Understanding the history of director’s cuts through 9 great examples
polygon.comThe director’s cut is one of the stranger and more complicated divots in the landscape of film. As anyone in Hollywood will tell you, getting to direct your own movie is already very nearly a miracle, but it’s even rarer that a director is granted final cut on the films they make. And in most of those cases, good or bad, whatever version of a movie the studio wants to release is the one that is cemented in history.
However, in a few very rare cases, a director gets the chance to return to one of their movies and alter it as they see fit, pushing aside studio notes and cutting together exactly the version they desire. This doesn’t always result in saving a masterpiece, or even improving a movie, but some lucky directors have taken the opportunity to save their own movie and reshape its cultural image.
While this may sound like a triumph of art over the cold arm of commerce, it’s important to remember that a director’s cut is, first and foremost, still a tool of marketing. In the best case scenarios, it’s a genuine improvement on a piece of art thanks to the vision of the director. But it can also be a substantially worse movie in some cases, or have barely any change at all. But no matter the result, a director’s cut is an attempt to get more people to watch a movie, even if it’s a good-faith attempt to realize the original director’s vision, whether in theaters or years later on home release.
Similarly, there’s a real difference between a director’s cut of a movie and an extended cut or unrated version. Plenty of R-rated comedies in the 2000s were given unrated DVD releases that weren’t necessarily more truthful realizations of the director’s vision, but rather just included a few more vulgar jokes that likely got cut for good reason. Even more importantly, examples like the extended versions of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies don’t fit the bill of “director’s cuts” because the definitive versions of those movies are the theatrical releases. The Extended
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