Anyway, the difference is that by surgery, you've got two kidneys. A kidney weighs a pound and a half. If you want to lose that pound and a half, I suggest cutting out the kidney. And there's systems of cutting out people's fat, and stapling stomachs. There are cinematic equivalents of this, where you go at the internal organs of the film, and take them out. The difference, and it's a healthy difference, is that inevitably, if you do that to a human being that human being is not as healthy. With only one kidney, you are not as healthy as you are with two. Whereas, a film can actually get more healthy by the reduction of something that ostensibly looked very healthy. And the scene that I'm talking about, on paper, looked healthy. It was shot, it was well acted. But a problem was revealed with it when we saw the whole film, which is that we are now being asked late in the process of the film, very late in the film, to suddenly care about the people killed in Hiroshima. And of course, on a human level, we have to care. But on the cinematic terms, in terms of the internal dynamics of the film, we've already made up our minds what we should care about.
And to make a major plot device, this was the end of the Kip/Hana relationship. And really, the unwinding of the film happened partly as a result of this, where Kip went crazy because, 'You white people just killed 140,000 coloured people. And you wouldn't have done that to other white people. And I'm mad.' And it was important in the writing of the book for Michael that that be touched upon. And the book was constructed in a way that that was good within the book. But it didn't work within the film when we saw the whole film. So okay, we have to lose some time anyway. Let's see what happens if we take this whole thing out. The problem was that suddenly Kip becomes a different person. He's a Sikh, he has a turban. Suddenly the turban is gone. His hair is down. He's incommunicative. He won't talk to Hana. What happened? Well, the bomb happened. He's acting that way because of Hiroshima. But now we've taken that out. What do we do?