The Big Picture - 'The Godfather Coda' and Top Five Director's Cuts

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

In December 2020, Francis Ford Coppola oversaw the release of 'The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone,' a reconfiguration of his film 'The Godfather: Part III' and the latest in a long line of director's cuts. What is a director's cut? What is its purpose? And what are the best in movie history? On today's episode, Chris Ryan and Sean break down the truth behind International Immobiliare and why filmmakers return to their work over and over again. Host: Sean Fennessey Guest: Chris Ryan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about The Godfather again. Late last year, Francis Ford Coppola oversaw the release of The Godfather Coda, The Death of Michael Corleone, a reconfiguration of his film The Godfather Part III, and the latest in a long line of director's cuts. What is a director's cut? What is their purpose? And what are the best in a long line of director's cuts. What is a director's cut? What is their purpose?

And what are the best in movie history? On today's episode, Chris Ryan and I will break down the truth behind Internationale Immobiliare and why filmmakers... Internationale Immobiliare! It's all coming up on The Big Picture. CR, welcome back. How you doing, man? Thanks for having me, me man I can't wait to do this it's really exciting to see you here have you finished your edit on the director's cut of that Philadelphia Eagles game from Sunday night I was wondering no United Artists has taken taken the keys to the editing suite I've been locked out that's very sad uh speaking of sad losses before we get

into director's cuts i'm not sure did you see the results of the 1995 movie draft voting i'm not sure if you got a chance to look at that congratulations thanks you know uh i think that you're in good company with uh recent elections in terms of their stability i don't know what are you what are you referring to i hate the fact that when if anybody loses these drafts, you're immediately forced into the Josh Hawley role. You know what I mean? That's the company that you're keeping. My electoral votes have been certified across the country. And I feel strongly about them. We don't need Mike Pence to intervene in any meaningful way. I am the true victor. Another true victor, Francis Ford Copppola really one of the best ever a hero

of ours we've talked about him quite a bit on the rewatchables talked about him a little bit here on the big picture from time to time and there was an announcement late last year that he was reimagining reshaping recontextualizing the third godfather film which is a frankly a much malign movie and we did an entire episode about it on the rewatchables and our flawed rewatchables short lived series, which is one of the last pods that you and I did in person. I don't know if you recall that. It is. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And it was also, I think one of the more fun ones we've done because sometimes flawed rewatchables means only five people like this movie. But I think with The Godfather 3, we're talking about coming out of two of the most important,

but also most beloved films. You know, if you listen to the rewatchables, there's a pretty good chance that Godfather 1 and 2 are in your top five movies of all time. And then there's a third movie that wouldn't be in your top 300. You know what I mean?

Yeah, it's true. And it's not just a tacked on 90 minute movie. It's a massive two and a half hour film. So the idea of going back and recutting it and reshaping it, I thought was a fascinating decision. Not the first time that Coppola has gone back to the well with reshaping the Godfather story. Not the first time he's gone back to the well with reshaping one of his movies. It's something he is quite fond of. But just on the Godfather Coda tip, when you rewatched or when you watched this really for the first time, what was your initial reaction to it? Did you feel like it worked better than the film that we talked about a year ago on the rewatchables? Certainly. Although I think the fact that I saw

the original version of it or the, I guess, the widely understood version of it so recently, made it a complicated watch. One of the things I think will come up in this conversation about director's cuts is your relationship to the original film in the first place. You know, how often have you seen it? How much did you not like it that the director's cut somehow solved the movie for you? You know, and then there's a lot of tinkering that goes on. You know, this is ultimately an act of editing. And I there's a lot of tinkering that goes on. This is ultimately an act of editing. And I think that that's only one element of what a director does. And I think sometimes when we talk about director's cuts, especially when we eventually

will have to reckon with the Snyder cut, there's this idea that he is going to just go reshoot it. That he's going to take $100 million of HBO Max's money and actually fix all the shit that went wrong with it. That's actually not what happens with these movies. In the rare occasion, there's a ton of footage that wasn't used, but mostly what people are doing are speeding things up, slowing things down, reshaping performances maybe a little bit. With Godfather 3, the freeze frame that you see, if you bought this on Amazon, there's like a freeze frame before you hit play. And it is a portrait from the ceremony that opens the original version and is now like

happens in the second scene of the coda. And the center character who is in the middle of the photograph that is the freeze frame is Archbishop Gilday. And I think that that really does prove that we thought for all these years that this was Michael Corleone's story. And it's actually, The Godfather is actually about a guy who is a banker at the Vatican who meets this other guy and everything changes. You know, for everybody who listened to that Godfather part three pod a year ago the biggest

takeaway i think for all of us was your at the time i thought inspired impersonation of archbishop gilday and upon revisiting or or seeing the coda i have no idea what you were doing and if you'd like to if you want to revise that performance in any way or if you'd like to do a kind of chris ryan coda no on your gil day impersonation no no i like the idea that there might be people out there like oh yeah that probably is how that guy talks we've never seen the movie yeah i think it's a very strange thing i i thought this was an interesting version of a director's cut because it it does not resemble a lot of the the types that we'll talk about which is that a lot of times you hear that phrase and you think, you know, an additional 40 minutes of unseen footage, or you think completely reshaping the structure of the story or significantly changing the ending of a movie. That's something that happens a lot. You hear about studio notes

and a filmmaker fighting back against those notes. In this case, and Coppola did a lot of press around this movie when it was released at the end of December, there were a lot of minor changes, I think, that helped the movie, in particular, that first change that you just identified, the fact that the film doesn't open with this ceremony of Michael Corleone's character granting essentially a $100 million gift to the Vatican. It starts with a business deal, with a conversation between Corleone and Archbishop Gilday and the acquisition of International Immobilare.

Yeah. And that's really what the movie is about. It's really like a business movie. It feels very inspired by the machinations of studio business in Hollywood. It feels inspired by the increased globalization around the world. It feels inspired by the obvious real-life Vatican business dealings, which we talked about at length on that Rewatchables episode. And it just makes the movie make more sense to me.

And even though that's a very minor change to just move one scene that happened 12 minutes into the movie right into the beginning, it actually, I think, in some cases, accomplishes what Coppola sets out to accomplish, which is he's just made a different movie. And i was kind of impressed by how powerful that could be now as the movie went went along i had a harder time identifying what it was that he had changed did you feel comfortable picking out and choosing and saying oh this is different that's different no i mean that was actually quite difficult i mean i think the opening and the closing are the ones that you are obviously alerted to because they're so significantly

different. And the opening, I completely agree. The original scene with the ceremony that Michael is having, I think is supposed to really obviously echo the Lake Tahoe and New York openings of the first two films. But just setting it up, I mean, even this is like having George Hamilton in an early scene kind of fixes, it doesn't fix the absence of Robert Duvall, who I think would have helped this movie enormously, both just even in the writing for that character and having the Tom Hagen character exist in this world rather than as like a footnote with this young priest played by John Savage. But even just having George Hamilton, he's like, oh, okay, so Michael has a new lawyer now.

