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Dugpa: I'm definitely looking forward to Mulholland Drive, as I am sure everyone is. Lets talk a little about DVD. You recently finished a new 5.1 remix for the Elephant Man.

John Neff: I finished the Elephant Man for 5.1 this week. Paramount is committed to doing a very good release of it. Mel Brooks of course owns the film. I don't know to what degree they've cleaned it, but they did make a hi-def transfer. I worked from videotape on this mix, and it was real good. The problem with any film that old is all the original sound was analog, been sitting in a vault for 19 years, and that deteriorates a little of the highs. Analog dialogue recording when somebody shouts has the tendency to distort a little bit. And all that is captured in 24-bit digital wonderfulness. Also, all of the original elements weren't found. So I had to mix from some premixed stems, the unfolded Dolby LCRS mix, and things like that. So I had to piece it together, but it came together really nice, and sounds good. All of the DVD remixes I've done under David's direction. It's not a remix, per say, a few balances and a few things were changed, and now there's stereo surrounds. But David doesn't like a lot in the surrounds anyway. So the surrounds just slightly open up a scene a little bit more when they are involved in any of his pictures anyway. The Straight Story, I got a couple of trucks to drive across the theater, but that took some argument, but he normally doesn't like to use the surrounds like that. We utilized the subwoofer channel to really develop the low end into octaves that the old film soundtrack just wasn't capable of producing. The film now has a frequency spectrum much higher than it ever did. It's much cleaner and much clearer. Yet it's the original mix in terms of balances, there aren't new elements brought in, and there weren't new effects brought in. It's only stuff that was in the original film.

Dugpa: Do you have any idea of when it will be released?

John Neff: The Elephant Man DVD will be released December 11th, as of the current schedule.

Dugpa: Will there be any supplements with this release?

John Neff: Paramount is doing the entire production on this DVD, and we were brought in at the last minute to do the 5.1 mix just because they thought that if it was done in David's room under his direction, that that would add a certain value to the DVD, and that nobody would start to take the modern capabilities and get away from the gentleness or sometimes the very suspenseful moments of the track or restrict the dynamic range, or try and artificially expand it. So that part worked out really well, but we don't know what extra materials are on it. I don't believe there are any extra scenes, as I don't think the stuff has survived that long.

Dugpa: And for the film 'purists' that would like the original stereo Dolby sound mix, will that be included on the disc as well?

John Neff: It's probably one of the other 2 tracks. And I think you can go between them and find that the new one is fuller and quieter.

Dugpa: That is great news. So when we first spoke a few months back, you had mentioned just completing a new 5.1 remix of Blue Velvet for an upcoming DVD release.

John Neff: Right. We did Blue Velvet earlier this summer. That came out really well. That one was recent enough that we had a lot of the elements, and it was a modern enough recording that there were some good low frequencies in the raw stuff and we were able to come up with a really good subwoofer track on that. I had to make stereo surrounds because there weren't stereo surrounds in those days, and clean up the dialogue track and condition it, etc. Blue Velvet came out really nice.

Dugpa: I noticed that MGM had already put out a Blue Velvet DVD in 1999.

John Neff: They did, and it was so poorly received, that they retrenched and said 'we better do a better job on this' Even the audio and videophile magazines raked them over the coals for just the original 2.0 mix, which there's a certain argument that what a movie was released in is what it should always be. And we are sensitive to that. But David wanted to take a crack at utilizing modern technology that could make that soundtrack a little more impactful.

Dugpa: Had anything been radically changed on the new 5.1 remix? Changes in the original elements?

John Neff: No. We always use the original elements. David is not interested in' although let me backtrack. I think he would like to remix some of the older movies. But you can't. Anybody that creates a work, years down the road, will go 'God, I wish I would have done this different, I wish I would have spent more time on that'' A project is never done. You just have to finish it and deliver it. In your mind, it's never done. So when he hears these things today, he goes oh, jeeze, I wish I could have done this, that, and the other thing, but you have to resist that temptation. You don't go in and start remixing and introducing new elements and new effects or new music or anything like that. You can't do that, because then you are violating the original work of art that the film was, and to David, unfortunately there is a film business, but to him, the films are art.

Dugpa: For this new transfer of Blue Velvet, can you tell us if David was involved in the Video Transfer, and to what extent?

John Neff: He did go for the color timing. I've not seen a final color corrected digital copy yet. I worked from tape. But it looked awful good.

Dugpa: Do you know if there is any information about an upcoming Wild at Heart DVD? Also, would you happen to know who has the rights to the picture at this time?

John Neff: I have heard that MGM has the US DVD rights to "Wild at Heart", and that they plan to get to work on it after Blue Velvet comes out in December. Have not heard whether or not I'll get a crack at a 5.1 mix of it, but I would like to.