DVDFILE: What has been your working relationship with Richard Donner over the years that led you to your work on the Superman Special Edition?

Michael Thau: In 1982, I was sent down to Baton Rouge, Louisiana by Columbia post production as an assistant editor on The Toy. I wasn't directly working for Donner, I was working for Richard Harris, who was the editor on that. But I worked around Dick and saw he's this bigger than life guy with this huge voice and always up and happy. Every time it was someone's birthday, at dailies he'd have beer and wine and birthday cakes. It was like a big party down there, especially considering the subject matter of the film. Later, in 1984, I was hired by Stuart Baird, here in Los Angeles, on Ladyhawke as an assistant. They had come back from location and they were cutting at Donner's house, which luckily is only like seven minutes away from where I live. That's how I started working around Dick. I was fairly outspoken, always giving them ideas and stuff, which is not the British way for an assistant, so Stuart was always frowning.

Part of the way through post, both Dick and Lauren (Shuler-Donner) asked me to be their assistant on their next picture and I chose to work for Dick because I wanted to work for a director rather than a producer. Dick's next project was The Goonies and Lauren's was St. Elmo's Fire. Tom Mankiewicz was around the cutting rooms. He kind of served the same function on Ladyhawke as he did on Superman; he really is a creative consultant. And this is where I started hearing the stories about how Superman was made. Stuart cut both films. Those three were always talking about Superman, which had been released five or six years before. And Superman was one of my favorite films, and Dick was one of the best directors I'd ever seen.

Dick became kind of a surrogate father to me and I guess I was a surrogate son to him in a lot of ways, not having any kids. And over the years I've tried to always be involved with him in a creative way as well as hard core production wise. I've directed inserts on some of his films, some second unit (including the condom commercial in Lethal Weapon 2), I directed a "Tales from the Crypt." On some of the films I did the video playback the characters watch on TV sets. It establishes a lot of things about the characters.

In Lethal Weapon, there was a lot of playback, like the Three Stooges, etc. Scrooged had an enormous amount that actually carried the story. In Goonies, Sloth watched TV a lot and one thing was the movie The Sea Hawk. We actually shot some things that were made to look like Sea Hawk so that Sloth could learn how to stick a knife in a sail and slide down it. That bit was not actually in Sea Hawk, but in another swashbuckler film of the time, but the rest of the stuff in Sea Hawk was so good for what we wanted that we ended up just shooting that little bit and putting it in to seem like it was. But that's the wrong movie Ñ

DF: When the idea for the Superman: Special Edition came up, was the DVD the first consideration? Were they just planning to release it without the restoration?

MT: Well, Warner was obviously going to make a DVD of Superman at some point, but I think around October of 1999, I called up Dick and said, "Are you ever going to do a DVD of Superman?" (lowering voice to emulate Donner's trademark boom) "Great idea kid." So his assistant at this time knew Tom Lesinski, the head of worldwide marketing at Warner Brothers Home Video and set up a meeting. I went in and pitched a couple of ideas for things we knew we could put on the DVD, like a new cut, new sound, a commentary track and a limited documentary with new interviews. Everything else on the DVD was discovered along the way.

Paul Hemstreet was there; he is their special features executive. He interacts with the directors or producers and production companies for Warner Home Video and supervises production on any new material. He also budgets any work on the films themselves, like new mixes, director's cuts, etc. It was Paul's vision that allowed us to continue to work on the many extras as we found more and more material. He put me together with Jonathan Gaines, who produced the DVD with me and wrote the now, very substantial documentaries.