BEHIND THE CUT - POWERHOUSE FILMS

This is the 'Behind the Cut' series we're running in our newsletter over the coming months. We'll be sharing more conversations with the folks that help shape our platform.

If you have a question you'd love to ask someone in the team, drop us a line – we love hearing from fellow cinephiles.

Today we're visiting the fine folks at Powerhouse Films Ltd, where every release is a labour of love, from the first licensing discussions to the final booklet that tucks neatly into the slipcase.

We turn the 'camera' on, starting with the Directors who founded the label, followed by the Producers, the Art Designer, and then a chat with the Freelance Writers who all make your limited editions come to life.

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A Chat with Sam Dunn, Co-founder and Director

Sam, I'm delighted you agreed to having a quick chat with us. May I ask you some questions that I'm hoping our reader will be willing me to ask...

Q. Why Film? I developed a love of film through watching the great seasons on UK TV in the 1980s - The Film Club, Moviedrome, and the various seasons which screened on BBC2 and Channel 4 (Jarman, Cassavetes, Tarkovsky, etc.). In those days, you could send a self-addressed envelope to the broadcaster and they'd send you a well-produced brochure with critical writings about the films and information about the filmmakers. I loved delving into those, and still have them somewhere...

Q. Powerhouse Films have a distinct editorial voice and curation style. How would you describe your mission when selecting this? As well as being big fans of the acknowledged classics of cinema history, a number of which we're very pleased to have been able to release, we're also interested in the way that certain films get 'lost' or disappear from circulation, and we've developed a keen interest in making sure that such films are given the opportunity to find a new audience. In that respect, Powerhouse has always reflected a desire to give equal weight, prominence, and status to films that, on the one hand, have enjoyed critical praise and, on the other, have 'fallen off the map', so to speak. It's a sort of 'democratic curation' - an approach which doesn't privilege one kind of film above another.

Q. How do you manage commercial appeal with artistic integrity when choosing what to restore? It's a delicate balance, and John and I are constantly weighing up a given film's commercial potential with our desire to make each and every release as good as it can possibly be, with the quality of the film presentations - which are more and more restorations which we undertake and fund ourselves - at the heart of that decision-making process. The bottom line for us, though, is to always find a way to give each edition the same level of care and attention.

Q. What Film from Powerhouse Films do you feel especially proud of? I'm pleased to say that there are many of our releases that I'm proud of. The box sets hold a special place, of course, due to the sheer amount of love and hard work we pour into them, and I'd single out Magic, Myth & Mutilation (our Michael J Murphy collection) and The Criminal Acts of Tod Slaughter as particular highlights. But I feel particularly proud of the work we've done with the films of Jean Rollin, and The Iron Rose would have to be singled out as an edition I feel we really did justice to.

Q. If you could take three films on a desert island what would they be? That's a tough one - there are so many I still haven't seen! Seeing as you're forcing me to choose, though, I'll take All About Eve, Carnal Knowledge, and The Small World of Sammy Lee. (Obviously, if you were to ask me the same thing tomorrow, I'd probably make different choices...)

Q. Thank you so much Sam, is there anything else you would care to add? Just to say a big 'thank you' to you and the rest of the team at Limewood and Limelight. The work you all put into packaging and delivering our editions with care and attention - to be received by people who, very reasonably, look forward to enjoying them in perfect condition - is an essential part of the process.

Thank you for that Sam, that is so kind of you to say!

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An Interview with John Morrissey, Co-founder of Powerhouse Films

That now leaves us to talk to John Morrissey, the other Co-founder of Powerhouse Films.

Q. Why Film? I fell in love with cinema at a young age; it was a huge part of my early life.

Q. If you could take three films on a desert island, what would they be? The Great Escape number one, It's a Mad Mad Mad World, and Local Hero, but there are so many the list would be endless.

Q. What Film from Powerhouse Films do you feel especially proud of? I would say without a doubt The Night of the Demon; the feedback we received for this release was just amazing. We knew then we had a successful formula for presenting classic films.

