Take a seat: A Chairy Tale (1957).

TJ: Was it difficult gathering all the material that McLaren did prior to his NFB work?

DM: It wasn't complicated, because there were negatives at the Film Board of all of this material.

TJ: Even the films that he did in the U.K.?

DM: Yes -- he brought negatives of his student films with him when he emigrated. In one or two instances, the films were with his family or something. Then McLaren had had copies of the GPO films sent to him at some point. And when I did the feature on McLaren called, Creative Process, in 1990, I got one or two other things for that. But all this material existed at the Film Board, and Norman had obtained good dupes.

TJ: That's some remarkable foresight on Norman's part. So often in filmmaking the negative is under someone else's lock and key, far, far away. Or in TV it's sold from one library to the next, or chucked, or lost, or degaussed. But no, Norman preserved all his own prints.

DM: There was Love on the Wing, in which all Norman had was a very scratched 16mm print, because he thought the original materials had been destroyed in an air raid. But when I did Creative Process, I actually found the original at the British Film Institute, so I got a fabulous interneg from them. That's my only memory of anything that was not already at the Film Board, in Norman's vaults.

My blackbird may never sing: Le Merle (1958).

TJ: So there was no long-lost treasure you had to laboriously dig up, no holy grail?

DM: No -- I knew what was there. It was a holy grail as far as other people were concerned, because a lot of this stuff had never been seen. Bits of it, like On the Farm, had been running around for years in different forms, and sometimes had been shown in festivals. But it was 98% unknown to the general public.

TJ: So you got to be the Fool in the Fisher King story -- "Hey, guys, I didn't know you were looking for the grail -- I just thought you were thirsty for some McLaren! Here you go!"... It's interesting how the box set is thematic, not chronological, and some material repeats from disc to disc.

DM: I think initially there was some idea of doing it chronologically, and then we had meetings and it was decided that we should do it thematically. McLaren himself jumped back and forth. He was doing handmade films right up until the mid-'60s, but they were interrupted by films which were not handmade. It's awkward looking at the work chronologically.

TJ: It's easier to see how he refined his technique if you see all the examples of that technique in one place.

DM: Exactly.

TJ: Were you involved in any of the packaging decisions, the choice of DVD shells and so on?

Abstract ballet in Pas de Deux (1968).

DM: No, that was all done by other people -- Christine Noël, Marysol Moran and Marc Bertrand, who's a producer working under Marcel Jean. They would ask me questions -- "Are there photographs on such-and-such?" And I would say yes, and they'd have a dozen to look at, and we would go through them and pick. But I had made it clear that I didn't own McLaren, (laughs) and that anything that I would say or think about the DVDs is only my opinion, and that McLaren has to stand on his own two feet. It was one of those things that the Film Board does well, which is large-scale collaborative projects.

TJ: Have you gone on the road with that program of McLaren's work? Were you at the Academy screening in L.A.?

DM: No, I couldn't get down for that. It was a 67-minute program that went down to Hollywood, and then we showed that in Toronto, and Ottawa, and Montreal. For that we took the digital restorations and transferred them onto film. See, the problem is that a lot of these films are still in release. They're films that he made in 1940 in New York, like Dots and Loops, and they've never gone out of circulation. The original negatives don't survive anymore. We're now into a dupe of a dupe of a dupe. So we made a decision to use the digital materials, which were totally clean and with new sound, and to make the 35 negatives from those.