The Rise and Falling Rise of the Director’s Cut
By Gary D. Rhodes
“I don’t do director cuts. When you see my film in a theater, that’s the director’s cut.” – Quentin Tarantino, 2003
Two different movies are titled Director’s Cut. The first was Eric Stacey’s 2003 horror film, in which a director slices, dices, and — you guessed it — cuts some would-be actors. Fortunately, no character quips that one of the victims has “gone to pieces.” (Instead, we get this choice dialogue: “Nancy’s just all over the place tonight.”)
Thirteen years later, Adam Rifkin created his own Director’s Cut (2016), a comedy starring Penn Jillette as guy who takes over another filmmaker’s movie. “In my director’s cut, I’m going to share everything,” his character explains. “For this cut, I spliced in some rare and valuable outtakes, some deleted scenes that should never have been deleted, and some prviously unseen behind-the-scenes footage.”
Rifkin’s film isn’t just the better of the two. It gets to the heart of what director’s cuts are really about: addition rather than subtraction.
We can’t blame Eric Stacey, though. Part of the problem is the very word “cut,” which means to sever, to divide. “Cutting rooms” — and their floors — used to be all about the act of omission. Now they’re about the sin of omission.
You see, director’s cuts more closely align with another term for editing suites, an outmoded term from the early twentieth century: “Joining rooms,” which emphasized footage being put together, rather than being edited out.
More than one website promotes director’s cuts as being “movies the way they were meant to be seen.” Meant to be seen by whom, you ask? The director, of course, not necessarily the other creators involved in the making of a film, like the actors or screenwriters.
Lest we forget, director Tony Scott fought hard against screenwriter Quentin Tarantino’s unhappy ending to True Romance (1993).
And film directors have often been considered the heaviest of heavyweights contending on film sets. Nobody else wore hip boots and gripped a riding crop in one hand and a megaphone in the other.
Popularization of Auteur Theory in America during the late sixties solidified this view. As film theorist Edward Buscombe provocatively declared in 2012, “We are all auteurists now, even those who tried to fight against it.”
The director matters: all else is at best secondary. Unless you happen to be a studio mogul or fuddy-duddy censor, of course.
Flashback: It is 1924. Director Erich von Stroheim completes his epic film Greed, running time 42 reels, or approximately nine hours. Irving Thalberg — “The Boy Wonder” at MGM, who has an Academy Award named in his honor — demands the film be heavily trimmed for theatrical release. Viewers, he reckoned, weren’t so greedy. A version running 140 minutes would suit them just fine.
The original cut of Greed remains one of the most sought-after of lost films. Stroheim’s hip boots had waded into waters that submerged him and drowned his vision.
Tragedies and travesties continued, most famously in the case of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons(1942). Wresting control from him, RKO cut some thirty minutes of footage and shot a new ending, a happy one for the story, an unhappy one for Welles.
Three decades later, Sam Peckinpah sued MGM because the studio made “substantial changes” to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) without his approval. That included the deletion of about 18 minutes of footage. (“It slices! It dices! It’ll even make julienne fries!”)
It wasn’t as if directors before Peckinpah hadn’t argued against such changes. In 1948, the Screen Directors Guild drew up a clause “covering a director’s cutting rights on a film, including [the] right to present his own views on editing to a company head.” (Sure, go ahead, present your views. We’ll take them under advisement.)
By the early seventies, the union — which had become the Directors Guild of America — developed a clause that said the director’s cut “could not be interfered with during [the] period of this cut and prior to paid public preview.”
In neither case did studios have to release the director’s cut, except in the very rare case of special contractual arrangements.
In 1967, The New York Times Magazine incorrectly stated that Mike Nichols was the first American director since Orson Welles “to have complete creative control over a movie–including the right of final cut.” As Variety told readers that year,
Although the number of Hollywood directors with [the] right to final cut is small, they nevertheless exist … at least three people have had this right for some time — [Otto] Preminger, Elia Kazan, and George Stevens. There are more, but the facts are closely held, since studios don’t like other helmers to know that such privileges have been granted.
And of course Welles had only enjoyed that privilege on one studio film, Citizen Kane (1941). (Hence, the aforementioned, Less-Than-Magnificent Ambersons.)
Most director’s cuts didn’t play theaters. As film critic F.X. Feeney once wrote, “The director’s cut was a kind of Holy Grail that you’d read about in film magazines.”
When did that begin to change? We could point to Charlie Chaplin’s classic silent film The Gold Rush (1925), which he re-edited and re-released in 1942 with music and narration. The Exhibitor called it a “revised reissue.” The 1942 cut was actually 13 minutes shorter than the original, partially because of Chaplin’s changes and partially due to the 24fps frame rate.
