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You know how in postproduction you are supposed to color-correct the picture so everything is smooth and even? Jean-Luc wants the opposite. He wants the rupture. Color and then black and white, or different intensities of color. Or how in this film, sometimes you see the ratio of the frame change after the image begins. That happens when he records from his TV onto his old DVCAM analog machine, which is so old we can't even find parts when it needs to be repaired. The TV takes time to recognize and adjust to the format on the DVD or the Blu-ray. Whether it's 1:33 or 1:85. And one of the TVs he uses is slower than the other. He wants to keep all that. I could correct it, but he doesn't want me to. See, here's an image from War and Peace. [Shows sequence on his laptop] He did the overlays of color—red, white, and blue—using an old analog video effects machine. That's why you have the blur. When I tried to redo it in digital, I couldn't. The edges were too sharp. And why the image jitters—I don't know how he did that. Playing with the cable maybe. Handmade. He wants to see that. It's a gift from his old machine.

He makes a book for me to use for each film: first there is the outline of the whole film in chapters, with some of the text and images for each chapter. This is like the book we published with Anne-Marie [Miéville] for this film. We also did them for Film Socialisme and Goodbye to Language. And then he takes one frame from each image he has edited. He gives it a code number, and he writes what the format is, where the sound begins and ends, where the music begins and ends, everything. But I don't use that book very much because I just copy his tapes into DaVinci. And sometimes I find better copies of the films he used and substitute them.

But sometimes, when I try to make things better, it's a mistake. There is a passage from a Dovzhenko film that moves me very much. It's in the section [of The Image Book] called "The Central Region," where the voiceover is about time and the absence of time. I found what I thought was a "better" copy of the film, where you see more of his face, and more of her eyes, and his hand on her breast. All that moved me so much. But Jean-Luc said, "You don't understand me at all. This is what people do when they do restorations. They put Botox in the film." So yes, it's important to see the faces but it's just as important to see the snow in the image—all the deterioration. And also to hear the noise in the sound. Jean-Luc records his voiceover with an old microphone, and we keep all the noise. It's the mark of time.