The reasons for this? Well, the movie will be finally coming out in the UK this year, where it has never been seen outside of festival showings (and imports, I guess, and naughty bittorrent downloads). Seeing as the territory is a bit of a clean slate for the film, I wanted to make sure that it turned up looking its best. Various territories ended up with a 4:3 crop being released back in 2007 (when the movie was shot 16:9) so it was already a no-brainer that I'd have to make sure that the version for my home territory didn't suffer any such ignominy. Ultimately, of course, once you're back in the project and making sure you're happy with the ratio, it's a very small jump to tweaking this and that and before you know it you've got a director's cut on your hands. Not a massively reworked version, granted, but something significantly different from the original release to warrant pointing out.
Thing is, where does this end? Is this the road that leads to George Lucas madness? Am I embarking on a foolish mission, and do I even have the right to take something back and screw with it once it's already been out on release?
Let's take that grade, for example. KillerKiller circa 2007 is massively desaturated, with a brittle, cold look to the whole flick. There's not a great deal of colour variation, even in the nightmarish kill sequences; the whole thing has more or less the same level of extreme desaturation. Ultimately, this was a decision I made under a specific set of circumstances; those circumstances being that I'd been staring at the movie on the edit line for months and months. After a while you get a bit edit-blind and start to mistake different for better. I remember the night that I settled on the look of the grade. I was absolutely delighted. I felt that the grade matched the tone of the flick, made it feel more cinematic, just worked.
Of course, I then got used to that desaturated look. As I watched the movie back at festivals, or at screenings, or for commentaries, or whatever, that desaturated look came to be how the film was in my head. Of course, when I came to review a few bits of the original footage a few years later (when I put the first Fake Blood on the Lens live shows together) I flipped out a bit; I suddenly thought it looked gorgeous. All that colour, man... All that colour detail that was missing from the release version...
But was I just falling back into the trap where different equals better?
For the new release I've tried to walk the fine line. I've got a decent colour grader (the multi-talented Paul Cousins, who has been my right-hand man on Battlefield Death Tales) to go through the film with a bit more sensitivity than I did in 2007 and grade accordingly rather than being constrained by what's already on the shelves. I've been feeding back on a scene-by-scene basis and I love the new look of the movie.
But what if other people don't? The version of The Exorcist that was released as 'The Version You've Never Seen' made me realise just what a delicate process messing around with previously released movies really is. I absolutely hated that version (and usually referred to it as 'The Version We've Fucked Up Completely') because in my eyes it broke a very, very delicate balance within the movie; I particularly felt that the addition of a load of new subliminals took the technique from being devastatingly effective to utterly ridiculous, and the whole movie suddenly felt cheap in places it had previously felt masterful.
KillerKiller, of course, isn't in the same league as The Exorcist, so to a degree there's a lot less at stake. I'm not meddling with a cherished classic: I'm tweaking a little indie slasher that very few people have seen. But the point remains as to whether I'm breaking my own rules and behaving in a way that I constantly berate bigger filmmakers for doing.
Sod it, the die is cast, and I much prefer the new edit. I'll just have to ignore the little voice in the back of my head whining that George Lucas prefers his new edits too.
The Devil's Music is finally going to appear on DVD in the UK this year, too, having been a solely digital release up to this point. That one, however, I'm going to leave exactly as it is.
Except for maybe just one shot...