Q. Running an Indie label isn't easy what keeps you going? Everyone at pH has an immense amount of pride in what they do, and that keeps us motivated to keep doing better with each title.

Thank you, John. Now, we move onto Anthony Nield...

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An Interview with Anthony Nield, Head of Production

Q. How did you get into production and what led you to Powerhouse Films? I started out by writing about film, and specifically DVD when the format was still relatively new in the early 2000s. This was mostly online and initially for a website called DVD Times, which no longer exists but was home to a number of writers who ended up entering the DVD business, including a number who are now employed by Powerhouse Films today. Through my writing, I was able to get to know and meet people who were working in the physical media industry, and so – when Arrow Films were looking for a new producer – my name was suggested. I worked as a producer for Arrow for about six or seven years, beginning with their Blu-ray of Brian De Palma’s The Fury, and then moved to Powerhouse just as the massive edition of The Night of the Demon was in its latter stages.

Q. What does a typical day look like for you? At any given point, we’re working across various titles that are at various stages of their development. So we will have some discs that are at QC stage, with their booklets and packaging at proofing stage, some discs that will have their extras and their subtitles being prepared, and some that are in need of pieces being commissioned (if new) and licensed (if old). We are only a small team, but we work as collectively as we can, meaning everyone will take a look at a disc before it is signed off, or a book or booklet, or the inlay or slipcase, not to mention extras when at the editing stage, and any and all subtitles. Much of the work is watching and reading, and spotting and fixing errors before they make it to disc, and a lot of emailing. On top of that, I have more ‘admin’ related jobs, such as ensuring that retailers have all the information they need to sell our products, handling the same information for our own webstore, maintaining our release schedule, and generally ensuring that all deadlines are hit. There may also be some social media involved, or working on ads for print, and each day brings a few surprises, too!

Q. Can you share a moment from behind the scenes which makes you think ‘this is why I do this’? The physical media market is now at a stage where it no longer caters for the general public but rather a collector mindset. As such, our job in bringing these films to Blu-ray (and, increasingly, to 4K UHD) is to provide the customer with the definitive release. Especially as it could be the last time the title in question gets a home-video release. Of course, we are trying to do this with certain restrictions in place – we don’t have unlimited budgets, and certain items or people may be inaccessible as much as you’d love to have an interview with such-and-such – so when you are able to achieve those results, it’s especially satisfying. Our release of Bullfighter and the Lady did everything that it set out to do. It contains both Budd Boetticher’s definitive cut of the film and John Ford’s shorter cut. It contains rare, career-spanning interviews with Boetticher that are incredibly entertaining. We were also able to get a new interview with his widow, Mary Boetticher. And we were able to present his final film, My Kingdom For, as an extra, which hadn’t been available to the public since its initial release in the mid-1980s. Plus plenty more besides. The previous Blu-ray didn’t even include a trailer, yet the film is Boetticher’s masterpiece, so it deserves this loving attention.

Q. Do you have a favourite film? And if you could produce any film with an endless budget, what would title of that film be? I’ve probably seen too many films to be able to pick out a distinct favourite that stands out above all of the others. I think it’s more important to have a rich and varied diet of cinema, especially in this job. One of the great pleasures of doing this kind of work is that each month differs from the next. So we can go from a brisk Hollywood pre-Code crime pic to an obscure British feature from the 1970s to a lavish British Technicolor gem from the 1940s to a saucy Jean Rollin caper to a Mexican horror classic to an Al Pacino courtroom drama. And our schedule is only going to get more diverse in the coming months. Having broad tastes helps in doing all of these films justice, though we also learn so much when working on each of them. I always say that, at the point of signing off on a release, you should be in a position to go on Mastermind and have that film as your specialist subject.

As for a dream release – it still smarts that we were unable to get our Ishtar Blu-ray out in the world. That was another disc where I felt truly satisfied that we had put together the definitive edition. But the licensor had other plans and, sadly, those are unlikely to ever change – even with an endless budget!

Fabulous Anthony, thank you.....