The Gold Rush also launches our story into confusing, if not treacherous waters. Both versions of the film represented Chaplin’s director’s cuts, plural. And most modern viewers, critics, and historians prefer the original.
A small number of director’s cuts appeared onscreen in the 1970s, notably Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) in 1974, which featured the restoration of six minutes of particularly violent footage.
In 1980, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978) was changed and reissued with the subtitle The Special Edition. And the 1981 reissue of George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) famously added the words “Episode IV” and “A New Hope” to the opening title crawl.
The minor trend continued with the Special Longer Version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) in 1983. The following year, Daily Variety described a “restored director’s cut” of Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962).
An extended version of Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend (1971) arrived in 1987. A restored and extended version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) appeared in 1989.
Notably — given descriptions that promoted it as the “director’s original daring vision” — Clive Donner’s Stealing Heaven (1988) hit video stores in extended form in 1989.
In 1991, James Cameron’s Aliens: Special Collector’s Edition appeared on laserdisc, after playing television in 1989. It, too, featured additional footage.
By 1994, there were even director’s cuts of The Toxic Avenger (1984) and Teenage Catgirls in Heat (1993).
Home video had transformed director’s cuts into desirable products. Customers may already have purchased one copy of the movie, but some would buy it a second time, in order to see footage they haven’t seen, to own the “Holy Grail.”
The rise of DVD in the late nineties secured the “Director’s Cut” a permanent place in pop culture and sales.
As Daily Variety said during the theatrical release of Eli Roth’s Hostel (2006), “the aptly termed ‘director’s cut is all but inevitable.” The joke here is similar to the title of Eric Stacey’s Director’s Cut (2003). Funny? Probably not.
In any event, director’s cuts became synonymous not with less, but more. More footage, unseen footage. The allure of the “Uncut” became as attractive, as orthodoxical, as the auteur. The word “Uncut” in the cinema became almost sexual, biblical even.
Caveats, yeah, we got ’em. There are always exceptions, in this case a few director’s cuts that are in fact shorter than the original theatrical releases. Joel and Ethan Coen’s preferred version of Blood Simple (1985) has a running time of three minutes less than the theatrical release.
And some director’s cuts add only a minimal amount of footage. The Unrated Director’s Cut of Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992) is only forty seconds or so longer. But to be sure, it was as unrepentant as it was unrated.
“Unrated” became another buzzword in this context, meaning not only do we finally get to see what the director wanted us to see, but also see what the MPAA tried to keep us from seeing.
On occasion, director’s cuts really do alter film narratives significantly, no more so than in the famous case of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). The Director’s Cut of 1992 deleted Deckard’s (Harrison Ford’s) voiceover narration and restored a dream sequence featuring a unicorn. It also removed the theatrical cut’s happy ending.
Together, these changes were profound. Here is the clear distinction between a director’s vision and a studio’s version.
Usually, though, director’s cuts simply make films longer in duration without changing their narratives in any major respect. Bigger is allegedly better. Think James A. Michener, not Ernest Hemingway.
Let’s take a quick waltz through the history of blockbusters and art house films alike. Next to each of the flicks below is an indication of how much footage was added to its director’s cut:
o James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) — 15 minutes
o Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) — 17 minutes
o Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988) — 18 minutes
o Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) — 18 minutes
o Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001) — 20 minutes
o Luc Besson’s Leon (1994) — 23 minutes
o James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989) — 28 minutes
o Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995) — 28 minutes
o Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep (2019) — 28 minutes
o Zack Snyder’s Batman V Superman (2016) — 31 minutes
o Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970) — 39 minutes
o Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980) — 47 minutes
o Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005) — 50 minutes
o Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves (1990) — 52 minutes
o Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987) — 58 minutes
o Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984) — 112 minutes
Wolfgang Peterson’s Das Boot (1981) is also notable in this regard, with the original theatrical release of 149 minutes being extended to a 208-minute Director’s Cut and a 293-minute Original Uncut Version.
Here we should also mention Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy from 2001–2003. The theatrical cuts collectively run 558 minutes; the “extended editions” — Jackson eschewed the term “director’s cut” — collectively run 686 minutes.
Consider also James Cameron’s comment in 1998 about his film Titanic (1997): “People were asking me about a director’s cut after the very early screenings. When they said that to me after a three hour, 14 minute version, I knew I was in Fat City.”
More to love, or more to bore? The Urban Dictionary now defines the slang phrase “director’s cut” as “the long version of [any] story,” explaining that some film director’s cuts are “interminably long.”
At least a few critics and viewers have perceived the same problem. Daily Variety bemoaned the fact that Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005) “plays more like a director’s cut, with scenes that easily could have be dispensed with or tightened. One cringes a bit at the thought of a DVD expansion of this version.” (Note to that weary critic: the eventual home video release was 12 minutes longer than the theatrical.)
