Viridiana was an absolute dream commission. You know those commentaries where it's clear well before the end that they're running out of material? Not here; deciding what to reluctantly leave out was my constant challenge with this one.
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Although admittedly the Marx Brothers got there fifty years earlier with the "college seal" joke in Horse Feathers.
That same episode features a joke that would be cringingly awful in any other medium - a bloke brings an ox into his fake locksmith shop ("Oxsmith?" "No, no, LOCKsmith!") - but it's strangely hilarious when you factor in the sheer amount of logistical effort that it must have taken to set up.
The reason why J.S.Bach wrote dozens of church cantatas isn't because he had a compulsive urge to do so, it's because he was required to produce them on a regular basis as part of his day job. He just happened to be very, very good at it, which is why they're still appreciated centuries later.
...but cut anything not directly related to what was on that Blu-ray (including, sadly, many of the weirder entries such as Gueuze-Lambic beer, which the Quays suggested), but fortunately the BFI was planning their own Blu-ray upgrade, so the full version made its English-language debut there.
The Quay Brothers Dictionary has been through four separate editions; original 2006 (which you have), and then I substantially expanded it for a 2010 book that turned out to be exclusively in Polish. Zeitgeist Films in the US then licensed it for their Quay Brothers Blu-ray...
I said I'd never produced a DVD project, and he assured me that it was 90% the same job that I was doing anyway, which was online content development. And he was completely right: it was more or less the same skillset but the various elements ended up in a slightly different digital carrier.
I got the gig in the first place because an internal BFI list of new rights acquisitions included a dozen Švankmajer titles, so I got in touch with Erich Sargeant, then head of BFI Video, and offered my services as a bona fide Švankmajer expert. He asked if I'd like to produce the project.
Well, the first one was technically the Jan Švankmajer set, but that got bogged down in rights and materials issues. And while that was in limbo the Quay project came up, and I was presumably considered the obvious choice to oversee it.
I added that at the very last minute! Someone at the BFI pronounced the name "key" on the day the booklet went to press, so I thought "I'm going to sort this out once and for all", and fortunately the booklet designer could re-jig the space.