Mark Kermode & Daphne Dentz On Restoring ‘Ken Russell’s The Devils’: “There’s A Balance Between The Grain, The Dirt, The Vibe And The Look”

If you don’t ask, you don’t get, and that’s what Mark Kermode discovered over 20 years ago while trying to put together the definitive version of Ken Russell’s badly butchered 1971 film The Devils. Thanks to Kermode’s sleuthing, not only did the missing moments turn up, but it also resulted in the one of the surprise hits of the year; this week the film expands on its planned one-week run after taking $1,725m — a $4,925 per-screen-average — from 350 locations across North America. Next weekend, it opens in its native UK just in time for Halloween.

Unusually for a restoration project, The Devils wasn’t just given a hi-res make-over, it was restored to the original version that Russell handed to Warner Bros. and never saw again, first thanks to the timorous British censor and then the much more scissor-happy MPAA. Based on Aldous Huxley’s 1952 non-fiction book The Devils of Loudon, about a notorious series of demonic possessions alleged to have occurred in the French town in 1634, it was controversial enough for its time, even though nobody ever got to see its most infamous scene, in which naked, rampaging nuns run riot and defile a statue of Jesus Christ.

Russell always believed the scene was missing, never to be found, and, for a time, so did Kermode, until, while snooping around in the Warners archive, he came across a set of shipping logs. One stood out: It was labeled “C-cut 86”.

“At that point,” says Kermode, “I thought that the missing sequence was maybe 86 seconds long and maybe ‘C-cut’ meant ‘Censor cut’.” The archivist, however, wasn’t so sure. “He said, ‘I don’t know, but I’m pretty certain it’s not what you’re looking for.’ I said, “OK. I’ll make you a deal. If you call it in and it isn’t what we’re looking for, I’ll never bother you ever again.’ God bless him, he called it in, and then I got a phone call. He said, ‘OK. The canister came in. We opened it. It smelt of vinegar, so we’ve sent it to be washed. But I looked at the first frame, and it’s just a huge crucifix and there’s a load of nuns…’”

In 1971, Ken Russell’s name was synonymous with controversy, and for years the missing scene was presumed to be an act of gratuitous provocation. But in 2004, when Kermode — with the help of the film’s original editor, Michael Bradsell — put together a very rough DigiBeta Director’s Cut, with Russell’s blessing, audiences saw that the scene was far from gratuitous. Rather, it is pivotal to the film’s story, in which rival political forces manipulate the fantasies of a disturbed nun, Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave), to discredit Loudon’s popular incumbent priest Urbain Grandier (a literally smoldering Oliver Reed).

Notes Kermode, “Ken had always said that the whole point of the film is that it’s a film about brainwashing. It’s about the use of hysteria as a political tool, and the film is very clear about that. I think, as people recognize today, it’s very satirical in the way that it deals with politics and it’s incredibly contemporary. But that sequence was really important to him, because what it was demonstrating was that, in the middle of this apparently religious enclave, all this is being played out for the simple political end of getting Grandier out and getting the walls of the city knocked down. He said the whole point is that it’s a kind of a pantomime of blasphemy, and if you take it out, you never quite get that point across.’ That sequence is, in the very best sense of the word, hysterical.”

So, how did Mark Kermode’s rough-edged DigiBeta assembly become the luminous restoration that proved to be the hottest ticket in Cannes this year? And where does Guillermo Del Toro come into it?

To find out, Deadline spoke to Daphne Dentz, Senior Vice President of Post-Production Creative Services at Warner Bros. Discovery.

DEADLINE: When did you come on board with this project?

DAPHNE DENTZ: I guess it was January [2026], when Christian Parkes reached out to me. I’d never met him before. He was like, “We really want to restore The Devils and do the Director’s Cut. What do you think about that?” There was also the content licensing team; there’s a woman named Robyn Sklaren over there, and she was a huge proponent of getting this greenlit. I think it was sort of a combination of that and Christian’s enthusiasm, which is completely infectious. He’s incredible. It was like the stars aligned, and that was it. Then my team — the preservation team started researching and looking for assets. Luckily, we had everything — so we just went for it.

DEADLINE: What do you mean by assets?

DENTZ: We have a preservation services team, and they’re really experts as regards everything that relates to film assets and sound and audio assets. They went into the archive and scoured for every piece of film. Luckily we had the original camera negative. We had separation masters. We also had deleted scene reels, A/B reels, and that was the piece that was needed. Initially, we weren’t sure we had everything, but we did.

DEADLINE: Is that common? Mark Kermode was saying even Ken Russell didn’t think these things existed…

DENTZ: Well, I oversee the Global Media Archive, and I have to say that Warner Bros. — and this is just not me touting the Warner Brothers philosophy — our archive is pretty solid. We’ve spent 100 years preserving our assets, and I would say that over the last 10, 15 years, there’s been an even more aggressive attitude around preserving and archiving our assets. We’ve got good tools in place to search. We have a film prep team that literally sits in a room on the studio lot and goes through camera negatives and documents every frame and shot that exists in the OCN [Original Camera Negative]. Essentially, what we did was we pulled the original camera negative and those deleted scenes or those reels, and they went through it, frame by frame, identifying what we had. Then with, the 2004 DigiBeta that we received, our digital conform operator Katie Largay, frame by frame, rebuilt this film.

DEADLINE: What’s the first thing you do in approaching a project like this?