If we return to Eric Stacey’s Director’s Cut for more guidance, we can remind ourselves that slasher movies do feature slashes. Not just one cut, but many. Which can result in something of a mess.
In some cases, in other words, there isn’t just a theatrical cut and a director’s cut. The Director’s Cut of Blade Runner in 1992 was followed by the The Final Cut in 2007. It included even more unicorn footage and also some additional violence previously seen only in yet another cut, the international. (Not one, but many.)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977, 135 minutes) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition (1980, 132 minutes) were followed by Spielberg’s director’s cut in 1998, which runs 137 minutes.
In July 1991, Daily Variety reported that Francis Ford Coppola was “back into the editing studio to create the ‘final director’s cut’ [of the 1990 film The Godfather Part III] that Paramount Home Video is releasing.” But then, in 2020, yet another cut appeared, with a new title no less: Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone.
So many other examples could be cited. Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009) ran 162 minutes theatrically, 186 minutes as the Director’s Cut, and then 215 minutes as the Ultimate Cut. (Time to watch the Watchmen, or watch your watch?)
In this context, Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004) is particularly worthy of consideration. The theatrical cut is 175 minutes, whereas the director’s cut of 2005 is 166 minutes. Like the latest version of The Godfather Part III (which went down from 162 minutes to 158), Stone’s second take on Alexander is intriguing in that — contrary to the norm — it decreased in running time.
But then, in 2007, there was Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut, which runs 214 minutes. And then there was Alexander: The Ultimate Cut in 2014, which runs 207. Oh, and of these, Stone says his preferred is The Final Cut, the third of four, the longest.
Forget not Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), the theatrical cut running 147 minutes. His Apocalypse Now Redux of 2001 runs 193 minutes. But then, in 2019, his Apocalypse Now Final Cut went down to 182 minutes: longer than the theatrical, but reduced from the redux.
None of this is to suggest that some films aren’t improved in director’s cuts. The director’s cut of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) — which made numerous changes, including expanding the running time from 96 to 108 minutes — is a clear enhancement, and it seems historically in line with what Welles wanted, even though he was long dead when the restoration occurred.
But the impulse towards more and more slicing and dicing is not always wise, or even correct. Once director’s cuts became marketable, the wishes of some dead directors no longer mattered.
As Peter Bogdanovich told The Guardian, “MGM have a director’s cut of Howard Hawks’ Red River [1948] that they’re calling the Director’s Cut, and it is absolutely not the director’s cut. It’s a cut the director didn’t want, an earlier cut that was junked. They assume because it was longer that it’s a director’s cut. [Frank] Capra cut two reels off Lost Horizon[1937] because it didn’t work and then someone tried to put it back. There are certainly mistakes and stupidities in reconstructing pictures.”
Stupidities abound. In 2020, Eureka Entertainment released Robert Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) on Blu-ray, adding his alleged “director’s cut” as an “easter egg” bonus feature. The only problem is that this version is not at all what Florey wanted the film to be, as his biographer and friend Brian Taves knew all too well.
“There are some things that are still held in respect,” Poe wrote in his short story Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). Not at Eureka Entertainment, alas.
Even when it comes to living filmmakers, much of this isn’t about restoring a film to an original vision, but rather revising it ex post facto. Imposing, arguably inflicting, new ideas onto old work.
William Friedkin had at least three reasons to excise the infamous “spider walk” scene from The Exorcist in 1973. All of his reasons — and there were his reasons, not orders handed down by the studio — remain sound logic. But in 2000, Friedkin restored that scene in a director’s cut of The Exorcist, which was theatrically released as The Version You’ve Never Seen.
Think about the original Star Wars trilogy, with George Lucas’ repeated tinkering. Probably he did want Cloud City to appear more expansive when he first made The Empire Strikes Back (1980), but making Greedo shoot first in Star Wars?
Lucas later told The Hollywood Reporter, “The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.”
Of course audiences had good reason “to think,” not just because they can think, but because they can also see. In 1977, we saw Han shoot first.
And then there’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Steven Spielberg’s director’s cut featured numerous changes, including altering the word “terrorist” to “hippie” and visually transforming the guards’ guns into walkie-talkies. The director’s vision changed over the years, and so in retrospect he changed the film. This wasn’t about recovering the “director’s original daring vision,” but instead him imposing a new vision onto the past.
Is this fair? We can debate that point, but certainly there is precedence in nineteenth-century literature. Poe tinkered with reprints of his poems and stories, including The Murders in the Rue Morgue. And Walt Whitman revised Leaves of Grass (1855) at least six times.
Perhaps it is logical that filmmakers would want to remain in process, in progress. Some of them want to keep revising. To be finished is, well, to be finished.
Of Watchmen, Snyder has said in 2021, “I love that movie 100 percent. It’s exactly what I wanted,” even though there are three versions. He also added that, if he made the movie now, he would consider adding the graphic novel’s squid attack.