You know what I mean? Like little things like that, that you just intuitively understand from that moment. And also the enormity of the deal that he is trying to execute. And the fact that he's going from not just a thug or a guy who's got some pieces of casinos, but to becoming a Bertelsmann, a Seagram's, a huge, huge, huge family-owned conglomerate is incredibly crucial. And it makes a lot more sense in terms of his desire to reconnect with his kids because he understands that this is his legacy that he's going to be passing down. If he buys this company from the Vatican, it will be generations of corleones after him that sort of oversee it yeah and you know much like your eagles michael doesn't really realize that he

has forfeited his chance at legitimacy by by murdering the integrity of the game um and it the movie i think is so is joe judge fredo here is like who's's Fredo? Yeah, probably the Mara family is probably a slightly more reasonable comparison, but I think that it's, um, it's the kind of movie where I want it. I've always wanted it to be better. And so this gives me an opportunity to think it's better. And I'm having a hard time kind of wrapping my head around whether it

actually is better. I, what I see more, much more so, and you just hinted at this is the heavy echoes of the first two films in this version and the intentionality of sort of revising and repeating the same themes and the same ideas and even the same visual images that he created in those first two films. The thing that the film was probably most significantly criticized for

when it first came out was the performance of Coppola's daughter, Sophia, as Mary, who is Michael Corleone's daughter and the love interest of the NDRC character. And there's been a lot

of conversation over the years about, you know, just how unskilled an actress people thought she was at the time. And now she has gone on to become such an important filmmaker that there's

a complicated conversation around that. I will say, and I felt this when we revisited the movie a year ago, but even more so now, I don't think that the performance is good by any means, but I also don't think it is like the train wreck that it has made out to be over the years. But I also couldn't specifically tell what was reframed here. Was it clear to you how he improves this? I think that there's less of her. I think he moves through those scenes a little more quickly i think the nokia making scene which is sort of notorious as as like the kind of nate nadir of the entire saga is if i if i i didn't take a stopwatch out but i think that some of those scenes move through more quickly and i think generally there's a little

less of her i found that that plot line specifically this time around, I don't know, maybe it's because we watched it so recently. I thought that was very clear. I thought that that entire like Vincent falls for Mary, Vincent also rises in estimation in Michael's eyes. The moment comes where Vincent is pegged, he's chosen to take over as godfather and the price for that is to give up Michael's

daughter for both incestuous reasons and also because Michael is trying to inoculate Mary from whatever comes at Vincent once they return to New York. And that Vincent quickly acquiesces to that. And I thought that there was a feeling of narrative clarity for me. I think the Immobiliari stuff and specifically the stuff in Italy where all these different assassins and dons are getting involved I think is still really cloudy to me. I know I could probably

sort it out, but I think there's a bit of the ending that still is he's just so enamored with this idea of entering it ending it with this operatic code like aria that it kind of abandons like everybody getting all the all the plot points totally making sense yeah i agree and i think that the the final 30 to 40 minutes on the one hand is this you know impressive feat of intercutting and gilday like

falling down the stairs and like yeah you know there's amazing stuff but it's also really it's still quite drawn out and it feels you know incredibly melodramatic and over the top but it's not bad and you know i think the things that worked for me the first time still work i think this is an unbelievable al pacino performance yeah and we focused we focused a lot on that in the rewatchables. I would also say, I thought Garcia this time around, like just watching Garcia this time, among the first times that I was ever like,

if they had made a Godfather 4, I think that would have been cool. Like, you know, I thought his performance has a real texture to it this time around. Maybe it's always there, but I just really noticed the way

he changes over the course of the movie. What do you think about Coppola's relationship specifically to returning to his totemic work and trying to revise it? Because he's somebody who doesn't really need schmucks like us to come and explain why his stuff is good. He's made three or four of the most important films ever, and yet he can't resist this urge to revisit. What do you think about that? I think it gets to the larger conversation about director's cuts in general, because the defining tension of Coppola's career is his desire for creative control. He starts his own studio to do so. He invests millions of dollars of his own money, often leveraging his own real estate, his family's wealth to finance movies

that are passion projects of his. And then he will go off and make a Rainmaker or go off and make, you know, not a studio picture, but I think obviously making Godfather 3 was clearly a gambit for him to have creative freedom going forward. He's one of these guys that I think is the person who proves the director as author rule, the auteurism rule. And we're saying

director's cuts here. We're not saying the Thelma Schoonmaker cut. We're not saying the Walter Murch cut. We're not saying the Paul Hirsch cut. It's always the director's cut. It's like the director's vision of this movie. And Coppola is the proof of that. Coppola going back and tinkering with Apocalypse and tinkering with Godfather movies and re-editing Godfather movies. And I think maybe the more significant re-imagining of the Godfather movies is the chronological cut that has been released a couple of times over the decades. But if people haven't gotten a chance to watch the movies that way, it's quite an experience to watch them sort of go from young Vito arriving in America through Robert De Niro into the Pacino era with Brando. And he's going to fix wolves.

I don't know. He's always messing with it. Yeah. It actually reminds me quite a bit of the Hackman character in the conversation. You know, he can't look away. He can't not listen. He can't not tinker with understanding why something happened the way that it happened. And try to, I don't know if fix is necessarily the right word, but constantly re-imagining his own creativity is, that must be a nice place to be. You know, obviously Francis Ford Coppola is hugely successful and wealthy

and has everything in the world, but it does feel like he has, in addition to being an author of his work, he's like a creative constabulary. You know what I mean? He has a level of oversight into his work that is uncommon. You know, it seems like he understands what his place is in film history.

I've been rewatching a couple of his movies recently, and you can see this even in movies like Tucker, A Man and His Dream, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. He has this really complicated relationship to the thing that he made, and it feels like a constant, you know, essentially he's not able to make, put exactly what he wants on screen. And he's tortured by that at all times. And it's fascinating. The flip is also that he's the guy at the blackjack table who doesn't even feel anything until he's down 2000. You know, I think that there is a degree

to which he needs the feeling of Robert Evans kicking down the door, demanding that he finish the script or get the edit out or make sure that... There are some people who need that chaos and that pressure to perform. And really, all of his successful films have come through the fire. They're not the ones that he gets to go off and make his quiet passion project. It's the one where there's this collision between art and commerce. And that's really the germ of what this conversation is about. The director's cut is this idea that

I was not able to put out the thing that I wanted to because a theater needs to turn over its screen six times a day. So we want to keep this under two hours and 25 minutes or something. How many times after you've finished recording a podcast do you think, I need to go back, I need to recut, I need to revise? See, I'm not a tinker. That's not like, do you ever feel like, do you immediately start thinking about things you could have done differently? Never.

I think about our pals, Mallory and Jason, all the time in binge mode and the kind of effort and clarity and the length and the amount of time and work that goes into making their show relative to our show. And I feel like all of my work happens before. Everything, once I have started talking, and obviously what we make is infinitely less interesting, important, or useful than The Godfather. But just as a means of communication, as a means of making anything, of putting anything out in the world. I think I'm a lot like you, which is, I may have some regrets, but I just have to go to

the next thing. I'm a volume shooter. Yeah. It's like some are going to go in and some are going to go out. Truly. Let's talk about director's cuts a little bit more specifically, because I think you put your finger on the thing, which is that it often feels like this battle between art and commerce and studios and people telling artists that they know better or that they know how to make something more profitable. That's not always the case though. And some of these films that we're going to talk about in some of these approaches are a bit more esoteric, are a bit more unusual. In some cases, they mean cutting back, not cutting more into the frame. So I've identified what feels like about six different types of director's cutters that you come across here over history. The first is probably the most significant and the one that we think about most.

