The original idea, short of the theatrical release, was that it would be a DVD that was what was called a branching DVD, so that in the menu options, you would see something like the Nung River going into Cambodia, with scenes sprouting off of it like branches. And you would decide, by clicking on them, which new scenes you wanted to see, or none of them. So you could put this DVD in and just see the original film, or you could see it with just the French plantation, or with all of the new scenes but not the French plantation, or whatever. The technology of the time was not quite up to that, that we could not do that without some significant stall in the process, so it would not be a smooth blending. I think you could probably do it now. And this involved taking the soundtracks from 1979 and pulling them apart, and adding all of our complicated treatment to this never-before cut material in a finished form. The French plantation did not exist as a scene that we had cut out. As we were working in 1978 and '79, the French plantation would shrink, and it would shrink again, and shrink, until finally... I think in the last time it was in the film it was just a few disconnected images. And then we thought, 'Well, let's just... let's kill the darling and put it out of its misery.' So I had to reconstruct the French plantation scene from... I had to recut it from its essential elements. And that applied to all the other scenes as well. So that was a fantastic experience, doing this. The archival aspects of it, digging back 20 years into the past and pulling out this beautiful negative that had been stored very nicely, it was very clean.
