Martin Scorsese is a filmmaker that is easily on the Mount Rushmore of American directors, including the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, and others. But unlike those men, Scorsese hasn’t gone back to his films over the years to release new cuts or reformat them in some way. And as explained in a new interview with EW, the filmmaker has a very good reason for not wanting to release a director’s cut or extended cut of his previous films.
When asked if he would be interested in going back and revisiting some of his films in a more long-form, extended cut, such as what Tarantino did recently with “The Hateful Eight,” where he made his film into a Netflix miniseries, Scorsese scoffs at the idea and the idea of director’s cuts in general. Why? Well, simply put, every film he’s released has been his director’s cut.
“No, no, no, no, no!” said Scorsese. “The director’s cut is the film that’s released — unless it’s been taken away from the director by the financiers and the studio. [The director] has made their decisions based on the process they were going through at the time.”
He continued, “There could be money issues, there could be somebody that dies [while making] the picture, the studio changes heads and the next person hates it. Sometimes [a director says], ‘I wish I could go back and put it all back together.’ All these things happen … But I do think once the die is cast, you have to go with it and say, ‘That’s the movie I made under those circumstances.’”
The filmmaker goes on to give an example of when a director’s cut of a film is warranted by bringing to mind Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.”
“You should take a look at Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,’” he explained. “I saw the full version a few days before it opened at a meeting and it was two hours and 20 minutes or so. Then MGM released their version and it was 90 minutes. We all said, ‘Oh no, it was a masterpiece,’ and wished it could be saved.”
He added, “The editor saved a copy and what you see now is what we saw in that meeting. That is a director’s cut. And if the editor said there was another 20 minutes that Peckinpah wanted to keep in there, I would have loved to see those 20 minutes. So I understand the idea of an audience wanting to be entertained for another 20 minutes in that world.”
So, while the filmmaker is clearly opposed to releasing any new versions of his previous films, he’s definitely understanding if another director chooses to do it, under specific circumstances. This goes a long way to explain why “The Irishman” is over three-and-a-half-hours when a typical filmmaker would have likely cut much more off the runtime. For Scorsese, he’s going to release the cut he’s happy with, no matter what.
