chrisandy007 wrote: ↑Sun Apr 16, 2023 10:38 am
FWIW pretty much everyone considers the BAM cut to be superior since it retains the film’s original structure. I wonder why he made the decision so last minute, someone said studio pressure but I have trouble believing that. I’m guessing even if they turned in the edit, it doesn’t mean he submitted it to the studio and he worked with a new editing team.
I don’t know if you saw this, but here’s an interview he gave right after the BAM cut was shown:
“I thought the film would benefit from having a tangible danger at the beginning,” Mann said. “Then I looked at the film a number of months ago and I thought, ‘No, it was better to have the soy hack in front.’ “
Mann has said similar things about other films over the years where he talks about re-editing them again and again long after they’ve been finished. The point is, he ALWAYS wants to recut his films. That’s why so many of them have multiple versions that have been screened or released.
Here’s Mann in another interview about why he keeps recutting The Last of the Mohicans among other films:
"There was a speech by Chingachgook at the end, I may have felt, 'I really have to make these themes land, so I’ll speechify them.' They don’t need to be speechified, it’s implicit, so I took that out. It was never in, it used to be out in the first theatrical version of the movie, it should’ve stayed out. That’s a film that’s a successful film and I like a lot, and I’ve changed it a number of times. I don’t think there’s many, maybe one or two things I’ve taken out
Collateral but that all worked. Losing the first scene in
Miami Vice in the theatrical version was a mistake…"
Then of course Ali:
"You get a good idea of how much the decade between 1964 to 1974 politicized the boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay in the 2001 biopic
Ali – but for the movie’s director Michael Mann, it still wasn’t good enough. So when he began prepping the movie for its Blu-ray release, the 73-year-old filmmaker decided he was going to change a few things. He’d
already revisited the material and recut the movie once, for a TV version that he’s cited in interviews as being superior in terms of narrative flow. Now, however, Mann wanted to bring more of the context that had shaped Ali into the center of the proverbial ring."
And I'm sure you can find something on the numerous changes made to
Manhunter or
Thief (which was even given a radically new look via the color timing). It never ends.
