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Director's Cut

Date: Dec 06 2006

Intro

1. Learn Vocabulary - Learn some new vocabulary before you start the lesson.

2. Read and Prepare - Read the introduction and prepare to hear the audio.

When you see a movie, you don’t always see the director’s ideal vision. For many reasons, the director sometimes has to make compromises concerning certain scenes or even the order of the scenes.

Once the movie is released, a director can release his or her own vision of the movie. Often the two movies are very different.

The picture here of Jake Gyllenhaal is from the movie Donnie Darko. The original release is very different from the director’s cut, which was released later. It illuminates a whole other side to the story.

Another more famous example is Blade Runner, a classic, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford.

Listen to Logan and Mason talk about director’s cuts.

Dialog

1. Listen and Read - Listen to the audio and read the dialog at the same time.

2. Study - Read the dialog again to see how the vocab words are used.

Logan

Mason

Logan: I’ve seen some director’s cuts where they’re not much different, where there’s maybe a couple minutes added in here and there.

Mason: Yeah. I think there’s… it’s something that you have to go into each movie individually looking at. And you gotta ask yourself, like, what’s worthwhile and they usually tell you how many more minutes of extra footage there is, uh, and if it’s, like, five minutes then I usually don’t care.

Logan: Are they taking out the director’s editions, the director’s cut per se, for cinematic time?

Mason: A lot of it, a lot of it is running time, ya know? Like, the studio or the producer, uh, you know, will say that, uh, we need to have it this long because, like, actually it’s part of the business of movie theaters, you know, like they can only show so many movies a day. If a movie’s this long, they can only maybe get three shows instead of four and how much less money are they making because of that? And then also, you know, like in a DVD, there’s just a whole new market for, you know, a film that maybe had to cut certain stuff out to get a rating, but then there’s a DVD market for an unrated version that’s got more content, you know. Quite frankly, I think they’re generally worthwhile.

Logan: I… If there’s more time on it, I’d be willing to watch the added scenes, and more acting, and there’s probably better, you can get the plot better and the storyline. Maybe understand it more.

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Discussion

Mason says that director’s cuts are not always that different from the original release. He explains to Logan some of the factors involved in making a movie that would affect the director’s original vision of the project.

Logan says that he is interested in director’s cuts that offer more insight into the movie’s plot.

Have you seen any director’s cuts?

How different were they from the originals?

Click here for a lesson on Donnie Darko