And I think most closely dovetails to what you're describing, which is the unshackled. shackled the filmmaker whose vision was was muted or muffled by a big studio at some point and that they have been given a chance or have sought to get the chance to tell the true story to make the movie that they always wanted to make or at least that they felt that they had captured and there are a lot of historical examples of this heaven's gate is probably the most, if not legendary example, probably a notorious example of this. Sure. And it has an actual book about it called Final Cut. Yes. And this is Michael Cimino's 1980 movie. This is the film he made after The Deer Hunter that reportedly sunk United Artists, the studio, and also reportedly sunk the new Hollywood and the era of the essentially the auteur being in charge of the creative process in Hollywood. I was just reading Mark Harris had

this great piece about Joe Micklin Silver, who just recently passed away on the vulture. And he was writing about how she had a movie with Griffin Dunn and the guy who played Niedermeyer in Animal House. I'm forgetting his name. And that like United Artists had backed it like, we got Heaven's Gate coming. So we're good. We're just in the business of making great art and Heaven's Gate collapses and United Artists winds up turning it into this kind of like horny comedy, you know, and like put like a Griffin Dunn with a like, oops, police like poster. And so, yeah, it certainly ended something there yeah it's and that's a great reflection i think of what a movie like this can do you know they can be blamed for the destruction of other people's careers and other people's projects they can be blamed for the destruction

of um the creator's careers you know chimino is really never the same he did make more movies after heaven's gate but you know that's a movie that's a um it's a three and a half hour western about the johnson county war um i revisited it recently it's there's an edition on the criterion collection and um it i it's hard to imagine a version of that movie that is two hours or two and a half hours like the one that was released after the original version was pulled very quickly um but this happens over and over again you know we've seen it with movies like Brazil. I mean, your guy, Ridley Scott, you should talk about Ridley Scott's relationship maybe to the director's cut because he maybe has more than any filmmaker ever. Yeah. I mean, I would almost say that that is seemingly baked into the Ridley

Scott experience. And one thing that we should note is the emergence of the idea of the director's cut and the home media market, you know, and now we could call that the streaming market, but just the idea that, uh, people would own movies at any point was only like something that happened in the eighties, really like, you know, they, I think that people had their own private collections of films and, you know, there, there were ways in which you could own a movie, but most, for the most part, people would go to rep theaters if they wanted to see older movies or they would watch them on television. And sometimes in the case of The Godfather, and he did special cuts of The Godfather that aired on NBC. But for the most part,

the movie you saw in the theater was that. And then you probably didn't really get a chance to see it that many times afterwards unless you went and saw it in theater. And then in the 80s, in the home video market and the laser disc market and the dvd market starts and to sell new iterations of this dvd to find a guy like you sean and say i'm gonna make you buy alien or blade runner five times in 20 years they have to tweak it somehow and you can't always just say we've like kind of cleaned up the image a little bit or punched up the sound a little bit like you have to entice people with the idea that this version of the movie that they're going to see is somehow new.

And Ridley Scott, who's one of Hollywood's most successful filmmakers of the last 30 or 40 years, is the person who I think has the most significant amounts of director's cuts that actually wind up changing how you feel. The other people in that list though are not unsuccessful directors. I mean, Cimino is almost an outlier in the sense that his career completely collapsed after Heaven's Gate. But you've got guys like James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, very successful directors who often will be like, yeah, well, there's a different version of aliens. There's a different version of Close Encounters. Yeah. So that actually raises a question that I wanted to ask you, which is, do you think

that these people do feel creatively crunched? Or do you think that they are dramatists and are frequently kind of inventing enemies to feel bound by and have to rebel against? You don't have to make a clinical personality judgment on Ridley Scott necessarily, but a lot of the time, maybe Terry Gilliam is a better example of this because his version of Brazil was notoriously cut by Sid Sheinberg, I believe at Universal at the time. And Terry Gilliam is a dyspeptic and defiant artist and filmmaker and it always feels like he's in some sort of battle for his own personal freedom or his own idea of freedom and i have often thought

terry williams of course a genius and has made wonderful movies and i love monty python but it does feel like he is waging a war for his own reputation rather than for a film a lot of the time but i don't know i mean there's so much that is unknown and unseen about this do you think that people that fall into this category are like essentially telling a story of their own persecution in an attempt to to valorize themselves i certainly think that there are there's basically two kinds of directors cut directors there are showmen who know better and then there are are rebels who kind of like going down with the ship. And the latter, they can have overlap in terms of their personnel, but you see people like Gilliam. There's the famous story of the director's cut that no one will ever see, which is the four-hour

version of All the Pretty Horses that Billy Bob Thornton made with a Daniel Lamoise score that Matt Damon claims is one of the best movie the best movie he he's ever made and could have been like one of the great American movies and was mangled by Harvey Weinstein. And then a different soundtrack was put on it. Uh, and Daniel Lamoise will not release his own score to the, to, to have it read mastered or redone. Like you will never see that movie. So there's people like that. There's people like, um, you know, you read like, uh, diaries from like John Borman as he's like making movies. And like, it definitely seems like John Borman is like, I want to make a King Arthur movie. That's just like a sexual fantasy about this. And then you're like, you're not going to be able to make that movie, man. You know, like, I don't know if you thought you were going to be

able to make that movie, but you're not like there, there are some filmmakers who I think are willfully like putting their head in the sand about the realities of the business. And then there are people like James Cameron, who's like, I had a 15 minute part at the beginning of aliens. We took it out. It turns out it's a better movie. Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, I think that Cameron probably falls a little bit closer to the second category here, which is like the, what I'm calling the fiddlers you know the people who kind of can't stop playing with their toys and you mentioned spielberg i think spielberg is an example of that too people who make quote-unquote perfect movies you know close encounters of the third kind is a perfect movie aliens is a perfect movie and

nevertheless we still get reimaginings i i have noticed and i don't know if you've noticed this but i have noticed online that a lot of people are we're re-watching. I have noticed, and I don't know if you've noticed this, but I have noticed online that a lot of people were re-watching the Lord of the Rings movies over the holiday break. Yeah, because they go on the marathons on TNT,

but I don't know why everybody got the message to do this. Yeah. I don't know either. I know Mallory Rubin just re-watched all the extended editions

and this is the thing that was just, you know, the 4K release recently came out and there are these massive long extended editions of the Peter Jackson films. I love those movies. I think those movies are fantastic. But there was a point where they were putting out a new version of those

movies every like 18 months. At least it felt like it. Whether that is actually true or not, I don't know because I'm not closely tracking what they're putting out into the world or if it's meaningfully different. And that's the thing, even just researching to have this conversation with you, it's kind of tough to identify what isn't, isn't new. I think that's true for some of the Ridley Scott stuff too, but you know, for somebody like Cameron or probably most notoriously for Oliver Stone and Alexander, there are like four extant cuts of Alexander, his, his epic tale starring your boy, Colin Farrell.rell and that's a that's an example of a movie where I can tell what's different because yes there's like 20 to 40 minutes of of of padding

on it but for Close Encounters for example the cuts are not that different you know there's a version of Close Encounters where you don't see inside the mothership right like and when that was a significant thing that Spielberg basically offered to shoot and did shoot and then was like, God damn it, I shot that and now they're going to use it because it's going to, this is the director's cuts because for a lot of these i don't think that you really notice that much you know if anything some of them feel a little shorter like you know spielberg is is gone in i think made close encounters a little bit shorter uh in places blade runner is a very good example of a movie where the version that was in the theater and the version that ridley scott his his sort of final cut is, is pretty significantly different tonally,

but is not actually that significantly different in terms of runtime. You know what I mean? Like the, the absence of the voiceover makes a huge difference when you're watching Blade Runner. Although I'm curious how many people have seen only the final cut version of Blade Runner. You know what I mean?

Like watching the final cut version of Blade Runner, it's what I mean? Like watching the final cut version of Blade Runner, it's nice to not have the voiceover, but I don't know how much Blade Runner sometimes makes sense if you don't have the voiceover. Let's hold off on that because I think we'll talk about Blade Runner a little bit more in the future.

But it's a good question. I think understanding the difference requires a level of obsession that might even elude people like me and you, which is part of the reason why I wanted to have this conversation. Um, you mentioned Zack Snyder. Yeah,

I did. I think Zack Snyder falls into the third category, which is the justice seekers is the greatest filmmaker of all time. Right. Um, what, what'd you say? Release it.

He's the Snyder cut. They are releasing the Snyder cut and, and, and fans of Zack Snyder and ostensibly fans of his version of the justice league, which we have not seen, um, want justice. They want justice for the version of the movie that they believe should exist. Um, there is a version of this that I think is slightly less, I don't know, toxic or controversial in Superman 2.

