Inside the Five Year Restoration Process of ‘The Godfather’

variety.com:

Simon Thompson Being given the job of restoring arguably one of the greatest films of all time, “The Godfather,” is daunting enough.

Doing it under the watchful eye of its director, Francis Ford Coppola, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the filmmaker’s Academy Award-winning opus is another level entirely.It was a team led by restoration expert Andrea Kalas, Senior Vice President of Archives at Paramount Pictures, and James Mockoski, Archivist and Restoration Supervisor at Coppola’s American Zoetrope, who took up the mantle.“The burden of restoring this masterwork was something everyone felt,” Kalas recalls, noting that it required some of the finest artisans in the industry to do so.Laura Thornburg, Executive Director of Preservation, had left Paramount, but Kalas brought her back to oversee the restoration.

Says Kalas, “That is, in my opinion, why the result is as good as it is. We knew how serious, daunting, and exciting it was.” “This is something you can’t do overnight,” remarks Mockoski, revealing that it was five years ago when the restoration project was first raised. “Andrea started the conversation around the time Francis wanted to dive back into ‘Coda,’ and he said that when the 50th anniversary came around, he wanted to be a part of it.

This effort is a journey over 50 years.”The Zoetrope archivist considers the digital restoration in the mid-2000s to be the first real attempt to “bring this film back,” but they were now able to push it further.“Technology, monitoring, software, and hardware have all changed,” Mockoski explains.