[This is an extended version of the interview that appears in the October 2004 Sound & Vision to accompany Carrie Fisher's exclusive interview with George Lucas.]

John Lowry designed his first image-processing system to clean up the live TV pictures from the Apollo 16 and 17 lunar landings. He went on to develop a technique for restoring films by using computers rather than the conventional hardware that was used throughout the industry. With his associate Ian Caven, he restored North by Northwest for Warner Bros. and then Gone with the Wind, Now Voyager, and Citizen Kane. Since then, Lowry Digital has grown to a staff of 60 and has been involved with many major restorations, including the entire James Bond catalog. This year, Lowry finished two projects for George Lucas: THX 1138, his first film from 197, and the Star Wars Trilogy.

Did George Lucas actually let you borrow the original camera negatives of his Star Wars films to do your high-resolution scan for the restoration?
No. We sent one of our 6-terabyte servers up to Skywalker Ranch in San Rafael , California, where they loaded it with full RGB [red, green, and blue] data without having to go through the component output that tape masters would demand. We processed those images, cleaned them up, and sent them back in little packages of discs. The net result was that we never lost a bit in the process of moving all the data back and forth, and we were able to work on full high-definition-bandwidth imagery. It was an unusual approach, but we got some pretty stunning results.

So the Star Wars films were processed at high-def, but not at the 4K level — four times high-def resolution — that you've been using for some other films?
At high-def, yes.

Why was that?
The challenge with these films is the amount of special effects in them. Our concern was whether the effects were done to true 4K standards. Whenever anyone lit up a lightsaber, it was done with an optical effect, and all of the opticals at the time were done on film — there were no digital effects. So every time you go to a lightsaber scene, bang, you drop two generations of film. It gets grainier and, as it's going through an optical printer, you have different characteristics in terms of contrast. And those are things we have to match up with the scenes immediately before and after. It took a lot of effort to match precisely the granularity, the contrast, and the sharpness. They flow very nicely now and, frankly, in the original movies, there was a distinct change. We were able to eliminate that change, and to me that's a very strong contribution to the storytelling process — removing something that prevents an audience from being drawn in.

But the high-def digital material was fine for the standard-resolution DVD release?
Yes. My guess, knowing George, is that maybe he'll be back when they do the HD-DVD.

Did you have to create a demo to show how good Star Wars could look?
We did the Indiana Jones stuff last year for Paramount, which Lucasfilm was involved in, so it sort of got this relationship started. Then they created some samples of other things they had done, and eventually they sent us THX 1138 , which was the first film that George made.

THX 1138 was, to say the least, an interesting challenge. It had been shot quite some years ago in 1971, so it had various degradation factors. There was a lot of flicker, lots of grain, because everything was shot indoors in a studio using faster films — and it was shot in two-perf Techniscope, which has a half-size negative, so the dirt and grain look bigger, and the jitter is worse. There was a spot on the lens during the shoot, so every time the camera moved, so did the spot. One particularly demanding problem arose from the characters having been shot against a white cyclorama. We had to try to make their faces look good without making the white cyc look ugly.

George was always in the loop. We'd send everything up to him, and he proved to be one of our fussier customers. We'd get stuff back and say, “Boy, has he got sharp eyes.” He'd find stuff that we hadn't, so we got fussier in the process. By the time we finished, he was very happy with our work and gave us the Star Wars movies to do. They sent us some tests and said that the actual films weren't nearly as bad. That was total bullshit — they were worse . They're not 30 years old yet, but I've never seen movies so dirty.

Because they were so popular?
They were so successful that they kept hauling the negatives out to make more prints, so they are really beat up now.

Were there other problems you had to contend with?
In the first movie, you have C-3P0 and R2-D2 walking across the desert, and I think half of that desert sand ended up in the camera. It was unbelievable. One technique we use is where you look at the frame before and the frame after to determine what is dirt on the frame in between. When you have as much dirt as this, though, the before and after frames have the same damn dirt — and more. It's really hard for the program to separate what's dirt and what's image. It led to a lot of extra work — run it again, check it again, multiple passes, a lot of hand work at the end.

And on each of these movies, George would look at a scene and ask us to sharpen something a little — almost scene by scene. We can do that beautifully without putting edges on things. It's very different working with the director who created the movie you're restoring. It gives us a whole new sense of the creative objectives and exactly what path to take — how much sharpness, how much grain to leave. All decided by George.