Jim Ward is currently Vice President of Marketing at Lucasfilm Ltd. He executive-produced the new "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace" DVD and is responsible for the planning, development, and execution of worldwide marketing of all Lucasfilm theatrical, video, and television properties.

The Region 1 release of "Pearl Harbor" will come in no less then three special editions. How come we're not getting the same treatment for the "Episode I" DVD? Don't you want our money?

They're going to do what they're going to do, but the whole goal for us was to release "Episode I" on DVD, and to make it the best, in our opinion, release possible. We wanted to make the film look and sound the best it could and offer the fans the best added value materials possible. Hopefully that's what we've done, but as far as releasing multiple versions at the same time, that doesn't seem very viable to me.

Was it ever an option to edit the 20 minutes of deleted scenes on the DVD into the film?

It was decided that these scenes would form a separate entity. George Lucas felt, and still feels, that there are reasons that those scenes should not have been in the film. There are little bits where after he finished it he said, "that works really well, let's put it back into the film", and he did. All the other scenes, he felt very clear from early on that they should not be part of the film.

Were the 20 minutes of deleted scenes selected from a much larger amount of available material?

There are other scenes that were cut from the film but those were smaller bits and pieces. What you have on the DVD are the longer chunks that had been cut from the film.

Was there more to putting the deleted scenes on the DVD than just polishing up old footage?

Deleted scenes from a film like "Episode I" are often just actors filmed against a blue screen, and you can't just slap those onto a disc. We had to go back to scratch, design what the scenes would look like from concept drawings, and then take them to ILM so that they could computer generate it all.

Any plans to release the other "Star Wars" films on DVD in the near future?

No, there are no plans at this point in time.

Which part of the DVD are you most proud of?

Obviously the film itself is great in terms of audio and picture. I guess, though, I'm most proud of two aspects. One is the entire deleted scenes project, which I think is phenomenal, and, I'm also extremely proud of the job and the process that John Shenk went through to make that hour-long documentary come to life. I don't think that it's been done that way before and it raises the bar on documentary films for DVD.

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