The Director’s Cut, for Better or Worse
The filmmaker’s version of a movie is usually the best. Except when it isn’t.
George Lucas doesn’t care what you think.
The creator of Star Wars notoriously tinkered with the first three of his beloved movies in the 1990s, adding sequences, enhancing visual effects, replacing characters, changing events (Greedo shoots first!).
Fans were incensed at the resulting “special editions” of Star Wars and its sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, which supplanted the original theatrical versions of the films.
But Lucas didn’t care.
“Anybody that makes films knows the film is never finished,” Lucas told the Associated Press in 2004. “It’s abandoned or it’s ripped out of your hands, and it’s thrown into the marketplace, never finished. It’s a very rare experience where you find a filmmaker who says, ‘That’s exactly what I wanted. I got everything I needed. I made it just perfect. I’m going to put it out there’.”
Lucas was one of the few lucky filmmakers (from a certain point of view) who got to “fix” the release version of his films.
Filmmakers from Ridley Scott to James Cameron to Francis Ford Coppola have been able to take the sometimes inferior release version of their films and restore them with “director’s cuts” that more accurately reflect their original vision.
But, as with Lucas’ Star Wars movies, not everyone agrees that a director’s cut is the best version of a film. Let’s take a look at some notable examples.
1. Cinema Paradiso (1990)
Censorship is a key theme in director Giuseppe Tornatore’s Oscar-winning Italian valentine to the movies: The village priest excises scenes of kissing from the town cinema’s movies … and Cinema Paradiso’s climactic scene has the protagonist rediscovering the edited scenes in a special montage.
It’s ironic that the story of Cinema Paradiso itself is one of excisions and restorations.
The film originally opened in Italy in 1988 in a 155-minute version, which flopped at the box office.
Producer Franco Cristaldi and Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein worked with Tornatore to trim the movie for international release, cutting it down to just over two hours, The New York Times reported.
It is that version of the film that won the special jury prize at the 1989 Cannes International Film Festival and went on to become an international megahit, winning the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for best foreign film.
The film’s success and cultural resonance encouraged Tornatore in 2002 to restore the cut footage and add more to a “new version” that ran more than 170 minutes. Among the biggest changes was the addition of a sequence late in the film in which the hero, Toto, reunites with his childhood love, Elena, now a married mother of a young daughter.
The New York Times liked the longer version:
“The director’s cut … is more romantic, more emotional and ultimately more satisfying than the teary-eyed original. By adding 48 minutes to that two-hour release, and bringing back a character that had been deleted from it, the director’s cut sabotages the earlier version’s message, a variation of the old admonition that you can’t go home again.”
But not everyone approved, notably famed movie critic Roger Ebert:
“It is an item of faith that the director of a film is always right, and that studios who cut films are butchers. Yet I must confess that the shorter version of ‘Cinema Paradiso’ is a better film than the longer. Harvey was right. The 170-minute cut overstays its welcome, and continues after its natural climax.”
Over the years, more critics have sided with Ebert. Indiewire went so far as to say, “Do yourself a favor and never see the ‘New Version.’ Forget it ever happened.”
Watch the shorter, Oscar-winning version of Cinema Paradiso on Tribeca Shortlist now.
2. Blade Runner (1982)
Director Ridley Scott’s now-classic dystopian sci-fi movie played so poorly in test screenings that producers Jerry Perenchio and Bud Yorkin ordered it altered to add, among other things, an explanatory voiceover narration and a happy ending (with visuals consisting of outtakes from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining).
The film flopped in its initial release anyway. But as the movie gained cult status over the following decade, an unauthorized “work print” of the film found its way into arthouse movie theaters in 1990 and 1991.
Fans (including me, who saw the work print at the venerable Nuart Theatre in L.A.) loved the new cut. The buzz persuaded Warner Bros. to authorize the home video release of an official “director’s cut” that eliminated the narration and happy ending and made other changes that brought the film closer to its original intent.
Scott himself eventually took another go at the movie to restore it fully (and fix some glaring problems) in a 2007 version that is called the “final cut.” That version fixes some visual effects problems and includes the now iconic “unicorn dream” sequence meant to intimate that Harrison Ford’s hero character, Deckard, is indeed a replicant.
The “final cut” was released in a home video package that includes all five versions of the movie, to generally favorable reviews.
3. Aliens (1986)
Twentieth Century Fox made director James Cameron cut his film — the sequel to Scott’s 1979 Alien — by 15 minutes for its initial theatrical release, mainly to accommodate theaters that wanted as many showings per day as possible. Even with the cuts, the film ran more than two hours.
For subsequent showings on broadcast TV in 1989, CBS added back a few of the deleted scenes to lengthen the runtime (more commercials!).
Cameron finally got his wish to restore all of the deleted scenes for what was intended as a limited home video release of the film in 1992 called a “special edition.” Among the scenes restored:
· Ripley learning of the death of her daughter
· Scenes of the Hadley’s Hope colony on LV-426 before the arrival of the aliens
· Several scenes of automated sentry guns defending the colony from aliens
The success of that version of the film made it a staple of Aliens home video releases.
4. Apocalypse Now (1979)
The story of director Francis Ford Coppola’s troubled production of his Vietnam War masterpiece has been well-documented (particularly in the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness).
Coppola was never fully satisfied with the resulting film, despite its huge box office and awards (including the Palme d’Or at Cannes, a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for best picture).
So it was in 2001 that Coppola undertook to recut the entire epic film, with the aid of original editor Walter Murch (who famously took two years to cut the original). Coppola brought back many of the original actors to dub dialogue into original footage, ordered new score music and restored entire sequences that had been cut from the original release.
Among the additions:
· A scene at a French plantation where Willard and the men stop
· More scenes with the Playboy bunnies
· Willard stealing Col. Kilgore’s beloved surfboard
Rolling Stone liked the new version, called Apocalypse Now Redux:
“This is the untamed ‘Apocalypse’ that Coppola envisioned in 1979 before money and mental pressures made him fear he had created something too long, too weird and too morally demanding for the masses. Of course, the film is still chaos, and as such it’s an apt reflection of the war it depicts. But the journey, laid out in the script by Coppola and John Milius, is much better mapped now. “
Which version is best? Both are highly praised, with the longer Redux being credited for restoring certain scenes and bashed for extending others. On Rotten Tomatoes, the original scores a phenomenal 97 percent fresh, while Redux trails only slightly at 93 percent.
Addendum #1: Blood Simple (1984)
Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen released a “director’s cut” of their neo-noir psychological thriller in 2001.
It has the distinction of being perhaps the only director-driven revision that is actually shorter — by about three minutes — than the original release. The Coens extended a few scenes, cut others and revised some music.
Addendum #2: Raising Cain (1992)
Working from an original script 20 years after the film’s release, Dutch filmmaker Peet Gelderblom re-edited Brian De Palma’s thriller Raising Cain in an attempt to restore Cain’s original structure.
De Palma had been on record for years (most recently, in the documentary De Palma) as having been disappointed with his decision to radically restructure the film before its theatrical release, reportedly after disappointing test screenings.
Gelderblom posted his version online, where it made its way to the master himself. In a note to the editor, De Palma wrote, “I just saw the Raising Cain recut, and I think it’s great. It’s what we didn’t accomplish on the initial release of the film. It’s what I originally wanted the movie to be.”
This led to a chain of events that culminated in Shout Factory releasing the re-edit as part of a special edition Blu-ray earlier this year, making the Raising Cain re-edit the rare director’s cut not actually cut by the director.
