Is there any chance that we'll see Black Angel released on DVD?
I had a 35mm copy. Richard Edlund's company, Boss [Films], they chucked it all out. I've never forgiven them for it [laughs]. George Lucas had a copy on the ranch, which their archivists cannot find. They've been searching and searching for me. I know that [Lucas] showed it to Spielberg in the early days, and it may have got left somewhere…
Do you mean to say that there isn't a complete copy anywhere now?
Well, by weird coincidence, Les Dilley, the other art director I worked with…Les wanted to be a producer. We weren't working so I said 'I'm going to make this film'. He said 'Oh, I want to produce!'. I had to go and sit with his wife and say 'Listen, I've got no money, nobody's going to get paid - if he's going to do this, you've got to be okay with this'. So in the end he did come and do it.
Les called me out of the blue after about a year and a half, two weekends ago. We were catching up and talking about Black Angel and he said 'Well blow me, I made a copy!'. I said 'From what?'. He said 'You gave me a print!'.
I remember now that you got three prints, in the early days, from Rank. There was a bit of slight re-grading to do on his one, a few shots, so we gave him that print. So I've got a print of it now at my disposal. I have a half-inch copy. I regraded it - when I was doing commercials, somebody cancelled five hours of time at one of the best facilities in Los Angeles, and the owner, who's a friend, phoned me up and said 'Do you want to use this time?' , so I went and regraded Black Angel. And I have a three-quarter inch of that in storage.
But do your other plans for the Black Angel story make you think twice about releasing it?
Do you know something? I'm wrestling with this. I was talking about it yesterday. I still get letters, still get emails, there are threads on the IMDB going on and on about it - people guessing the story and how much it affected their minds…but I just wonder if I brought it out now, thirty years later…
