Joe Wright Says Severely Edited ‘Woman In the Window’ Is “Watered Down” & “Not The Film That I Originally Made”

“The Woman in the Window” is just one in the long line of films to suffer from studio interference in the editing room. A situation where a director’s vision is superseded by studio interests, and the resulting film suffers because of it. And that situation is something filmmaker Joe Wright is openly ready to discuss, after “Woman in the Window” failed to dazzle during its Netflix release last year.

Speaking to Vulture, Joe Wright talked about the experience of trying to get his vision of “The Woman in the Window,” which stars Amy Adams in a “Rear Window”-esque thriller, in theaters years ago. And ultimately, he understands why he was defeated by studio interests. 

“Yeah, it was a long, protracted, frustrating experience,” Wright admitted. “The film that was finally released was not the film that I originally made. It was like, ‘Oh, fucking hell. You live and you learn.’ It got watered down. It got watered down a lot.”

READ MORE: ‘Woman In The Window’: Amy Adams Fails To Awaken This Sleepy, Predictable Mystery Thriller [Review]

He added, “It was a lot more brutal in my original conception. Both aesthetically, with really fucking hard cuts and really violent music — Trent Reznor did an incredible score for it that was abrasive and hard-core — and in its depiction of Anna, Amy Adams’s character, who was far messier and kind of despicable in a lot of ways. Unfortunately, audiences like women to be nice in their movies. They don’t want to see them get messy and ugly and dark and drunk and taking pills. It’s fine for men to be like that, but not for women. So the whole thing was watered down to be something that it wasn’t.”

Speaking further about the experience, Wright compared his intended tone and cinematic style of “The Woman in the Window” to something Gaspar Noe would have made. 

“The cuts were really hard. I always think about that Gaspar Noe film, ‘I Stand Alone,’ where there’s like a gunshot on every single cut, so you were dreading him cutting at all, and it left you a complete nervous wreck,” the filmmaker said. “There was something of that in ‘Woman in the Window’s’ cinematic style. It was brutal. It was brutalist. And would you believe it? They didn’t like it! [Laughs] I always think that people are going to get what I do and that of course it’s worth spending X amount of millions of dollars on a sort of formal experiment in fucking anxiety. And when people go, ‘Hmmm, that’s not really what we …,’ I get surprised. I think that sort of thing is fine if you’re working with a Gaspar Noe budget. If you’re working with a Hollywood budget, it’s probably not such a clever idea.”

READ MORE: The Playlist’s Guilty Pleasures Of 2021

Considering “The Woman in the Window” is definitely not a Marvel Studios film or a Zack Snyder production, it probably won’t have the fan fervor about a potential director’s cut. However, if the opportunity presented itself and Wright was able to take another crack at the edit, he would do it.

“​​I think it would cost a lot money to do because you’d have to re-edit the whole thing, regrade it, remix it. But it would be fun. I’d love to do it,” he said.

It would appear a director’s cut of “The Woman in the Window” is nothing more than a pipe dream at this point. Instead, what we’re left with is a blemish on the IMDB of Joe Wright, which was quickly forgotten with the release of his critically acclaimed musical, “Cyrano.” But it would be fun to get a peek at what Wright originally intended at some point.