Superman 2 famously filmed concurrently with the original Superman movie. This is the Richard Donner movie and was functionally taken away from the director, Richard Donner, and Richard Lester,

the famed director of Beatles films and one of the great English directors, took over. He was acting as kind of like a consultant slash producer and was friendlier with the studio. And he made a version of Superman 2 that is a bit goofier and even more kind of like slapsticky,

I would say, than the original Superman movie. And about 20 years ago, Richard Donner was finally granted the opportunity to recut the version of the film that he wanted to make which includes reinserting marlon brando into the film as cal l's father and brando was cut out because he was having a war with the studio and removing some of the conversations between cal l and his mother and you know donner got to have his final say i guess on this film And that was perceived as justice. It's weird how much that controversy foretold, I think, a lot of the weird conversations that we have about superhero movies in 2021, where we think that there has to be a definitive version of a kind of film as opposed to seeing things in the multiverse.

Have you looked at the Richard Donner cut of Superman 2 recently? kind of film as opposed to seeing things in the multiverse um i don't have you have you ever looked at the the richard donner cut of superman yeah i haven't i haven't done so in a long time but it's it's a it's certainly a different movie um it's it's a lot less slapstick a lot less and with comic book movies you know the lines are really fine between that kind of almost uh self-consciously like we're it's pretend it's it's it's supposed to be fantastical versus like no this is actually a lens through which to look at really human experiences you know it reminded me a bit of the um the rogue cut do you remember the rogue cut yeah yeah yeah which was like an entirely different version of the film that featured a storyline with Rogue, because Rogue is barely in Days of Future Past.

I still can't explain the Rogue plotline of that movie. No, me neither. I also can't explain how they screwed up Days of Future Past. Truly one of the best comic book storylines of all time, and an utterly mediocre movie. Deeply disappointing. The Justice Seekers thing is like, this is the hashtag era. This is sort of the idea that fans can will the version of the movie that they want into existence. And I think the first time we

really saw this was a little bit of around Last Jedi, where I felt like people kind of were like, you ruined it and now I want JJ to fix it somehow. And in some ways, the final film in the sequels was sort of a corrective for Last Jedi. And this idea that there is like a base that you have to appeal to and that if you don't, they can kind of just demand a better version of something that exists. Yeah. That's a very odd tick of the internet that has come along in the last 10 years and probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

And we're about three months out now from the Zack Snyder discourse starting once more which I you know I look forward to you joining us on the show to talk about Justice League which I know you should start getting into like really random cuts you know what I mean like I'm trying to think of like release the Clive Owen cut of the informer you know like yeah well that does feel like a movie that is missing 40 minutes of clive owens character so i would watch it i would definitely watch it um another kind of cutter i think the app the apostate is a really important version of this and i can only think of one example but it's an important example this is george lucas turning on his own religion and revising and adding digital creatures, characters, fixes to Star Wars in 1997.

Let's just talk about the 1997 re-release of the Star Wars movies. Okay. This was a pretty big deal. I was 15 years old. This was an opportunity for me to see Star Wars movies in theaters. Let me tell you, it was phenomenal. I was just so excited. I grew up being obsessed with Star Wars from the age of three to today and the

chance to see them in that re-release was a huge deal now i don't think i had a total understanding at the time of what it was that lucas did to sort of quote unquote improve those movies among them adding new creatures using digital animation technology to you know show the worlds in the way that he wanted to show them goosing the sound with like new thx you know technology or whatever yeah i believe also grito shooting first uh was was amended there speaking of hashtag cuts yeah the grito cut as i recall and um it was very exciting but it was probably my first taste of rejection by a fan base you know that felt like and and this was early days of the internet and it was early days of fan culture and the way that we understand

it now did you did you excitedly go see the star wars yeah and then i immediately went to ain't it cool news message boards to complain or to write your 10 000 words to my 10 000000 word Greedo defense. Uh, I remember going to these movies and, um, um, I remember I, my dad took me to like an 8 30 AM screening of it and I fell asleep. You know, I think I had like, it was almost like a sugar high where you kind of built up all this anticipation to see it. And then I realized I had seen these movies 300 times and I was like, Oh yeah. Like I just saw a new hope like six months ago. I don't know if this really matters that much. Would you, were you reading movie magazines at the time? Did you believe? I think I was reading premiere and movie line and stuff like that.

Did you believe Lucas's American cinematographer? I was reading in 1997. Oh sure. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Me as well. I was contributing at that point too, to the magazine. Did you believe his line about essentially this being the vision that he always wanted to put on screen or did you think this is a cynical cash grab um with lucas it's kind of hard because he's at once the most cynical cash grabber but also like did could he even i mean how does a guy even have more money than that so he's so po-faced too you know like you never feel like he's being i actually think he sincerely is like i i'd like to tinker a little

bit more and show more of like the senate you know more more of the like the galactic senate yeah we need the senate cut i think of phantom menace too that's something i've been thinking about just more of the inner workings of the chamber so it's a great one of your favorites this is not really an official version of director's cuts, but it is becoming increasingly common, and I think one of our heroes, Steven Soderbergh, is

foremost in this category, which is like the unofficials. Yeah. So, Soderbergh notoriously recuts people's films all the time. Shout out to his scene read and watched list came out today. This is, we're talking on Tuesday. Have you had a chance to look at it?

I have. Yeah. Just always just feel really bad about myself. Because even when like, I'm like, oh, I can keep up with him in certain departments. It's like, he still read 50 books and watched Chinatown three times in a week just to like chill out. You know, let me pick a random day here from his list just to identify the greatness of

Steven Soderbergh, April 6th, the bitter tears of Petra von Kant. Yep. Fassbender. Peter Greenaway is the draftsman's contract. And then below, below deck sailing yacht.

Yeah. What is Jules Asner doing? Like, do you think that she's ever like, do you want to come have like a glass of wine with me? Like, are you busy? No, they're watching it together. You think Jules Asner watch,

I think, you think Jules Asner is like, get that greenway on the screen right now. It's time. Yeah, they're like, they're like Marvin Schwarz and Mary Alice Schwarz in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. They sit down in their screening room for the nice cognac. She loves a Western and then she leaves.

She goes to bed and he watches The 14 Fists of McCluskey. I bet they have a beautiful relationship. I'm sure they do. Soderbergh, in addition to watching everything in the known universe, also sometimes edits everything in the known universe. Yeah, he does his own cuts. And the one, you pointed this out to me years ago when we were working together at Grantland, the black and white cut of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It's a silent cut with the social network score over it. And I think, I don't know what the exact quote is, but I think Soderbergh considers Raiders to be cinematically like a perfect movie. If you want to learn how to make movies, you should just watch it. And if you watch it without dialogue, you can still understand everything about the movie.

He's done this over and over again, though. He cut Heaven's Gate in half. He did like a 90-minute cut. That's not available anymore. Oh, you weren't looking for it? I did, yeah. I mean, I'm sure it's somewhere, but it wasn't on his site, which I think Raiders still is. I mean, he's rec available anymore. Oh, you went looking for it? I did, yeah. I mean, I'm sure it's somewhere, but it wasn't on his site,

which I think Raiders still is. I mean, he's recut 2001. Like, he is unsparing, too. Like, Raiders in 2001, two of the most acclaimed films of all time. And I think just the idea of experimenting with what a movie could be by redefining it is sometimes better in the hands of someone

who didn't make it. And I like that idea. I like the idea of someone re didn't make it and i like that idea i like the idea um of someone reimagining someone else's creativity uh but you you've cited an example here on our outline of someone who did that that i've not had a chance to see uh what did you write down topher grace re-edited the star wars prequels i think into one movie if i if i remember correctly this is i this is a product of a better, cooler part of the internet.

