And so we set up an Avid in my barn. The same place where I had edited [The] English Patient. And I got all of the material, and the memo. And emotionally, it was a very powerful experience because it was as if Orson Welles himself had handed me the memo. And said, 'Here's some ideas, do what you can. Wake me when it's over. I'm just going to go into the other room and take a nap.'

The nap lasted three weeks, which is the amount of time that it took me to do these notes. And I was disappointed and slightly amazed that he wasn't there to wake up because the memo itself is written in a way that gives you such a strong idea of his own personality, and what he was like as a person that I felt that he was very close in this. And it's exactly the kinds of things that an editor would like to get from a director. He never talked about frames, or individual shots... In a couple cases, individual shots. But more it was like: 'Here's the kind of feeling of what needs to happen. This area needs to be much shorter. This area was... The original plan was to intercut these scenes, parallel action. A little bit of Charlton Heston, a little bit of Janet Leigh, Charlton Heston. The studio undid all of that. I want to see it back together again', and so on.

The fascinating thing about the memo is that again, it was written to his enemies. And so he had to be very political about how he said things. And it's a great thing to study if you want to find out what a great filmmaker, and an artist, with a dash of politics does to try to convince people to get his way. It was unsuccessful. They didn't do any of these things. But it's still a great thing to read because he says things like, 'I am here to help you make your film the best film that it can be. I am under no illusions that it is my film, even though I wrote the script, I directed it, and I acted in it. So I know certain things about it that only I know. And I can help you by telling you these things.'

So he flatters them, and doesn't stand on a high horse about: this is my film and you bastards took it away from me. It's a very interesting document to study, which is one of the silver linings of this whole tragedy. Which is, I can't think of such a high profile example of a world class filmmaker under such duress, being forced to define, in 58 pages, what he wanted from a film. So we had this document. And we wouldn't have had this document unless the studio had taken the film away from him. So the greater tragedy is that they did this. And they denied Welles the ability to finish his own film. But we have this document, which in a sense was squeezed out of the awkwardness of the situation.