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An Interview with Nick Wrigley, Art Director

Q. How did you start working with Powerhouse Films, I believe it was right from the very start? Yes, the Indicator range launched Halloween 2016, and I’d started around April of that year, working out the branding, logos, and how each edition would look with Sam and John. I suggested the “Indicator” name, because of the pH Indicator strip, which informed the 14 colour pH strip branding, and that stuck immediately.

I’d previously founded The Masters of Cinema Series in 2004 and worked with Eureka Entertainment on hundreds of titles until 2012, when I left to go freelance and focus more on art direction, instead of ‘everything’ (licensing, producing discs, subtitles, etc!). I re-booted my enthusiasm.org design studio which led me to work on some large projects with Arrow, Criterion, Eureka (again!), the BFI, and to design a cover for Sight & Sound magazine, among many other things. I’d met Sam in 2008, the week he started at the BFI, and we’d discussed what our dream project would be – the films of Alan Clarke. Seven years later – it had taken that long for Sam to sort out the licensing – he asked me to work on the BFI’s incredible and massive Alan Clarke box set, where I did the package design, worked heavily on the subtitles, and wrote two essays for the book. We still talk about how great that release was, we can’t believe we managed to do it. There was a time when his films were almost impossible to see, and then there wasn’t. Working with Sam and John on Indicator came directly after the Alan Clarke box set was finished.

Q. What is involved in designing a cover? Short answer: most of the time, because we release old films, I don’t design covers. I research, clean-up, and respectfully re-present original designs, made at the time the film was released, which were usually approved by the people who created the film, because I think that’s more important than anything anybody could design decades later. The best art direction, I believe, is about research and respect. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, and when people do, it more often than not results in an arbitrary design which isn’t as good as the original.

Q. How has graphic design for film posters changed over the years? Remarkably so! The golden period is probably 1920s-1980s. An amazing time, full of craftsmen working at the forefront of design, a period which fed into the advertising and art worlds. Once desktop publishing and Photoshop became common in the 1990s, and heavily Photoshopped photography-based designs became the norm, the craft almost died with the 'floating heads'. Occasionally, I have had to come up with something completely fresh for a recent film, because the original poster was so poor. That’s not my favourite thing to do though. I love researching original designs, picking the best, and polishing it / re-sizing it for our needs.

Q. If you could design a poster for any classic film in history, what would that be? Most classic films have incredible original posters, so it’s difficult to think of one that I don’t like and could better. The BBC films of Alan Clarke are interesting examples… all made for TV, so none ever had posters. I’d like to have a crack at making quad posters for each of those, as if they had theatrical releases at the time they were made.

Q. What does a typical day/night look like for you? I work from home at the laptop, and also in front of the TV, all of the time – so I need to get to the swimming pool/sauna most days, to prevent my back from seizing up! I work very closely with the entire production team on almost every aspect of a release, so it’s a combo of WhatsApp, Zoom, and email.

Q. Is there anything you’re currently working on that you can share with us? Indicator is ten years old in 2026, so we’ve just started planning something interesting to celebrate!

Thank you so much for spending some time with us and giving us an insight into your world.

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An Interview with Jeff Billington (Freelance Writer)

We now turn our attention to Jeff Billington.

Q. How did you first get involved with Powerhouse Films? I was chatting to my friend Nick Wrigley, one afternoon in the pub, and he told me about this new label he was working with as art director, and showed me early versions of logos and packaging design. I was asked to work on the first two booklets, which was very exciting. I am one of the only members of the team with no background in the physical media or film industries.

Q. When you take on a project like this, where do you begin? I begin by looking for a suitable writer. Sometimes the disc producers have ideas, at other times I look around to see who is interested in the film or the broader genre. Then I research in the archives for suitable material, and make a list of things which I might include. I tend to collate all this material together, establish the word count, and then make decisions about what can realistically be included.

Q. What's your research process like? This depends on the film, to some degree. For an older Hollywood film, newspapers tend to have carried stories and interviews regarding the production, so I will start there. For a foreign language film, I need to be more adventurous – for some of the Rollin films, I had to track down some... er... specialist French publications.