Of when I think there was a little less copyright oversight and people could do weird shit like this and upload it. And you'd kind of be like, oh, wow, look at that. And the idea of Topher Grace just sitting up in the Hollywood Hills

on a throne made of that 70s show money and re-editing the prequels is really entertaining to me. But yeah, these kinds of gambits I think are going to get increasingly hard as streaming libraries become more and more like these walled off. This is our intellectual property.

We don't want this existing on YouTube. We don't want this existing on Vimeo. We don't want Topher Grace doing a non-Disney Plus cut of movies where, you know, when people could be paying $9.99 a month to be watching them.

If you could recut any movie, Chris, the CR cut, what would it be? This is a fucking awesome question. Den of Thieves, probably. What?

It's already perfect. What are you talking about? I'd add. I'd add on. I want the Benihana scene to be 40 minutes longer. I want the benihana scene to be 40 minutes longer you know i want the benihana scene to be in real time i don't want to i don't want to derail us in this conversation because we have such strong momentum and i don't want to have to recut anything that we've done here but garbage crime is growing chris i know the cult is growing more and more people

are saying that garbage are you gonna let me come on for talk about little things? Yeah, of course. I want to do a four hour episode about the little things. The little things is, is the forthcoming Denzel Washington movie. What's carry? What's Leto's character's name?

Isn't it Albert Sparma? That certainly sounds like the name of a character that he would play. It is Albert Sparma. Incredible. I already know the name of the serial killer in the denzel washington movie that isn't out yet is he the serial killer i don't know question i don't know it seems he is under suspicion we'll have to watch but as i say garbage crime is growing because um the people know have you been following the netflix top 10 over the holidays yeah every time it's just like triple nine gets like it goes like if any garbage crime

hits netflix it just automatically goes into the top 10 yes ava unknown the liam neeson film they've all this ryan philippe movie that bill is very excited about called the second it's all it's all happening i don't know why it's happening except for the fact that you and i made a podcast that's the only reason i can think of as to why this is happening but i think we freed people up to feel comfortable with themselves. Oh. We taught people that it was okay to be weird. Speaking of weird, there's something new happening with director's cuts.

There's a new strand, a new strain, hopefully a safe strain. And I'm calling these strains the futurists. I don't know if that's going to feel like the right delineation. It might be more like the streamerists because it feels more common on these streaming services. But I've noticed a couple of examples. The first one that I saw was the Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino's 2015 Agatha Christie-esque Western. And it hit Netflix, I want to say three, four years ago.

And the version of it that hit was chapterized and extended. And it was a longer movie, but it was organized on Netflix's streaming service like a miniseries. And that movie now, if you watch it, feels a lot more like all of the stuff that we saw in 2020, all of these miniseries, these Queen's Gambit style miniseries, than it did like the movie that I believe you and I saw together. You and I went and saw the roadshow together. Yes. The overture and the intermission and everything.

Truly great screening of that film before it came out in 15. And the version that you can see now on Netflix is longer and you know, whether it's better or worse, I think it's kind of immaterial. It's cool to see some added stuff with a Tarantino movie.

It's not hard to see what's new because the dialogue is so specific. But it certainly struck me as an innovation around the way that people are served movies and we saw another version of this recently um i don't think you got the chance to see dr sleep in i actually just watched it over the break but okay yeah i just watched it over at christmas yeah so the version that you saw i presume was on hbo max and was the director's cut it was yeah um what what'd you think i well i haven't seen the original so i i think i texted you once and i was like should i bother with dr sleep and i was like i saw that this there's a director's cut that's like three plus hours long and you i think you said the director's cut was much better i thought it was quite good i thought the and by all accounts the

rebecca ferguson character makes a shit ton more sense in the director's cut than in the original version but yeah fascinating aspect of this is like usually there's like an anniversary or there's a storied this movie was taken away from mike flanagan and now 10 years later he gets to right the wrongs this is the version that they put out on video essentially and and concurrent with whatever other theatrical version came out, they immediately were like, Mike Flanagan's director's cut,

as if it was always the plan. Yes. I haven't heard anyone, including Flanagan, specifically explain why that rolled out the way that it did. I've talked about this a little bit.

We had Gilbert Cruz on the show when the movie came out originally. Gilbert is a huge Stephen King fan and a scholar, really, in covering king's work and we both i think were pretty medium on the movie i think there were things that we liked you know you and i obviously really like mike flanagan's movies and and his tv series but something felt not quite right about the movie sort of unfinished really and getting a chance to see the new version kind of revealed to me what it felt like the movie should have been and i thought it worked a lot better as well and the idea of just putting out the version that the filmmaker wanted to put

out on a streaming service and then most people seeing the movie that way and then the theatrical cut being the thing that is lost to time instantaneously is an amazing inversion i love that idea of like the version that i saw in theaters and recorded a podcast about for posterity now doesn't make sense no one's watching that version yeah so flanagan is an interesting case where he's probably at this point best known for his netflix horror series and for uh the basically the the haunting of hill house and the sequel that was The Turning of the Screw. I can't remember the Haunting of Bly Manor. The Haunting of Bly Manor, yeah.

Both of which I would say are an episode or two too long. You know, that they, he has obviously settled into this, I can kind of push things and explore mood for eight to 10 hours when maybe it could be six to seven hours. And so it doesn't, it's not surprising that Dr. Sleep, he would almost obviously would have rather have made a four or five episode Dr. Sleep

than a three hour movie. This kind of brings up an interesting conversation though I wanted to have with you about to the extent to which our viewing habits, you and me, Amanda, often talk about like, and the great thing about it is it's only an hour and 45 minutes. That'll often be a selling point for a movie is its brevity. But how much of that do you think has just been drilled into us? Because for most of our lives, we know that you go to a movie theater and the movie theater would like you to be out in about two hours. And it's only if the movie is somehow special that it would last that much longer than that. And that even when those movies are longer, like when you do have a Dark Knight Rises or,

you know, even, I mean, Tenet's quite long. If you do have one of these movies that is two and a half, two hours and 45 minutes, that that is actually working against the film. That going into the movie, you're like, I can't believe this movie is this fucking long. Those habits and those behaviors are essentially like commercial realities. They're not necessarily for the best of the art that we're seeing. And I'm curious to see whether or not as we go forward of streaming and there's less of a concern. In fact, for streamers, I'm sure to see whether or not as we go forward with streaming and there's less of a concern. In fact, for streamers, I'm sure they're like, look, if they want to hang out for three and a half hours, that's just time spent for us. I wonder whether or not we'll start to see more movies that feel less constrained by theatrical kind of restrictions.

I don't know. It's a good question. I've been thinking about this. One of the most famous director's cuts of which there are many iterations is dust boat the wolfgang peterson you uh you boat film and there are a number of different versions of it i think the director's cut version is about three and a half hours but there is a version that aired on television i think in in europe that is about 400 minutes and it's longer and peterson does not stand by that version. But that version came into existence because it made more sense for television to be rolled out over a number of weeks. And it feels like that 400-minute version actually could become more common, where the extended version no longer signifies the director's vision. It signifies the thing that you need to maximize your streaming hours the chernobyl cut yeah yeah yeah i mean we talked about that when chernobyl came out the idea that that would have been a two and a half

three hour epic film in 1989 but instead the version that we got was this six hour i thought quite good mini series from craig mazen but i don. I mean, is there a biological imperative to only want to be sitting in a seat for anywhere from 100 to 140 minutes and make that a meaningful film experience? And then anything beyond that feels stretched? It depends. I mean, it really depends on the kind of film that you're talking about. First time I started thinking about that was Irishman because people anecdotally were watching Irishman in sections. You know, I don't want to say what film it is, but I saw a film that is coming out later this year recently, and it's a film based on a book.

