Captain EO occupied probably about five months to get it to some point where the visual effects department then took over. And I went back to writing a screenplay. I was hoping to finish a screenplay that I had started before Return to Oz.
It was a screenplay based on Egypt and archaeology. It was a kind of intellectual mummy film that investigated the possibility of an afterlife, and what would that be? And is it true, or does it seem to be true, or what? And I got that with Gill Dennis, who was my co-writer on Return to Oz. We got that to a certain point. And then, I ran out of money. And I had kids going to college, and other things.
So I linked up, thankfully, with Phil Kaufman. And we worked together, him directing Unbearable Lightness of Being, and me, editing the film. And it's based on a novel by Milan Kundera, about the events leading up to and after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, as it was then in 1968. Fascinating subject matter that involved a considerable amount of archival material. Because one of the conceits of the film was that in the middle, we would actually see the invasion the way it was photographed at the time.
