Editors: Our Best Friends

I love editors. I say this as someone who doesn’t have the greatest confidence in his own writing. I don’t always agree with their ideas, but I usually do.

I am reminded of how much I love editors when I see the Director’s Cut of most any film. Gerardo Valero has an excellent piece on the disaster known as the “restored” version of Cinema Paradiso. This is the only version of the film I’ve seen and I don’t think I could go back and watch the original. Tornatore may have wanted all that footage in the original, but someone knew better. All the modern stuff tacked on to the end is completely unwatchable. I absolutely cannot understand what people saw in the original other than nostalgia, but that’s probably because I was subjected to Tornatore’s vision rather than the work of many collaborators, including editors and studio executives who realized a bunch of this sucked.

And then of course you have Apocalypse Now Redux. There wasn’t a single second added to the original that was worth a damn. The scene with the Playboy Bunnies in the original is bad enough, but then their copter goes down and Martin Sheen has sex with them? Really? The added scenes with Robert Duvall searching for his surfboard destroys the power of his character built up in the previous scenes. And then the whole French plantation scene, well, the less said about that the better.

The Director’s Cut phenomenon comes straight out of the auteur myth around directors. But any film is a collaboration among many artists with many different vision. The director may be the most important single individual, but cannot make a film by him/herself. When they are given full artistic control, disaster can often result, which we can see so many examples ranging from Coppola after Apocalypse Now to Kevin Costner’s dross.