And the film is literally structured like the book, where every time we go to a new chapter, it reflects the chapter of the book. And the title of the chapter is like on screen. It's like chapter one prologue. And it did strike me that you could kind of like organize this movie,

which I think was about maybe a two hour and 20 minute movie. You could organize it the same way you did The Hateful Eight, where you just clicked on the 25 minute intervals

and you watched them through. And you know, you and I have been talking about this ad nauseum for the last 12 months, just that the... The collapsing line. Yeah.

It's all just content for literally lack of a better word. We got to get a better word. I got to get them content. What's the word we hit? We, what me and you can come up with something that isn't content. If we do, we should give it away for free on this podcast. What should we do with it? Copyright it. Be like Gary Vee, go out and just flip it, sell it. You know what I mean? Make our dreams come true with it. Was that an attempt to like Gary Vee. Go out and just flip it. Sell it. You know what I mean? Make our dreams come true with it. Was that an attempt to get Gary Vee to notice you? You want Gary Vee to invest in Chris Ryan Industries? I think that's what that was. So the futurists, I think that they're really the way forward for a lot of this stuff. I think

you're right that you're going to see more stuff that is stretched, that is longer, that is chapterized. And maybe there is just learned behavior that is going to be broken by future generations. I can't remember what it was last year, two years ago, but the Dark Tower debacle and the idea that there was going to be a movie, a TV series that led to a sequel that concluded the story. I mean, they've been talking about trying to execute stories this way for a long time. I mean, in some ways, Breaking Bad kind of did that with El Camino. But this idea that you could flit between the small screen and the big screen to tell the story that you want to tell and that you could create this. And I think that they will do that to some extent with the Marvel and Star Wars Disney Plus stuff and that there will be on onscreen executions.

I'm certain for some reason, but like, I feel pretty certain that there will be a, the Mandalorian will conclude on a big screen, that there will be like a final Mandalorian movie to wrap up the series. You know, that, that just seems inevitable to me.

Um, but you know, the thing that's so exciting and also probably is going to change the way we relate to these movies and whether or not we feel like this person economically and efficiently made their movie is the streamers. Because it's just like Underground Railroad is going to come out and we're going to be like, what is this? You know what I mean? The same way that people were having a debate about small acts. Underground Railroad is a cinematic statement by a singular director, one of our greatest directors. Are we going to call that a miniseries? Are we going to call it a TV series? Or is it just a thing? Yeah, I heard you and Andy talking

about this on The Watch this week, and I had the same thought. I feel like it's an even more discreet example of what is this because Barry Jenkins is so clearly associated with cinema. That is, he has gone to great lengths to make his work defined as such and so the way you get it i don't know if it defines it we'll have to see i think that a much more crude example of this that actually feels meaningful to me is um you know there's a godzilla versus king kong movie coming out in a few months adam wingard made a movie and it exists ostensibly in the same universe of Godzilla and King Kong movies we've been seeing over the last 10 years.

You know, was it Gareth Edwards made a Godzilla movie? Michael Dougherty, yeah. Yeah, Michael Dougherty made a Godzilla movie. And then the Kong Skull Island movie is also, you know, part of all of this but i i don't think people know that and i don't think that anyone understands that they are like trying to relaunch a universe that is like the mcu or fast and the furious like they're just and godzilla movies are not really like they're kind of ahistorical in many ways sure but and not chronological necessarily but it's confusing like it's it's confusing how

to know like do do i need to know do you did you get a chance to see king of the monsters or whatever the hell the last godzilla movie was i didn't see it no i'd been pretty hyped to see it but i did not actually wind up seeing it so i asked you that because i had a feeling that you didn't see it so will you watch godzilla versus king kong yeah well i'm a big adam wingard fan but i know i know that about you i mean i don't I yeah sure I I thought what if you miss all of the detail from King of the Monsters I don't know that's the joke I'm trying to make find like a girlfriend in one of these movies who cares uh remember remember when the let them fight meme was happening that was amazing that was one of the best memes. That seems like a

reasonable place to pivot to the best versions of director's cuts. These are you and I have have halfheartedly collaborated on a top five here because it's hard to know what to

invest your time in and why. And most of these that we're going to talk about are quite long. This was a much more arduous or at least much more significant time

commitment than research for other episodes of this show because the existing versions are very long. Yeah. And in some cases manifold, for example, the first in our top five, which is Apocalypse Now. Yeah. There are a bunch of different versions of this. I will say it's never the wrong time to watch Apocalypse Now, and I'm never mad at watching all of Apocalypse Now. But so good segue there. Which version?

Because in 2001, much like George Lucas reissuing the Star Wars films, Francis Ford Coppola reissued Apocalypse Now as Apocalypse Now Redux. Yes. You could go see this film. And in many ways, this to me is the signature director's cut because it is a much different film than the original film it features an entire plot line that was not in the original the original was already understood while it was a tumultuous and difficult production and almost you know filled his career it's also one of the greatest movies ever made and yet he still felt compelled to go back and insert this storyline about this French family, these colonizers who have been living in Vietnam for many years.

And they represent essentially… They kind of don't know the war that they've lost. Yeah, they're trapped in this amber of time. And they also represent sort of the reason why the war is ongoing because they have planted their flag in this foreign country and attempted to to own it to take it over and it's a very slow i don't i guess about 20 to 35 minutes um right in the middle of the movie and it kind of stops the movie dead in its tracks but intellectually conceptually it does help the movie make its point do you like redux do you like where the movie is now which is apocalypse now final cut which came out in 2019 like what what is the version that you like? So what did Final Cut add on?

I think Redux is, this is a really good example. Redux is beautiful. And I personally love the French colony because I think it hammers home, as Coppola says in Hearts of Darkness, which is Eleanor Coppola's movie about the making of Apocalypse Now,

her documentary. He's like, I wanted it to feel like these guys were going back in time. So they start there. They've got the kind of Apocalypse Now, her documentary, he's like, I wanted it to feel like these guys were going back in time. So they start, they've got the kind of contemporary, the Playboy bunnies and everything happening. And then as they go down the river, they're going back in time, they're going back in time

so that they go to the colonial era and then they go almost to this primitive era once they get to Kurtz's compound. So I thought it hammered home that feeling. And I think when you have a movie that looks as good as Apocalypse Now and sounds as good as Apocalypse Now and has the performers in it, I would actually just watch that movie for as long as he wanted to have it go. There's no limit to Apocalypse Now in my mind, but I don't think he doesn't significantly change.

And the only thing that I think really I want more of that there isn't of is Scott Glenn is the the guy who goes before Willard and uh I just wish there was an entire movie about him did you check out Scott Glenn on WTF recently no is he good it's incredible highly recommend um yeah so as far as what is in the final cut it basically it cuts out the playmates sequence the second one yes yeah the sort of the sex with the playmates the stuff that's happening i think in a van um but it keeps colonel kilgore's surfboard and it keeps the french plantation um so it's kind of a fusion of redux and the original cut of the film and it's i think it's three hours on the nose and i i remember it being good i watched it when it came out and bought the blu-ray like a chump

um and that's as you pointed out like this i probably own four different dvd or blu-ray copies of apocalypse now yeah and some of this is a financial gambit but some of it just seems like coppola is obsessed nevertheless it's the kind of thing that i think it is a rare case where thinking about understanding and watching all of the different iterations of the movie and the ancillary content surrounding the movie helps you enjoy it more helps you feel differently about it and understand what the filmmaker was going for so that's apocalypse now speaking of many cuts as you pointed out there are many cuts of blade runner yeah the final cut is the one that is probably most popular as you said the one that most people have seen and i think is the best one this is also a movie that

it seems like people disagreed about behind the scenes about what it should do and how it should be released the original version has a happy ending The final cut does not have a happy ending. The final cut insinuates that the Harrison Ford character, that Decker is a replicant pretty clearly, whereas the original version

does not indicate that. There was no voiceover in the final cut. There are like significant changes that change the movie. And for whatever reason, it took Ridley Scott

a long time to get the opportunity to make the version he wanted to make. You're a big Blade Runner, Allegiant. Which do you prefer? What story do you like? I definitely prefer the final cut. I don't need the unicorn sequence, personally. I think it's a little bit...

