs too. Is this a trend you intend to continue for some time?

Arrow is diversifying with more theatrical releases. First running titles like the sensational shows The Killing and Wallander and the upcoming Perfect Sense with Eva Green and Ewan McGregor but Arrow Video and Arrow Academy are still big parts of the business, we most certainly intend to continue and we’ll actually be growing the line very soon!

You have your own brand of sleeve designs for each release (sometimes offering multiple designs). Can you tell us about the artists involved?

We work with a number of artists, to date we have six on board, all with very different styles and the brief is usually the same. As they’re all so good at what they do we just ask them to watch the film and they do their thing. We go through a sketch process to make sure they’re not missing the mark but usually we totally agree on the direction and that’s it. It’s a huge pleasure to be working with such talented artists but also that they make it so easy! I hope people check out their blogs and websites which are printed on the back of the packages.

Arrow also puts together many of the supplementary materials. Do you have team who work to gain input from the film-makers for these interviews, commentaries, docs, etc..?

We’re always trying for the definitive edition, importing great extras where possible but mostly focusing on new content as things do tend to go out of date or get overlapped so we try to minimise that as much as possible. Most of our extras come from the great team at High Rising Productions who do a sensational job with everyone they manage to talk to and film. Other extras are commissioned by us, like the commentaries with Kim Newman and Alan Jones or the conversation with the Zucker brothers for the upcoming special edition of The Kentucky Fried Movie, but mostly it’s High Rising as they’re so good at what they do, we leave it to them!

Can you tell us about any other titles you have recently acquired, or even hope to acquire for the future?

We’re thrilled to have recently acquired William Lustig’s legendary Maniac Cop, which we’re thrilled about releasing on Blu-ray in October. It’s shaping up to be a very nice package so we’re very excited!

In particular I’m excited about seeing Demons but I understand there are issues with that title at the moment?

Lots of people are! Yes, unfortunately the material we received to master the DVDs from was just not good enough so we’ve had to go back to the drawing board, we’re working on it now and hopefully it’s going to be worth the wait.

Are we likely to see ifton Blu-ray?

At this time we don’t have material to master for a Blu-ray release but we’re looking for the best material and the eventual release on Blu-ray is the hope but there’s never any guarantee that it’ll be good enough, it’s very hard to get material for Blu-ray for these kinds of films as they are often in such poor shape to begin with.

Are there any other titles that have similar issues that are being looked at?

To date we don’t have any problem titles like Demons fortunately so it’s nice things are going smoothly! We do however have some other things in the works that seem to be taking as long as Demons but that’s because we want to get them right!

You pull over existing extra materials, but now and then you don’t quite get everything over (I.E. Day of the Dead was missing the Romero Commentary.) Can you tell fans why this is?

It’s always down to the rights, things are often very complicated so we can’t always get everything we want, and that might extend to rights to master material which is why someone might release a Blu-ray in another part of the world and we can’t access it. Just because there is a Blu-ray somewhere that doesn’t necessarily mean it can be used by us, the world is broken up into different territories of ownership and it’s often a complicated and difficult mess but we do what we can!

Often you will also have a written booklet for each release written by experts. For example Alan Jones seems to be contributing for each of the Argento releases, and sometimes a commentary too. How do you set about getting these people involved?

We have a booklet with every release. We try and focus on the best person for each film, Alan Jones literally wrote the book on Argento, same for Tom Mes and Takashi Miike, at other times we can be more creative, we don’t really like to overlap so we had Tim Lucas’ commentary on A Bay of Blood so we didn’t think it necessary to double up with an essay, though Tim isn’t too interested in writing new stuff on Bava – he’s been doing it forty years so we’re giving him new things to do…! In terms of the approach, it’s usually that one person knows another or we get in touch with a publisher or through an author’s website. Harvey Fenton of FAB Press is a huge help – he turned us onto Brad Stevens, Robin Bougie and Kier la Janisse and others so I hope people are reading the booklets and then going onto the author’s books as they are clearly brilliant writers. In other cases we turn to journalists such as Calum Waddell who does a lot for us alongside running High Rising and then there’s David Hayles, Kim Newman, Stephen Thrower, Andrew Stanton, Jay Slater… too many to name!

If anything I’m thrilled when journalists such as Alan Jones and Kim Newman provide audio tracks, but then dismayed when they are absent on other titles.

We do try to cover all bases when it comes to the extras and whilst we’d love to have Kim and Alan on every release we want to keep the variety up and keep people guessing, we’ve had loads of commentaries lately for The Funhouse, Pervert, Savage Streets and more to come!

It should also be noted that you release a great deal of uncut versions of films. This is surely getting you the attention of many fans that have been salivating over the idea of uncut footage from the likes of Bava or Fulchi?

Yes, we’ve been very fortunate to be in the position of releasing many films totally uncut for the first time, real surprises like Inferno, Deep Red, Island of Death, Savage Streets, Slaughter High… long may it continue we hope!

Steven Hurst