The Remaster
A few years ago I woke up and looked around my home with that particular mix of satisfaction and unease. You get older and gather things around you that reflect something of who you are, your own little world. But nowhere could I find the films that had shaped my entire life. Which was strange, because I used to have a whole cabinet full of DVDs.
In honesty, though, my real film education came through torrents. Twelve years old, alone in my room, burning through the IMDb Top 250 like it was homework nobody had assigned me.
As I got older and the DVD cabinet disappeared, I bought my first Blu-ray around fifteen. Se7en, in that beautiful blue case. I still remember thinking my TV was broken. I had never seen that much grain in my life. What is this old garbage?
Only later did I understand that Blu-ray held enough data to preserve the grain that compression usually swallowed. That grain is the soul of the film. Organic proof that light actually touched celluloid. That it existed in the physical world before it existed on a screen.
And yet, I understand the opposite impulse too.
Why James Cameron had the grain stripped from the 4K releases of his older work. Why Fincher puts fake anamorphic flares on a film shot with spherical lenses ( because it looks cool!). And why George Lucas went back in the nineties and filled the Star Wars universe with extra creatures and CGI crowds. I can imagine the agony of watching your own film and seeing the plywood of the sets. The edges of a world that was supposed to be infinite. Not alien enough. Never alien enough.
I understand the desire to make something feel timeless. Perfect. Like 2001.
Is that a betrayal of your own memory of the film or the ultimate expression of how a filmmaker wants their work remembered?
It is a fine line, and there is no clean answer.
I have made four short films now. My first was Leeuw Panter Wolvin, back in 2019. €7800, a lot of time, and long letters written to good actors. We shot it in four days inside the wonderfully unhinged house of Dutch celebrity Johan Vlemmix (he has since sold it). I graded it myself in 2019. Then again in 2020. Then again in 2024. Three different versions, all born from the same dissatisfaction with the colour. Part of it came from my own technical limitations. Part of it came from the conditions under which the film was originally shot and lit.
Every year I found myself opening the same old hard drive, pulling up the same footage, trying once more to get it right. In 2024, out of sheer frustration, I taught myself to grade in DaVinci Resolve. It still was not enough. Eventually, I did what I probably should have done years earlier. I convinced Wietse to take it on.
Wietse van Bezooijen has graded all my other short films. He called it a remaster. I call it the definitive version.
It is a strange thing, reopening old work and presenting it anew. Is it a falsification of history? Does something get lost when a maker goes back and fills in what they always imagined was there? For me a film is never really finished. It is an imperfect thing by nature, built from the limitations of everyone involved. Every department. Every accident. Every compromised decision made under pressure. And maybe that imperfection is where the truth lives. Something a computer cannot replicate because it comes from human failing. And there is something quite beautiful in all these little organic mistakes.
So starting today, I am burying that hard drive and presenting the definitive version of Leeuw Panter Wolvin.
A new aspect ratio. Open matte. New colour. A few audio touches here and there. Not because I had to. Not because I could. But because I can finally give the film a place to rest. And maybe, one day, find it again on a little compilation disc beside my other short films, all bound by Wietse’s beautiful, consistent colours.
Dusty. On a shelf. Next to the 4K Blu-rays I once could not imagine owning. A cabinet I am no longer looking to replace. Perfect. Like 2001.
Still from Leeuw Panter Wolvin, 2026 version