[Paul Smith]

My luthier friends were pretty amused about several features of "The Red Violin." Apparently blood added to varnish would make it brown, not red, and it would destroy the transparency of the varnish. The other parts they liked were the scenes in the lab with all the cool technical gear and everyone wearing white coats and looking very scientific. I have been told in no uncertain terms that there is no such laboratory, and that no one in the trade would ever dress like that. And it has also been impressed on me that serious experts could not possibly be fooled by such a ruse. Personally, I loved the film, and thought it was cool that they showed how the violin was modernized through the years, though the one flaw in that was that when the violin was dug up by the Roma folks, it was in its original "baroque" condition, but then when they handed it over to the English Paganini-esque fellow (Frederic Pope), the neck had been grafted and the instrument was in its modernized form. Nah, the Roma wouldn't have done that--it would have come to Pope in baroque form and he would have had it altered.