In the market-researched, dollar-driven world of modern film-making, the theatrical releases of films rarely reflect the absolute intentions of their directors. Constraints of time, technology and money, feedback from test screenings and focus groups, the pressures of political correctness, and the interference of tyrannical censors and megalomaniacal studios all have a bearing on the versions that finally reach our cinema screens. 'Final cut' is a luxury afforded only to a select few - Spielberg, Lucas, Cameron and a handful of others - and even then only late in their careers. Some directors, such as Martin Scorsese and Terry Gilliam, have spent their whole careers struggling to retain artistic control over their work. They haven't always won.
The fight over final cut is as old as film itself, and has produced some of cinema's most enduring tales: stolen and ransomed film prints, burned negatives, spectacular bust-ups, lawsuits, and even the occasional death threat. From Hitchcock to Hal Ashby, most directors have suffered a similar fate at some point in their careers. Orson Welles saw his experimental family saga The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) butchered beyond recognition, and abandoned Hollywood for Europe (and a slow descent into obscurity) as a result, later famously quipping "They let the studio janitor cut The Magnificent Ambersons in my absence". Michael Cimino's infamous Heaven's Gate (1980) was first released in a version which ran to 219 minutes, but following disastrous reviews and in the wake of already massive production costs, the film was re-cut at United Artists' request to an "acceptable length". It still managed to sink the studio.
More recently, Tony Kaye's battle with New Line Studios over American History X (1998) became one of the most infamous documents of the age-old struggle over final cut. Unnerved by Kaye's confrontational approach, which deliberately glamourised and sexualised white power movements in order to show their seductive power to disenfranchised WASP American youths, the film's producers took control of the film. It was subsequently re-edited by its leading actor, Edward Norton. Kaye publicly disowned it at the Berlin Film Festival in 1999, demanding that his directorial credit should be changed to "Humpty Dumpty" as "a metaphor for the fall of man and subsequent events". Kaye subsequently took out full-page advertisements in 'Variety' decrying the film and its producers, attended meetings under the spiritual protection of a rabbi, a priest and a Tibetan Monk, and finally sued New Line (unsuccessfully). Unsurprisingly, he hasn't made a film in Hollywood since. Such is the Faustian pact of film-making - in order to subsidise the huge expenses involved in making movies, most directors are forced to concede artistic autonomy to a board of executives whose motivations revolve more around making handsome profits than handsome films.
The advent of home video and more recently DVD, however, has opened an intriguing new chapter in the history of film-making. The huge growth in home entertainment has allowed directors to rediscover a degree of artistic freedom not usually available to them during the film's original release. Most DVDs now contain a variety of supporting material, including documentaries, storyboards, production stills, screen-tests, pre-production artwork, trailers, and often a selection of deleted scenes not included in the theatrical cut of the movie. Like the other material included on DVDs, these can be viewed separately from the film itself, like the footnotes of a novel, or the sleeve notes of an album, or the early drafts of a painting, providing the back-story behind the film's creation.
A 'Director's Cut' is different, however, since it involves cutting excised material back into the original edit of the film to produce an entirely new - and often radically different - version. Director's cuts are nothing new. As long as the original footage (and usually, but not always, the director) survives, a re-edited version which more closely reflects the director's original vision is always possible. Recent months have produced a slew of re-releases, alternative versions, and special editions, all 'director's cuts' in some shape or form: The Abyss, The Wicker Man, Apocalypse Now: Redux, Amadeus, the Star Wars trilogy, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, The Exorcist, a C4 re-edited version of Ken Russell's The Devils, and most recently, the 'Extended Edition' DVD of Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring, which adds over half-an-hour of material not included in the theatrical cut.
The director's cut makes financial sense for the studios, for whom a re-edited version of an old film essentially represents a chance to sell the same product twice (or in some cases, as with The Fellowship of the Ring, several times), and allows a director the luxury of revisiting a film in ways which were impossible during its theatrical release. Indeed, with the interactive nature and increased capacity of DVD, the director's cut has become an almost expected process in a film's passage from big to small screen. The result can be relatively minor and cosmetic - the rejigged effects, airbrushed guns and restored scenes in E.T. for example - or quite substantial, as in Apocalypse Now: Redux, in which the narrative and artistic aims of the film become quite different.
This raises intriguing questions about what constitutes the definitve 'text' of a film. Fiction, plays, poems, and paintings exist in relatively fixed forms, rarely alterable after their first release. Some authors have sought to revise earlier work - to correct unpalatable political attitudes, textual inaccuracies, or the vagaries of a youthful writing, for example - but have seldom succeeded. Once published, books are notoriously difficult to remove from circulation. Films, on the other hand, seem to exist in a much more fluid and precarious state than other art forms - editable, updateable, only as good as their most recent edition - and directors seem to have discovered a power over their work and its legacy which no other artists are afforded. When the re-edited version of a film is authorised and overseen by its director - for better or worse - does it supersede or exist alongside its predecessor? Which becomes the 'real' film?
Next week's article examines some recent case studies of the 'Director's Cut' issue, including Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, Touch of Evil, the Star Wars 'Special Editions', E.T., Brazil, The Devils and The Fellowship of the Ring.
