When we were mixing The Godfather, we were mixing in Los Angeles to a black and white print. So it wasn't video, but it was still black and white, and it was still a dupe, meaning a generational loss. Like a bad Xerox version of the film. And this was fine for doing the mixing, but a version of that same problem was present in any of this technology of the time. And the question comes, when do we show it to the producers? Meaning, the head of the studio, Bob Evans, when do we show this? 'We're not going to show it to him', said Howard Beals, who was the head of the sound effects department at Paramount at the time. 'We're not going to show it to them until we have a colour answer print.' Why? 'Because it will sound better when it's in colour.' Why? And he came up with a fantastically accurate emotional answer to it, he said, 'It sounds better for the same reason your car drives better when it's clean.' So if you'd have the experience, which we all probably have had, of putting your car through a car wash and cleaning it and polishing it, and then you get in. It's exactly the same car, the motor and everything, but you drive off and somehow, it seems to be driving better.

It's... When the picture is low in quality, again, more of your mind is able to pay conscious attention to the sound and you are aware of, inevitably, the technical problems that still remain that you haven't found a solution to. When it's in colour, there's this blooming of the brain. It now has more to deal with in colour, and less brain to deal with the problems, the fact that the equalisation wasn't exactly right there, or we still hear the click of the cut from one scene to another. Whatever they might be, these minor imperfections suddenly seem to go away. They haven't gone away, they are still there technically, on the soundtrack, but your brain does not have the ability to pay conscious attention to them. And so they are pushed to one side as if they didn't exist in the first place. These are problems that have disappeared from our world, because we now... When we're doing postproduction, we are always looking at a very sharp colour image of whatever it is that we're working on. And the distinction between what we're looking at and what will finally be seen in the theatre is negligible.