David Lynch is one of a small number of directors who have resisted the urge to put lots of “making of” materials on the DVDs of his films. While he has put some such materials on a few of his discs, Lynch has expressed the desire to not pull back the curtain back too far to show how his films are made.

That said, Lynch sounds positively excited about a certain extra he hopes to provide when his classic Blue Velvet hits blu-ray later this year. The director appeared on Los Angeles radio station KCRW long running “Morning Becomes Eclectic” late last week and revealed that scenes that were cut from the film’s initial release and long thought lost have been discovered and should hopefully be included on the blu-ray release.

There is a thing called b-negative, or outtakes, or lifts, that don’t make it into the film. And in the old days, those things sat around and maybe became dangerously close to being tossed away. Then the internet comes, and people want to see deleted scenes and things like this, so those things become more and more valuable. So, one day I looked into seeing where the lifts were because some of these scenes on their own would be beautiful to see again. So I find out that Dino, the producer, doesn’t know where they are. They’ve gone. His company went bankrupt, it was taken over by another company, and then it was sold to other companies. No one knew where they were, they were gone. So depressing. Lately, those have been found. Somewhere up in Seattle. It’s incredible. I’m seeing stuff I thought was gone forever. And hopefully some of those scenes (some of them aren’t worth putting back together) will end up on the new Blu Ray.

Complete interview transcript here.

Although his initial edit of the film was reported to be four hours, Lynch was contractually obligated to deliver to producers a cut that was exactly two hours long. The version he turned in was just frames short of that limit.

Lynch also commented that he has also done a new 5.1 audio mix for the film with his Inland Empire sound mixer Dean Hurley, having been displeased with the one on the current DVD.

Granted, the original DVD release of Blue Velvet did contain a photo montage of some of the missing scenes (embedded below), but those type of reconstructions generally pale in comparison to having the actual footage.

Hopefully, this will turn out to be successful enough to get some movement going on getting the many scenes shot but deleted from Twin Peaks: Fire, Walk With Me added on to a blu-ray release.

Via Dugpa.