By contrast, in 2018, Spielberg told Screen Rant that he regretted changing E.T. “I learned a big lesson,” he admitted, “and that’s the last time I decided to ever mess with the past.”
Fair enough, but in at least a few cases, these retroactive changes suppress access to the theatrical cuts, something of concern not just for critics and historians, but also for everyday film buffs.
Viewing the original Star Wars trilogy as it was seen in the late seventies and early eighties is not easy. The force will be with us, always, but only in versions that begin with the words A New Hope.
The same is unfortunately true of films that arguably work much better in their theatrical cuts, like Oliver Stone’s Nixon. (Nixon refused to give up Checkers. I refuse to give up the theatrical cut.)
Nowhere has the movement to director’s cuts been more monumental than in the case Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021). Snyder bowed out as director while the film was originally in production. Joss Whedon finished it with a dramatically different vision. The “Synder Cut” is thus the director’s cut of a movie that had never been made, or at least completed.
(A similar case would be Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, released in 2006. For it, the original director Donner re-edited the film closer to his vision. During the production of the 1980 movie, he was replaced by Richard Lester, who completed it in a different and more comedic style.)
Lots of director’s cuts and lots of confusion. How do we make sense of all of this? That’s not easy, so let’s now turn to the eyebrowed auteur for wisdom.
Martin Scorsese importantly told Entertainment Weekly, “The director’s cut is the film that’s released — unless it’s been taken away from the director by the financiers and the studio. [The director] has made their decision on the process they were going through at the time. … Sometimes [a director says], ‘I wish I could go back and put it all back together. But I do think, once the die is cast, you have to go with it and say, ‘That’s the movie I made under those circumstances.”
Releasing director’s cuts doesn’t interest Scorsese. As his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker has made clear, “Marty doesn’t believe in that.”
But most directors do, and will continue to do so. Even Tarantino, who once declared a philosophy similar to Scorsese’s, created The Hateful Eight: Extended Version. The theatrical version of 2015 runs 168 minutes, while a roadshow version runs 187 minutes. The extended version is, well, extensive. It runs 210 minutes. You can thus love or hate three iterations of the Eight.
All of this makes cents, but does it make sense? Perhaps this is all the sine qua non of post-modernist filmmaking, that there isn’t a single text, a single film, but various variations. The myth of the original is but a myth.
If nothing else, we know now that the final cut is not always final. And that an auteur’s vision isn’t necessarily singular, or even the product of advance planning.
Off hand, I don’t recall any filmmaker who disavowed positive critical reviews, prestigious awards, or sizable royalties on theatrical cuts, even if something — a la slasher movie logic — was burning inside them to keep cutting, to keep taking another stab at the same project.
That’s to say nothing of the fact that, at least in most cases, the original theatrical versions are what makes given films important in the first place.
As for audiences, we sometimes watch films differently now. I’ll never forget a close friend telling me why he wanted to see the Special Edition of Star Wars in 1997. It wasn’t to see the movie, not quite. It was to “see what Lucas added.”
Watching a film to spot “previously unseen footage,” is indeed different than watching a film. The revisions stand out, usually far beyond their importance to the story. The Version You’ve Never Seen isn’t at all the same thing as an entire film you’ve never seen.
So, for those of us who watch a director’s cut after — or even before — seeing the original, the process is as much as about remembering the past as experiencing the present. What the film was like Once Upon a Time occurs to us while we acutely perceive that Things Aren’t Like They Used to Be.
It also makes it tough to know whether or not to even say you like a film, if it has been released in more than one or two cuts. For example, I love one version of Watchmen, enjoy another, and am disappointed in a third.
Perhaps the only logical response to Director’s Cuts is what we — as thinking audience members — could refer to as the Viewer’s Choice. I want to see the theatrical cut of Star Wars, the director’s cut of Touch of Evil, and no cut of Alexander.
This is probably the only way to contend with the Uncut and the Unrated, the Extended Edition and the Special Edition.
After all, the Director’s Cut is not going to be cut. It may or may not always be about artistic vision(s). It may or may not always be about profits. But like the Final Girl in cut-em-up horror movie, the Director’s Cut will survive.
Survive and flourish. The Director’s Guild of America now has a podcast called The Director’s Cut. And Francis Ford Coppola’s vineyard sells “Director’s Cut” wines. The website explains, “Named after the version of a film which most reflects the director’s vision, the Director’s Cut wines represent our winemaker’s vision of varietal wines, which express true appellation characte
Let us conclude by bowing our heads and giving thanks for Patch Adams: The Director’s Cut, and also thanks for the fact that it exists only as a fictional joke inside of John Waters’ true appellation, Cecil B. Demented (2000).
