More Case Studies
For some directors, the status of their films - and their own egos - make the dilemmas over the director's cut more straightforward. When Francis Ford Coppola decided to produce a director's cut of Apocalypse Now (1979), the new version was given a shiny new tag (the strangely ambiguous 'Redux', which Martin Sheen thought made more sense when pronounced 'Re-doo') in order to distinguish it from the original. Coppola had sweated too much blood over Apocalypse Never, as it was famously dubbed during production, to jettison the old cut completely. Redux is a very different beast to its predecessor. Both the beginning and ending - two of the original film's most striking sequences - are entirely re-edited. Carmine Coppola's blaring, prog-classical (and very seventies score) is restored. The overall narrative is clearer and more linear, at the expense of some of the film's esoteric symbolism and hallucinogenic hysteria, and the film contains a number of long cut scenes, including an extended episode with the Playboy Bunnies, and the infamous French Plantation sequence, in which Willard and crew stumble across an isolated outpost of French colonists.
Redux is longer, fatter and even more pretentious than its predecessor, and it comes across more of an intellectual exercise than a determined attempt to produce a new "definitive" version. Fascinating Redux may be, but it won't supersede the great film it follows, as Coppola apparently intended.
For others, the struggle over final cut is almost an inevitable part of the filmmaking process. Terry Gilliam's titanic struggles with Universal Studios' boss Sid Sheinberg over Brazil (1985) are memorably documented in Jack Mathew's book The Battle of Brazil. Furious at Gilliam's profligate spending and the film's dystopian tone, Sheinberg demanded reshoots and the addition of an upbeat ending. Gilliam refused, and the film went into distribution limbo, with Gilliam refusing to change a frame, and the studio unwilling to release it in its present form. Weeks later, Gilliam took out a full-page ad in Variety which read: "Dear Sid Sheinberg - when are you going to release my film, Brazil?", and a compromise version, with which neither party was entirely happy, was finally released in cinemas.
Sheinberg's suggestions were subsequently incorporated against Gilliam's will for the US TV release, a cut which has become known as the 'Love Conquers All' version. The Criterion DVD edition of Brazil now includes three radically different cuts of the same film, together with a wealth of supporting material documenting its troubled evolution: the theatrical version, the 'Love Conquers All' version, and a third cut overseen by Gilliam which more closely reflects his original intentions for the film. Gilliam's aims are clear enough - his director's cut is obviously his preferred version - but by including the other cuts, he allows a fascinating insight into the treacherous world of trying to produce ambitious, experimental work within the ruthlessly commercial environment of studio film-making. This is when the director's cut becomes most illuminating: presented alongside its original version to show the enormous gulf between the film a director sets out to make, and the film that is released.
But what happens when a director isn't even alive to authorise his director's cut? One of the most difficult examples is the re-edited edition of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958), which emerged in 2000. Welles always complained that the film as originally released did not fully reflect his own intentions. In the late nineties, a team of American archivists and film historians discovered a document amongst Orson Welles' papers which detailed his original editing plan for Touch of Evil. They subsequently produced a cut which stuck rigidly to Welles' plan, though it was unclear exactly when or why the director had drafted the document. The new Touch of Evil was re-released as a 'director's cut' - even though the director happened to be dead at the time it was produced.
Controversially, the new cut incorporated some substantial changes, most notably in the opening sequence, which replaced the famous Henry Mancini theme with a soundtrack of music designed to reflect the street noise of the Mexican border-town in which the film opens. The archivists obviously had Welles' best interests at heart, but the case raises some serious questions. At the time Touch of Evil was made, Welles was perfectly aware that he was making his film within the confines of 1950s studio film-making. Much of his greatness lies in the way he subverts expectations, perverts the demands of genre, and invents new, innovative ways of overcoming the limitations of environment and climate in which he was working. Touch of Evil is already acknowledged as one of Welles' classic films. If it ain't broke, why re-edit it?
Most recently of all, Peter Jackson's DVD 'extended edition' of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring has taken both the boundaries of the DVD and the concept of the director's cut to a new level. The film was first released on DVD in its original theatrical form in September 2002, and then subsequently re-released in a lavish new version, spread over four discs the following December. The DVD itself is an astonishing feat, packed with a comprehensive selection of concept artwork, commentaries, making-ofs, documentaries and interviews, spanning the film's genesis from pre- to post-production. Much of the material was created specifically with the DVD release in mind, an indication perhaps of the new influence DVD is having on film-making right at the point of creation.
More interesting still is Jackson's extended cut of the film, which adds a full half-hour of new footage, including some detailed back story (e.g. Arwen and Aragorn's parting, Boromir's relationship with Aragorn, and the ring's betrayal of Isildur) and several key plot points (like the gift-giving at Lothlorien) which, while not strictly essential, certainly add to a richer and more complete understanding of the story. In his commentary, Jackson makes it clear that he was always aware that making Fellowship was always going to be a juggling act between the things he wanted to include, and the things he could include, due to the inevitable constraints of time and dramatic narrative. Fascinatingly, the concept of the 'Extended Edition' of the film arose directly out of this process. Jackson was aware that, while he might not be able to include everything in the theatrical release, as long as the film was successful, the subsequent DVD version would allow a greater degree of creative and narrative freedom, so that most of the excised material would eventually find its way back into the film anyway. Jackson also makes it clear that he views the extended cut as an alternative to the theatrical release rather than a 'definitive' version. Interestingly, however, he has chosen not to include the original cut on one of the four discs (though this might be down to New Line trying to offload more copies of the first DVD release). If The Fellowship of the Ring is re-issued in the wake of The Two Towers (2002) or when it is shown on terrestrial television, which version will Peter Jackson choose - the original theatrical cut, or the more detailed, character-driven 'extended edition'? In other words, which film really is The Fellowship of the Ring?
Of course, the most recent example of the limitations and compromises of film-making involves, ironically, one of the greatest living directors. Gangs of New York (2002) has been dogged by rumours of the conflict between director Martin Scorsese and his producer Harvey Weinstein. Scorsese's original cut was reputed to be over four hours; the theatrical release is a little over two and a half hours long. The film bears the unmistakable scars of having been mauled in the editing room, especially in the final third. It feels straight-jacketed, buttoned-up, and for all its flashes of brilliance, rather unlike a Scorsese film. Somewhere on Miramax's cutting room floor lies the movie Scorsese set out to make. If ever a film cried out for a director's cut, this is it. For once, I won't be asking any questions when it comes.
Director's cuts have a variety of motives. Sometimes they are designed to make money, sometimes to redress wrongs. Sometimes they appear simply because a director has been afforded the luxury of revisiting his earlier work. Cinema, like all art, reflects the age and context in which it was made, but as the trend of the DVD director's cut becomes more and more common, in years to come the films we see in our cinemas might start to look rather different to the films we watch at home - if we watch them in cinemas at all. Popular opinion seems to be that George Lucas makes better DVDs than he makes films. That may not such an insult. As the costs of theatrical productions grow, as digital film-making becomes cheaper and more accessible, and as the commercial and narrative constraints of studio-based film-making become more and more restrictive to young directors, 'straight-to-DVD' might start to be more of a badge of honour than of shame. Maybe DVD, and not film after all, is really the director's medium.