Q. Do you focus on a particular era, genre, or style when writing for booklets, or does it vary? It varies. A Hammer horror film, a 1930s comedy, a 1950s western, and an obtuse New Hollywood film might all need a different approach, in terms of both content and writing style.

Q. Is there a film or release you’ve worked on that was particularly challenging or rewarding? Recently I have greatly enjoyed working on the series of Jean Rollin restorations. Whilst I knew his films fairly well, the combination of the quality of the restorations and the wealth of Rollin’s writing on his work, have made me see the films anew. The most challenging releases are those which have little to no contemporary material, sometimes needing all the booklet content to be newly commissioned.

Q. How do you decide what to include or leave out in a limited space? I tend to favour including material that is less easy to find, and which is contemporary to the release of the film.

Q. Do you get to watch the film before starting your work? Yes, though normally from a DVD or other inferior source. I don’t often get to see the restored version until the release drops through my door, which is always a nice treat!

Q. Have you uncovered any surprising facts or stories during your research? Yes, in some cases things which we couldn’t print for legal reasons!

Q. What kind of resources do you rely on—archives, interviews, old magazines, etc.? Newspapers and magazines, press books, campaign manuals, memoirs of directors and actors, biographies, fan-made websites, general film books, fanzines, academic databases, online archives such as the media history project, and occasionally sources to which nobody has previously had access – for example, the legendary Australian producer Antony I Ginnane allowed us to excerpt his unpublished autobiography.

Q. What’s your favourite thing about working on these releases? I like to place the film in the context into which it was originally released. So for a film from say, 1935, I want to present material from that year, which often hasn’t been read since the original release. For the Mexican or Italian releases, I want to concentrate on Mexican and Italian writers where possible.

Q. If someone wanted to do what you do, what would you tell them? Read, write, and watch widely.

Thank you so much Jeff, now moving on to Michael Brooke....

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An Interview with Michael Brooke, Technical Producer

Q. How did you first get involved with Powerhouse Films Michael? I'd known the original Powerhouse team of Sam Dunn, Chris Barwick and Nick Wrigley for many, many years - Sam's a former BFI colleague - and had already done a couple of freelance jobs on the early John Carpenter releases and the Sinbad box set. Ironically, I'd been trying to wind down my home video activities and get back to doing more writing (my first love), but Sam heard about this, correctly concluded that I might be both available and persuadable, and rang me out of the blue in mid-April 2017 to offer me a job. Although I'm still technically a full-time freelancer, I've easily put in more than normal full-time hours for Powerhouse practically every week ever since, over what is now just over eight years.

Q. When you take on a project like this, where do you begin? As the project's Technical Producer, I generally get involved when there are concrete materials to work with - I'm not involved with the early stages of licensing, planning etc. The first thing that I typically do is create subtitles, which either involves reworking existing subtitles (sometimes very extensively) into our house style or creating them from scratch (either from an existing transcript or by ear). We generally subtitle the main feature, all short films and archival documentaries, and I'm responsible for delivering polished files at the end of the process. There will then most likely be other jobs coming up - I do a lot of audio clean-up (sometimes full-on restoration) and quite a bit of editing (video and audio), plus anything else that needs doing that I'm equipped to do.