It takes you out of the movie a little bit and I liked not knowing whether Deckard was a replicant or not. Obviously 2049 addresses that a little bit more explicitly. I think the huge, huge thing is the voiceover. It was obviously inserted by people who felt like the movie

wasn't clear enough at the studio. Harrison Ford does the voiceover the way I do some ad reads on podcasts. He's like, I was a killer. It was a good job, but you know, whatever, Los Angeles and it's 2021. You know, like it was definitely like, it sounded like he had a gun to his head

when he was making it. And the last, the very last scene in the theatrical cut is nonsense. And it's great to have them just going out the door and closing. I mean, it's like Casablanca. Yeah, it's not a sad ending. It's just ambiguous, which is, that's part of what makes it great.

I agree. I definitely think the final cut is worth watching. If you're going to watch just one Blade Runner cut. Heaven's Gate, I mentioned. I think it's probably the most significant, not just because of what it meant to the studio, but because there's some amazing filmmaking in it. And it's a unique version, I think there's some amazing filmmaking in it. Unbelievable.

It's a unique version, I think, of something that tends to happen in Hollywood. And that, frankly, jerks like me are guilty of, which is talking about the production of the movie as opposed to talking about the movie. I don't care. When you want to tell me about Michael Cimino walking on set one day and being like, I need the two sides of the street to be six feet farther apart. And the, and he's like, so just tear the town down and rebuild it. I actually think that's great. I love it.

Michael Chimino waiting all day. Cause there's a cloud he likes and he wants to see if it will roll closer to his camera. Absolutely. All year. I'm here for it. Do you think that a movie like this, if it rolled out and,

and Chimino, I think his first cut was like five hours and the version that you can watch now from criterion is three and a half hours if it had been rolled out say the way that hateful eight was rolled out on a streaming service over four episodes because the film is very episodic you know it's not a clear through line narratively it bounces from you know this incredible opening sequence set at harvard and then it moves to wyoming and then it you know this incredible opening sequence set at harvard and then it moves to wyoming and then it you know there's battle sequences and then there's these sort of more these elegant dance sequences in the roller skating sequence um it does feel like a series of impressionistic pieces capturing

a period in time and disagreements and the natural kind of battle lines that are drawn it's a class war too yeah totally um if it had been rolled out in sections do you think something like this could be successful or popular because it is one of the most notorious bombs in the history of hollywood yeah i think that it's unfairly maligned like like a lot of stuff from the 70s and early 80s like i i just think think that even bad movies from that period are pretty interesting. But I think that ultimately, this was a guy who viewed himself as at the top of a kind of pyramid. And that included the audience. The audience were beneath him. And it was in his opinion that the audience, if they sat through Deer Hunter, they're going to sit through Heaven's Gate and they should come and experience his vision of the American West in

the 19th century. And could Criterion Channel start experimenting with putting these films up in sections? I suppose so. I mean, you can watch Berlin Alexanderplatz in that way. It's not like there aren't great works by filmmakers that were originally ideated for television or miniseries for me. Ingmar Bergman did that too. A Fanny versus a Fanny and Alexander, I think is like one of the most significant versions of this where there's a TV version and then there's the cinema cut and they're both interesting and they're both useful. But to me, Heaven's Gate is death by cinema. To me, Heaven's Gate is this guy's career ended over this. You should watch it the way he intended you to see it yeah i i it's true um i think it's a pretty good movie i i don't i wouldn't watch it more than every once every like seven or eight years like

it's not like i can i don't watch this like the way i would watch like heat but uh it's pretty gorgeous and the performances are pretty amazing. It is. There are certain things about it that don't work. I think there's some misbegotten Isabelle Huppert positioning in the movie in general, but I think she is good in the film. Chris Christopherson is good in the film.

Christopher Walken is great in the movie. Sam Waterston is great in the movie. John Hurt. It's a really great cast at a perfect time there are a couple of battle set pieces at the end of the film that are great I think the movie is kind of best through its first two hours and I think that's one of the reasons why it was maligned somewhat is that critics got to hour three and they were just like Jesus Christ but it's then you overlook the majesty like the incredible work that he does in that extravagant dance sequence

at harvard at the beginning of the movie or in the roller skating sequence which is just breathtaking um so you know it's definitely a movie that is worth watching it's also came out at an era which is probably a whole other conversation where american film critics were more openly adversarial about the things that they were seeing and regularly panned quite good movies because they didn't feel that they lived up to their bar that they had set for art. And now I think we have a much more encouraging, shall I say, critical voice in the American arts. It's much more like, they did it with Wonder Woman, another rollicking great time. And it wasn't that extraordinary

to see Paul and Kale come out and see a very, very, very good movie and be like, this was shit. And so I think a movie like Heaven's Gate, if it came out today in the format that you're talking about or in any other format, would probably have more supporters

than it did back when it was released. And that's a, that's the thing that surrounds a lot of these films from the seventies and eighties, where they had just a lot more going against them in a lot of ways, despite the fact that I think viewers, audiences were a little bit more adventurous. Do you know what your dad thought of Heaven's Gate? I don't, I think he would probably knowing, knowing him would have been like, this movie is too long. He was a very big, I mean, for as much as he, you know, I remember my first long movie experience was him taking me to the re-release of Lawrence of Arabia and me asking to leave because there was too much writing. I was like, these guys

just are writing across the desert. And I think my dad almost wanted to disown me at that point. Obviously, Lawrence of Arabia is one of the greatest movies ever made but as a 11 year old i think i was just like this sucks you know but yeah i don't he was not a huge uh i want to be in a movie he was seeing five movies a week four movies a week i don't think he was like i really want to be in this theater for three and a half hours right that makes sense my dad was a big like leave before the end credits started he would be like i got it and then walk out he would have a really hard time with the mcu then you know missing no stingers for him uh so you wanted to talk about the abyss yeah i think that this is um it probably goes well with blade runner in that uh the cuts that were made to it so So there are two big Cameron directors cuts I think worth mentioning. One is Aliens

that adds an entire sequence with Newt's family and LV-426 or 246. I don't know if I've ever seen that. Oh, it's pretty cool. It's on HBO Max. So for people who want to check it out. And the director's cut

is on HBO Max. And it basically is the movie except it has a 15-minute sequence of the colonists that they go eventually find destroyed by the aliens. And it shows New it doesn't suck like it's an incredibly well-made sequence but the fact that you meet this kid who has been living like a feral existence when ripley gets to the planet right better introduction yeah yeah so there's that and then abyss um the abyss it spends a lot more time with mary elizabeth master antonio and ed harris's relationship so i think you're a lot more invested in the characters of those two people. And it also has a pretty significantly different ending, which I don't want to spoil

for people. But The Abyss is one where, again, Cameron, one of the most successful filmmakers of all time, has a version of... I guess Abyss is probably one of his less successful movies, if I think it's probably one of his better regarded films but has a much different version of it in existence i re-watched the abyss recently on hbo max so i assume is the version that's there let me see the longer version that's the other thing that's confusing about this is some of these things are are properly identified and right and some are it yeah it's so cool that all the camera stuff's on hbo max it's wild he is somebody though too who i don't think has necessarily been properly not supported by home video but there's not it's not clear necessarily what is what yeah in his

because with aliens for example i own a version of that from the box set the alien quadrilogy yeah for like true lies. You can't buy on Blu-ray. I think I'd still, I think it's still unavailable on Blu-ray, which I don't, I don't know what the reason for that is. Terminator two,

there have been a number, there is a director's cut of Terminator two, and there've been a number of different releases of that movie. And the original is a big remaster. Yes. Um, what about the, uh,

all of the films that inspired him after the abyss about him going underwater with Bill Paxton and looking at ghosts in the sea you watch those those directors cuts of those movies yeah maybe that's a separate pod for us James Cameron goes into

the water that's a pretty good be a good pod James Cameron invents his own fire retardant foam okay let's it's I'm gonna clear out now. Because it's your time to shine. The final director's cut in our top five is a film called Kingdom of Heaven. Ridley Scott.

