Inside the Five Year Restoration Process of ‘The Godfather’
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.