The restoration of The Harder They Come was truly a labor of love, inspired by loyalty to the film’s legacy and the power of its influential soundtrack. Post-production supervisor Scott Nabat (Real Women Have Curves, Maria Full of Grace), who was hired by Xenon Pictures to head the project, took on the job enthusiastically despite its limited budget. He knew that the respect for the film within the industry would fuel his work and the success of the restoration. Says Nabat, “The Harder They Come has been on my constant play list for twenty years...I knew I could save the day.”

The most daunting aspect of the aesthetic overhaul of the film was finding and restoring twenty missing shots from the film. The Harder They Come was originally shot in 16mm, inexpensively blown up into 35 mm, and then made into a video master that looks saturated in what Nabat calls “a haze of pot smoke”. At some point in the long history of movie’s distribution, a reel of film was damaged in a flood and thrown away. After extensive detective work, Nabat and his team reassembled the missing moments from earlier film and video transfers, and integrated them into the negative, like sealing up cracks in a vase.

The second most challenging aspect of the restoration was removing a pernicious mildew from the movie's first four minutes, a scourge that literally stained the film’s images with what resembled brown rain. Because of the limited budget, the alternatives were also limited. Nabat could try to blast the negative with ultraviolet light, or pay a local facility a sum that would break the bank. Nabat located a company in India, The Prasad Corporation, that could do the job for a workable price. It seemed fitting to the spirit of the film, which was made by an international cast and crew, visually striking but produced on a low budget, to restore these important four minutes in India. “The film went on a little vacation,” says Nabat. A team of experts hand-cleaned and painted 14,000 frames, and when the negative returned, all of the egregious problems were gone, the images clear, crisp, and mildew-free. “When it came back from India and I saw those first four minutes, then I felt like we restored it.”

The visual problems solved, there were a host of audio challenges as well. All of the original sound elements were lost and impossible to retrieve. The mono optical they had to work with, what Nabat calls “old brittle stuff”, was hissy and had limited dynamic range. Low, loud rumbles and distortions, plus dialogue from other scenes in some segments of the negative were audible on the optical. “Pulling a favor”, Nabat took the “old brittle stuff” to Chace Optical Recording, a house that restored classics like Lawrence of Arabia, The Wizard of Oz and now The Harder They Come.  When Nabat received the refurbished optical from Chace, he wrote to his staff: “MUCH clearer sound, EQ, and finally, no hiss. It will be the best it's ever sounded, too.”

The final assembly of all the elements into a high-definition transfer fell to Westwind Media, a premiere post house that took on the project because they respected the legacy of this artistically and politically important film. Renowned colorist Randy Starnes painstakingly performed the transfer at a labor-of-love rate. Every dollar spent went to a new hardware computer card that could restore the film without reducing color. The results were stunning. Nabet calls Westwind “our saviour”.

Though the most insidious and elemental problems had been solved, the issue of credits and subtitles still remained.  With the assistance of Xenon's James Renn, Nabat and crew created sharper, more elegant credits that still fit in the style and time-period of the movie.  The clarity of the subtitles was also key to the viewing of the film, as the characters speak in a Jamaican patois difficult to comprehend for most American audiences.  The daughter of the director of the film, Justine Henzell, scoped and revised the subtitles, and her corrected text was then laser-etched onto the film’s emulsion.

The payoff came when the newly-restored print made its triumphant debut at the 2006 Los Angeles Film Festival. From there it will enter the home video market on a special-edition DVD from Xenon Pictures, bundled with the iconic soundtrack that established reggae as a force in the world of music.