My experience of this, for the first time, was on Youth Without Youth. The film came out. It had a limited release. Francis [Ford Coppola] had, as we all do, great hopes for it. He would... He said he wanted it to run at a certain theatre in New York, and be at that theatre for six months, and that he would pay to have it be at that theatre. He knew that it was strange, but if it just kept at that theatre, people would eventually go to see it. Well, for various reasons, that did not happen. It played at that theatre, The Paris Theater on 58th Street, I think, 5th Avenue, but it did not perform well. People didn't want to go see the film. And there was another film that was hard on its heels.

And I, you know, I understand that the... It was based on a Romanian philosophical novel, and it didn't have a lot of action, and it was investigating things from a slightly sideways, artistic point of view. And this was the first film that Francis had directed in probably seven years. He had another project, very ambitious project set in New York called Megalopolis. It was a kind of science fiction film about the future of urban society, and that was dealt another... It was dealt a fatal blow, probably, by 9/11, that you couldn't talk about or even make a film about the reinvention of New York without mentioning the destruction of the Twin Towers. And once you start talking about that, that story becomes the main focus, which was not his intention. So that project eventually, sadly, got sidelined. And in order to start himself up again, he decided to make Youth Without Youth.

There was a review of the film that I found particularly apt. I think it was in the New York Times. And they gave the film a... It was a respectful, sort of grudging review. But at the end, it said, rated R for nudity and metaphysics. That's the only time, I think, that that particular rating has been published. And, you know, it is: it's an 'R' rated metaphysical film. But it... The great thing for me, as an editor, was this... It was, kind of, a sandbox in which I could explore all of these new, to me, and really, new to the industry, techniques of working with a very... With a highly manipulatable digital image. And that has continued for me over the last ten years or so, that every film I'd worked on, perhaps not as aggressively as that, I have found ways, you know, where it's suitable, to nudge the image.

And I think this is probably hard for cinematographers, because they put a lot of work into that framing, and to be essentially told by circumstance, 'No, that's not the final, we're going to change that, it's an awkward point, and should be discussed a lot, I think, of that...' You know, what is the correct dynamic between the framing that is selected at the time of shooting and the ultimate choice of the frame in the final version.