Q. What is your research process like? The things that I typically research are: (a) the spelling and/or wording of particular subtitles, which can sometimes send me down some fascinating rabbit-holes (for instance, loads of obscure late 1940s slang and cultural references in They Made Me a Fugitive), which typically involves extensive Googling (while being very conscious that I'm privileged here in a way that the original subtitler most likely wasn't); (b) frame-precise differences between two or more versions of the same film, as I usually edit the comparison featurettes - this typically involves comparing our master against other releases; (c) one-off challenges, such as the unusually complex subtitling demands on The Pillow Book (burned-in calligraphic subtitles, precision-placed SDH subtitles), or other subtitling issues where I'm trying to mimic the look of theatrical subtitles (Geronimo, Murphy's War, Gray Lady Down) - the most time-consuming part of that process being tracking down matching fonts, although thankfully The Pillow Book used an absolutely bog-standard calligraphic one in theatrical screenings. (d) linguistic issues, thanks to my taking a fateful early decision in the summer of 2017 that I would try to avoid cop-out subtitles like "(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)". At the very least, I try to identify the language being spoken, and if it's normally written in the Roman alphabet, I try to include a full transcript - after all, if people get to hear this dialogue, the deaf or hard of hearing should be able to read it. My French and Italian is passable, my German, Czech and Polish rather worse but still usable, and fortunately the overwhelming majority of language issues I've had to deal with have been in those languages. The major exception is Spanish, which happily my colleague Nora Mehenni speaks and which I can at least follow (structurally, it's gratifyingly similar to Italian) - and because her mother tongue is French, she gets to clean up what I create in that language, and sometimes transcribe stuff from scratch when I can't work out what they're saying. If it's a language that I don't speak at all, I try to rope someone in - for instance, an Irish-speaking friend of a friend transcribed the Irish prayer that Maureen O'Hara recited in The Long Gray Line, and a Norway-based friend was equally helpful with some unexpected Norwegian dialogue in Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror. (e) when creating original featurettes/commentaries, it depends on the film. Perhaps my proudest achievement is on 90º in the Shade, which contains a fair amount of genuinely original scholarship, not least the discovery that the film existed in two versions made up of different takes - I don't think that was revealed anywhere until our release, and may not even have been known about outside director Jiří Weiss's immediate circle. Commentaries invariably demand a ton of research, but their specific nature depends on the film - with 90º in the Shade, I went into it largely blind and had to research everything from scratch (quite a bit of it in Czech), but with Left, Right and Centre I already knew loads about director Sidney Gilliat, star Alastair Sim and turn-of-the-Sixties British politics, so it was just a case of working out what went where.

Q. Do you focus on a particular era, genre or style when writing for booklets, or does it vary? Ironically, although I've written loads of booklet essays over the last two decades, hardly any have been for Powerhouse! But the general answer is that it varies depending on the individual project. I tend to write quite a few essays for films that haven't been written about in English, either to any great depth or sometimes at all, so I'm very conscious that what I write may well become the definitive English-language resource, and there's a real sense of responsibility there. But that's a good thing.

Q. Is there a film or release you have worked on that was particularly challenging or rewarding? I've mentioned 90º in the Shade and The Pillow Book already, to which I'll add the Michael J. Murphy box, which presented me with constant challenges of a kind that I'd never encountered before and devoutly hope never to encounter again! The bottom line is that for all his genuine creative accomplishments, Murphy was essentially an amateur filmmaker with all that that implies in terms of technical, presentation and preservation standards, and he was the only one who'd have a definitive answer to my many, many questions - which is a bit unfortunate as he died in 2015. So there was a lot of hopefully educated guesswork, but guesswork nonetheless - particularly with regard to reconstructing the very early films which sometimes only survived as fragments with no assembly instructions. We also had to subtitle all the films by ear in the absence of scripts - I personally did about two-thirds. Another challenge came with Murphy's habit of reworking his films for DVD release, in one case adding glowing red eyes to characters in Invitation to Hell to denote demonic possession. This unsurprisingly wasn't in the 16mm source that we scanned for our release, and the DVD footage was unusable (very poor quality, and reframed to widescreen), so in a bit of blatant nepotism that I felt was entirely in keeping with Murphy's spirit, I asked my son if he could recreate Murphy's visual effects in high definition. Since he was actually studying VFX at university at the time, he turned the job around in a couple of hours, which was his first professional commission.

