There have been more than 600,000 books published about Napoleon. He is an eternally fascinating figure. There have even been two similar films released recently on the end of Napoleon's career. But no historical film ever made can compare to the magnificence and ambition of Abel Gance's astonishing Napoleon from 1927.

I was fifteen when I first saw two reels of Napoleon, and decided it was the finest example of pure cinema I had ever seen. And fifty years later, I have not changed my view. It took the best part of 25 years to restore it.

Whenever I made some progress, I would show the cutting copy at the National Film Theatre. The reactions of people in the audience were so exceptional that I wrote to Gance in Paris and told him. He was encouraged to make a new version, a sort of quasi-documentary called Bonaparte et la Revolution. The government of Charles de Gaulle encouraged him. They appointed a producer, Claude Lelouch, and the film, which was built around footage from the silent Napoleon, was released in 1970. Lelouch cannily acquired for himself the rights to Napoleon. When he heard that Gance was helping me restore the silent original, he threatened us both with legal action.

Nonetheless, I continued with my own money and then sold the project to the National Film Archive for the amount it had cost me. Francis Coppola saw it at the Telluride Film Festival in 1979 and thought what a wonderful idea it would be if he showed it in big theatres and if his father, Carmine, wrote an orchestral score for it. Meanwhile, the British Film Institute declared they would show it in the London Film Festival, but not with an orchestra. With a piano. It was my film-making partner David Gill who persuaded Thames TV to sponsor a score for our presentation. 'If we can have the British TV rights, then Carl Davis should write the score.' said the head of Thames TV.

Napoleon was shown with tremendous success in London in l980 and with the Coppola version in New York in l981. No one worried about money until these successes. Then Claude Lelouch arrived in New York with his hand out. He sold the rights to Coppola for $450,000. (I received nothing) Coppola and his partner Robert Harris had realised that their premiere at Radio City Music Hall was restricted to a four-hour slot. A film of four hours 50 would cost $50,000 more for the unions. Gance had been struck by the same problem at the Opera in l927. The premiere version was 3 and a half hours.

So I had suggested they cut the film to match the premiere version and restore the sections for all shows thereafter. But the Americans saw the commercial value of their 'Readers' Digest' version and did something quite extraordinary. They airbrushed the long version out of existence. Theirs was the restoration. The other no longer existed. When we tried to show it outside 'our' territory (UK), they regarded such screenings with benevolence - at first. Gradually, they became more possessive and soon I was written out of the story. Our requests to show the film abroad were turned down flat. The long version with the Carl Davis score has still never been screened in USA.

Meanwhile, with the BFI and Patrick Stanbury, I restored the film again, correcting mistakes, adding footage, improving the quality and reshooting the titles so they looked exactly like the originals. We showed it in London in June 2000. When we tried to show it in Italy, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, the Americans behaved very badly indeed, making outrageous threats. In the end, the calm negotiation of David Robinson won the day. But the Americans insisted that my new version with the Carl Davis score should never be performed again. If it was to be screened, it could only be with the Coppola score, which they would expand to fit.

What kind of people would behave like this? Incredibly, it is the much-admired director Francis Coppola and his associate Tom Luddy, together with distributor Robert Harris, who restored Lawrence of Arabia. You would imagine that such people would put the best interests of a film before their own profit. Alas, it is not so. Incredibly, they have allowed an Australian company to bring out a DVD of their 3 and a half hour version, speeded up, with incompetent tinting and overall inferior quality.

The French State are now Gance's heirs, but so far they have not felt it worthwhile to take the Americans on in a test case. The Cinematheque Francaise have always been embarrassed that their national film was restored by someone in England, and that the score was written by an American living in Britain. To cut off this unpalatable part of the story, they spent a huge sum on a new score from Marius Constant. He knew Honegger had written the original score. As a protege of Honegger, he simply swamped the film with his works, whether or not they fitted, with disastrous results for the film. Even Le Monde thought it converted Napoleon into 'a bore.'

So future presentations of the five and a half-hour version are threatened. Unless the legal situation can be sorted out, the film may disappear once again from European screens.