"The future as a Rolling Stone is very uncertain. My ultimate aim in life was never to be a pop star. I enjoy it with reservations, but I'm not really, sort of, satisfied either artistically or personally with it."

Brian Jones' candid words in the first Rolling Stones documentary, 1965's "Charlie is My Darling," are all the more poignant because the guitarist did, in fact, part ways with the band in 1969. He drowned later that year.

The Rolling Stones played four gigs over two days in Ireland in September of '65. On the heels of the success of The Beatles' "A Hard Days Night," the Stones' then-manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, asked director Peter Whitehead to film the band. The result was "Charlie is my Darling," a film that was never officially released -- until now.

Rumors of the film's existence was the stuff of Stones' fan folklore as the film reels sat untouched, gathering moss for four decades.

At a pivotal point in their careers

The Stones are celebrating their 50th anniversary, and "Charlie is My Darling" captures the band at that pivotal point in their careers where they were right on the cusp of superstardom. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" had just reached No. 1 on the charts. Lead singer Mick Jagger, guitarist and vocalist Keith Richards, drummer Charlie Watts, Jones and bass guitarist Bill Wyman were famous, but had yet to become rock superstars.

The original film was only shown in a few theaters in 1966 before being shelved, but ABKCO Music & Records uncovered unused footage and teamed up with filmmakers Mick Gochanour and Robin Klein to restore and re-edit "Charlie is My Darling" as a new film. The DVD/Blu-ray was released earlier this month.

Gochanour and Klein had been aware of the project since 1965. They had tried to bring it to life in the 1990s, but the technology wasn't quite there yet. With miles of material to sift through and footage in tatters, the project was put on an indefinite hiatus until last year, when Gochanour and Klein stumbled upon footage of The Rolling Stones on stage that they didn't even know existed.

A meticulous process unfolds

The painstaking restoration process was both time- and labor-intensive. It wasn't uncommon to have to stop everything to mend the film by hand because of a splice or torn sprocket breaking in the film scanner. It took two days to scan one reel of film, which contained 30,000 to 40,000 frames per reel. With 35 cans to be scanned, they spent several months matching sources and repairing tears, scratches and chemical blotches by hand.

After that initial frame-by-frame scanning, there was a grading process that brought the various disparate elements a little closer to being in balance, matching grain and tone. When all was said and done, over 90,000 individual frames were restored by hand. In addition, the many separate parts they were working with had to be balanced -- grain and tone had to be matched to convey the uniformity of being part of the same work.

And that was just the picture portion of the film -- synching audio and video was a whole other beast of burden.

"There were many issues and challenges we were dealing with," Gochanour told CNN, "not the least of which was the audio. Since it was not shot as a concert film, there were no logs or documentation."

Gochanour and Klein spent eight months on the performances alone.

"It was a meticulous, painstaking process of looking for clues," said Klein. "An on-camera word, a gesture, the tempo, guitar chords. The amazing thing is -- and every fan should appreciate this -- we sometimes had three versions of a song and every version would drop in against picture and could be matched up. That is a testament to the lockstep nature of Charlie and Bill. And also Mick, particularly the spoken word sections. The cadence is nearly always the same. He breaks the line up in the same way every time; he breathes at the same place. Many of his gestures remain to this day. He still hits his knee when he sings 'Time Is on My Side' and slaps the air during 'Satisfaction'."

Gochanour recalled finding the earliest existing footage of a live performance of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction."

"I get chills to this day remembering what it was like to see 'Satisfaction' with sound and picture for the first time," he said. "It was like finding a Picasso in grandma's attic. It was a revelation. I had no idea how raw and visceral they were; how incredibly tight and controlled at the same time. There was a punk attitude -- a direct communication."

A young Mick Jagger's swagger

In the film, a then 22-year-old Mick Jagger was interviewed. Still in his formative stages as a performer -- he hadn't quite perfected the moves like Jagger -- the rock legend did exude a keen sense of self-awareness.

"Most successful entertainers have always been the most egotistical ones -- on stage," he said. "They might not be as egotistical as that offstage, but all that ego is got rid of onstage."

When asked what sort of person he was offstage, Jagger remarked, "about half as egotistical."

Dispersed throughout the interviews are concert footage of entire performances of other early Stones hits such as "Time Is on My Side" and "The Last Time."

"I don't really know what I am on stage," Jagger continued. "It's very different because you have to treat everybody differently. You have to be very, very, very egotistical because that's -- I mean, you're acting. You're doing an act for them. It's not really you."

Jagger also said that when the band's first record hit the charts, he was convinced that The Rolling Stones would "probably be around for a year or maybe a year and a half, and then it's all going to be over."

Rocking the Irish countryside