DENTZ: Well, the first part of the process is the research. The second part is the film prep and the sound prep. Then, once we have what we think is all the elements, we start scanning. We’ve got the best scanners in the world. We scanned at full 4K 16-bit, and our colorist, Andrea Kleebach, is amazing. All those scans went into our digital intermediate bay at Water Tower Color, and we just started analyzing it shot by shot. I have to say, when we saw those first scenes, we cried. We couldn’t believe our eyes. The original camera negative was in such good shape. People have never seen this film look as good as it does today.

DEADLINE: Did you refer to Ken Russell’s other films? How much was he a part of this reconstruction?

DENTZ: Well, it’s an interesting question — may I read something to you? Really, the best way to describe it is the way the colorist described it, because the real challenge was honoring the film’s original aesthetic. We didn’t have a clean visual record of what this film looked like on its first day in the theater. The way she described it is so perfect. She said, “The previous restoration we don’t believe reflected Ken Russell’s or [cinematographer] David Watkins’ intent. It couldn’t serve as a North Star… Reference materials couldn’t be trusted. Colorists look for a fingerprint of the filmmaker across other works.”

It’s detective work. Then, she said, she basically read descriptions about how the film felt to watch [at the time]. Words like, “hallucinogenic”, “bleached” and “Caravaggio” became creative parameters. I mean, this is one of those very special cases where you have a cinematographer who’s shot the most beautiful scenes and composed the most beautiful aspects. Every shot looks like a museum portrait. At least to me, that’s how it felt. And Derek Jarman’s production design is spectacular.

DEADLINE: Did you reconstruct it strictly according to the template of what Ken Russell had laid down with the DigiBeta version? Or were there other things — like a shooting schedule or a continuity schedule — that you were looking at as well?

DENTZ: We looked at everything we had. It’s interesting, because our original camera negative was sort of an auto-select, and in the 2004 version, there were a lot of changes. I can get into that a little bit here, which may be helpful. Here’s what our conform artist said. She said, “Multiple reels contained redundant or alternate version scenes that differed from the approved director’s cut reference.” The Rape of Christ sequence, for example, was discovered on a separate role labeled “Deleted scenes” and substantially overlapped with Reel 5 of the OCN while also containing extraneous material not present in the director’s cut and omitting certain shots included in that version. All scanned OCN materials were systematically lined up against the director’s cut reference to identify editorial variances and maintain a comprehensive inventory of missing footage.

DEADLINE: Do you approach a project like this in chronological order? Or is there an element of just taking things as you find them?

DENTZ: Well, the reels are conformed, and it’s typical that you would start from Reel 1 and then just work through. All the material is sent for dirt cleanup, but we also are very sensitive around making the film look new. There’s a balance between the grain and the dirt and the vibe and the look of the film, in terms of keeping it authentic while creating an asset that’s modern — 4K, HDR, SDR, or for digital cinema — because we didn’t have digital cinema back in ’71. Keeping all those elements balanced is an art.

DEADLINE: Is that the case with all restorations? How do you calibrate the amount of grain and the amount of dirt that you allow back in?

DENTZ: Well, it’s a great question, and it varies. We think we’re experts at our scan department. They really know film stock, and so there’s an element of understanding what the film stock of the day would look like, and the grain structure of a film from the ’70s versus the ’80s and ’90s. I mean, we do so many films at Warner Bros. from the ’30s, like The Wizard of Oz, to The Devils, and then to things that are a little bit more recent, like Se7en, for example. Now, in this particular case, we didn’t have [the original] filmmakers to come in and tell us, “This is what the film should look like.” But Guillermo [Del Toro] did come and sit with us. I don’t want to speak for him, but he was very enthusiastic about what he was seeing.

DEADLINE: Could you expand? What was Guillermo’s role?

DENTZ: He came in and reviewed the work with our colorist. We always need help. We always are looking for some direction. Andrea is really, like I said, a detective. We looked for one-sheets and things that were on the internet. Then Guillermo came in, and one of the things he was very interested in was the tiles in Derek Jarman’s production design — the whites, and how difficult it is to achieve the whites in a film like this. He blessed it. He came in and he said, “Yep. You’re on the right track — this looks the way that it should look.”

DEADLINE: The print that was screened in Cannes looked like a movie one might have watched in the ‘70s before the print became degraded after doing the rounds of too many cinemas.

DENTZ: That’s so wonderful to hear, because we’re so close to it now, it’s hard for us to see. The goal is always to honor the aesthetic, the creative intent, and to not waver in that and to stay true to what we think Ken Russell would’ve wanted. We’re really careful.

DEADLINE: What appeals to you about this work?

DENTZ: This particular film appeals to me on so many levels. I mean, the first thing is just from the most basic sense of the beauty of it. I felt like every shot — even the ones that are kind of grotesque — is incredible. It’s a beautifully shot film, and I have spent my whole career looking at images in dark rooms. When the first shot opens, you’re just pulled right into this world of incredible cinematography and incredible production design. The first film I ever saw that I can remember was Ken Russell’s film Women in Love. [Laughs.] I was probably three or four years old, and my mother took me to the theater! She probably shouldn’t have, but it was late at night, and I think she thought I was going to sleep through it. She just recently passed away, and I wish that she could have seen this. She didn’t know that we were going to do The Devils, and I think she would’ve been thrilled.

DEADLINE: Do you have a dream project that you’d like to restore?

DENTZ: This was a dream project. This really is a dream project because it has all the elements of never been seen or haven’t been seen in this form ever really. I mean, the folks at Cannes, they saw this film in a way that I don’t think anyone had ever really seen this film before, in 4K resolution. For sound, we had only a mono track, and we’ve done our best with that — in some cases, we had to create sound using multiple assets and elements. But for sure, seeing it in the theater is spectacular, it really is.