Q. How do you decide what to include or leave out in a limited space? Not really relevant to me. Except possibly in connection with the time when David Huckvale was commissioned to record a 10-15 minute piece on Elisabeth Lutyens' score for Hammer's Never Take Sweets from a Stranger, and without warning us in advance he decided to spend some 45 minutes ranging over Lutyens' entire sci-fi/horror composing career. Now, this might have caused problems if the disc had been unusually crammed, but fortunately it wasn't, and I was only too happy to edit a far more substantial piece than I was expecting, even though it obviously took three times as long. But I'm thrilled with how it turned out.

Q. Do you watch the film before starting your work? Since the first thing I usually do is subtitle it... well, it would be a bit difficult if I couldn't! Although quite a bit of the time I don't bother watching the film before I start subtitling it, so the effect is that I'm watching it for the first time very, very slowly. A major bonus of which is that I really do know it backwards by the time I've finished, which is very handy in a subsequent video editing/version comparison situation, and it also means that I can answer colleagues' questions about the film very quickly.

Q. Have you uncovered any surprising facts or stories during your research? Where do I start? I've already mentioned the 90º in the Shade situation, and sometimes I've pitched extras that were initially based on a rather vague concept - Ken Loach's connection to eastern European cinema for Family Life, Roman Polanski's 14-year relationship with the writer Marek Hłasko, on whom I'm convinced the protagonist of the Polanski-scripted A Day at the Beach was partly based - only to end up discovering genuinely surprising details of which I was wholly unaware going in. And sometimes amassing this material means that I can make connections that I hadn't previously considered - for instance, surprisingly strong similarities between Andrzej Wajda in Poland and Tony Garnett (i.e. Ken Loach's producer) in the UK, both of whom had to spend a fair bit of their time essentially pulling the wool over the eyes of their paymasters (the Communist authorities in Wajda's case, the BBC higher-ups in Garnett's) in order to get controversial projects greenlit.

Q. What kind of resources do you rely on - archives, interviews, old magazines etc.,? What is your favourite thing about working on these releases? Pretty much everything! I pop up to London to rummage in the BFI Library, have a subscription to newspapers.com, which gives me access to a gazillion US newspapers and quite a few British and Australian ones, and am a dab hand at teasing information out of Google Books snippets - for instance, when trying to track down German lyrics for an opera aria in Buffalo Bill and the Indians that's more usually performed in Italian; the only source I could find was a book published in the nineteenth century. And if what I'm researching is within my own area of professional expertise - British and central/eastern European cinema - I have a substantial physical library to hand at home. I also buy loads of second-hand books via Abebooks and their Polish/Czech/Hungarian equivalents - getting back to 90º in the Shade again, a major source of info on that project was director Jiří Weiss's memoirs, published exclusively in Czech in the mid-1990s and only available from such bookshops. (If anyone tells me with a straight face that "everything's online now", I just laugh.)

Q. If someone wanted to do what you do, what would you tell them? Um... well, in my case "marry someone with a proper job", which I thoroughly recommend.

More constructively, I'd recommend that they develop a marketable technical skill or unusual research specialism over and above more general things like "writing". In my case, it's editing (both copy and video), subtitling and audio restoration, coupled with longstanding and recognised expertise in central-eastern European cinema, particularly Polish, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian. The latter isn't much use on Indicator projects (except the occasional one-off like 90º in the Shade or A Day at the Beach), but it does mean that I get freelance commissions for other labels - in fact, I seem to be rapidly becoming the go-to guy on both sides of the Atlantic for audio commentaries for weird eastern European films, having just done three in a row in the first half of 2025 and with at least one more coming up later this year. But this is not remotely a complaint.

Thank you Michael that was very enlightening!

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What's Next for "Behind the Cut"?

We're always striving to bring you closer to the people who make your favourite films a reality on our platform. We hope you've enjoyed this fascinating glimpse behind the scenes at Powerhouse Films! It's clear that their dedication to cinematic preservation and delivering top-tier editions is truly a labour of love.

Now, we want to hear from you!

What films would you love to see Powerhouse Films bring back to life next? And, most importantly, who from the world of film restoration, distribution, or creation would you like us to interview in a future "Behind the Cut" feature?

Share your thoughts and suggestions with us in the comments below!