Which is off-joked about between you and I and on this podcast at times. But I think is a bit of a curio to most people. What is Kingdom of Heaven? Why does it matter to you? And why is the director's cut important?

Kingdom of Heaven is a movie in 2005 that Ridley Scott released starring Orlando Bloom. That's about the crusades. It's about a guy, a bastard knight in France who hooks up with his, reunites with his father played by Liam Neeson and goes to Jerusalem and winds up fighting against both the Muslims who were there and also some of the Templar knights who are essentially like fanatical Christians who are trying to start a war with the Muslims there. And in its original version,

I think it's like two hours, 20 minutes or something. And it was regarded as sub gladiator, sword and shield bullshit with a bad central performance from Orlando Bloom. And it kind of came and went. Not too long after that, a roadshow version of it, I think it debuted at the Lamley or something like out here. And it wound up becoming the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven. And it's about three and a half hours long, I believe. I think maybe a little longer.

And I honestly will say this, and everybody is going to piss on my grave for saying it. It's basically McCabe and Mrs. Miller meets Lawrence of Arabia. It is so fucking awesome. It's got this hour-long sequence in the beginning, basically, that explains who Orlando Bloom's character is and why he is running from France. And his brother is played by Michael Sheen, who's a priest. And there's this whole by Michael Sheen, who's like a priest. And there's this whole thing with his wife's suicide and she's going to go to hell. So he's got to go to Jerusalem

to get absolution for her and for him. And it sets up the relationship between Orlando Bloom and Liam Neeson's character much more clearly. And there's a lot more time spent with the characters. And essentially, once you settle into the rhythms of it, you get the magisterial, upper 99th percentile of filmmakers

when you get to Ridley Scott in terms of technical ability and proficiency. And then you get this lovely, beautiful, historical epic written by William Monaghan, much more time spent with Edward Norton's king, who Edward Norton is a uncredited performer in this movie where he plays a leper king who wears like a metal mask the entire time. I think it's honestly like one of like the hidden gems of the last, of the last, of this, of this past 20 years of movie making. I don't know how many people have

had a chance to see it, but I don't know many people who have seen the director's kind of kingdom of heaven who don't love it. If gladiator had never come out, if there was no such movie as gladiator, but there was a kingdom of heaven, would it have been properly recognized in its time? And was this like fatigue from a certain kind of movie from Scott? No, because I don't see the thing with gladiator is gladiator had catchphrases. Gladiator was a very easily understandable movie, a slave, like a general who became a slave, a slave who became a legend.

Like that was the arc of gladiator. And it was just like, you could explain that you can show it at staple center. Like kingdom of heaven is about like, you know, fate and destiny. And also about like religious, religious fundamentalism on both sides and how jerusalem

becomes this like chess piece between these two warring factions of of absolutists and how really what needs to conquer is humanism i mean that's not i don't i don't think it's as easily translatable where is kingdom of heaven for you in the we haven't we've not done the ridley scott power rankings pretty high up there. I mean, I think Alien and Blade Runner are kind of like in a category of their own. And I think that there are some movies that he's made that I think are technically just mind-blowing. Like Black Hawk Down is still like...

I think you watch that movie and you're just like, there's only like one or two people who could ever made a movie like this. I just don't know whether or not people are even like watching Black Hawk Down anymore for social and political reasons. And maybe that's a good thing. But yeah, Kingdom of Heaven's probably top five or six for me.

I have had more thrilling and disappointing experiences at Ridley Scott movies, I think, than any movie ever, like any filmmaker ever. The first time I sat down and we watched Robinhood together, I was like, how can this have happened? How could you have hurt me in this way? Same thing with Exodus, Gods and Kings. I'm like,

how could you have hurt me this deeply? Conversely, movies that I don't think I'm going to like, like G.I. Jane or Matchstick Men, I thought were great.

And he's so unpredictable. We have two, two Ridley Scott movies coming out in 2021. Are you aware of this? Yes, I am. The Last Duel andci right yes there's a there's a gucci film coming from ridley scott which of the also ridley scott is like 100 years old right uh i don't think that's a the exact age he is i think he's 83 yes um that's protect Scott. He's making two movies a year at 83.

What are we doing? How many pods have you made today, Chris? That's true. This is true. You are the Ridley Scott of podcasting, I must say. Anything else you want to say about director's cuts? I feel like we've given people a good starting off point if you want to start getting into this world of intense movie fandom.

Yeah. I was going to ask you, this is sort of on the spot. Is there a director's cut that you would like to see? Is there a movie out there where you're like, I heard this got taken away from this person or that they had to recut this. And I wonder what the actual version of it is and all that. Like, is there a version, is there a movie out there that you would love to see a director's cut of? Well, the most famous version of that is The Magnificent Ambersons, right? That's the Orson Welles follow-up to Citizen Kane that very few people have seen and that is no longer in existence.

The negative is gone and there's no way to see it. There is a version that is significantly shortened and the tone is quite different. That would be one. And for a long time, it was Touch of Evil before Walter Murch, who you mentioned earlier, returned to the negative

of Touch of Evil and cleaned that up and restored that film and got out the version that Wells wanted out in the world. I'm trying to think of something a little bit more recent. I'm going to go with

minus Rogue One. Oh. Which is quite, I think, is only growing in our estimation as the years go by and we see other Star Wars stuff. We're like, actually, Rogue One was about as good as it gets. But isn't that kind of an inversion? Don't people seem to think that Tony Gilroy came in and saved that movie from what it was going to be?

I do think that that's true, but I think that there is a version of Rogue One that has a lot less, like we have to run to this planet to find out a useless piece of information. And I wonder whether or not there's stuff on the cutting room floor. And I also wonder what I would love to see, like what's Gareth Edwards's assembly of that movie. Like at what point did he get removed? What scenes did Tony, like I would,

I think it would be really cool if down the line you could see the Gareth Edwards cut and the Tony Gilroy cut of that movie. Yeah, that would be interesting. I mean, that is, there are some, there are some movie experiences that are, that, that replicate that, you know, alien three, of course the Fincher movie, there's an assembly cut of that movie available that somewhat approximates what Fincher was going for, though does not completely show his vision of the movie. movie um there's a really good i'm trying to think of just other director's cuts i love in lieu of something that i've always wanted to see i mean amadeus has a great director's cut that has like an additional 30 minutes of the

movie and that's an extremely long film that is quite good hmm trying to think of stuff that's recent i mean like the stuff that recently you would think like needs a director's cut is more stuff that was a disaster, you know, like. Detective Pikachu? Well, or like the Dark Phoenix, you know. You just blanked me on my Pikachu jokes. Dark Phoenix. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I mean, is there even a version of that movie that could be good? I doubt it. You know, I don't even know if they have the footage. That's the thing. There's a fine line between, you know what, we just screwed up this movie and we didn't put the movie on screen that we had in the can. And there's something tricky there. But I think that we're going to see a lot more versions of director's cuts. We might just not be calling them director's cuts. We'll be calling them something different in the future.

CR, thanks for doing this, man. It's always good to chat with you about movies. My pleasure. Please stay tuned to The Big Picture in the future. Amanda will be back later this week, and we will be talking about the most anticipated movies of 2021. We'll definitely hear some Ridley Scott. There'll be a whole lot more. See you then. Thank you.