EXT. MOVIE THEATER –- NIGHT

The marquee floods the block with light as the crowd files in, expectant.

In letters the size of people, the title reads: MICHAEL CIMINO’S HEAVEN’S GATE: COMPLETE AND UNCUT.

Not to weasel out of a definitive answer—I do have one—but, well, it depends. Not all director’s cuts are the same. They have different origin stories and serve different purposes, but broadly speaking, most of them seek to recoup, revise, or restore.

These purposes can determine how we evaluate each cut and whether it is merely an ancillary or adjunct to a definitive work or whether it constitutes a separate work in its own right.

Director’s cuts that seek to recoup represent the greedy of the bunch. It’s not about art here; it’s often about wringing every last dime out of a title. There are exceptions here, such as the far superior extended editions of the LordoftheRings films, but these cuts frequently amount to a handful of extra frames of gore or skin that often add even less to the film than they do to its runtime. While directors may tacitly approve of these cuts, they’re less representative of their intentions than an opportunity for them to resurrect some of the darlings they had to kill for a tighter (and better) theatrical cut. The director’s cuts of Alien and Aliens both fit this bill—and both directors openly admit as much. The director’s cuts of Almost Famous and That ThingYouDo! add some intriguing texture and scope, but they pale in comparison to the tightly constructed pop perfection of their theatrical versions. These editions, while nice for fans to watch on occasion, seldom illuminate something in the film that wasn’t already there. If anything, they detract from the film’s overall impact by virtue of their bagginess.

The true spirit of the director’s cut can be found in those that seek to restore. These cuts resolve the age-old debate between the artist and the suits strongly in the artist’s favor and affirm the authority of the director as the auteur nobly battling against a greedy system run by philistines. These restorations do the very important work of reclaiming films from decades of misunderstanding. Pat Garrett and BillytheKid,BladeRunner,Heaven’sGate,Once UponaTimeinAmerica,Brazil, and Touch of Evil are the classics they are thanks to the release of their director’s cuts.

Such cuts may not always represent an improvement (Oliver Stone’s JFK) or do much to move the needle on the film’s reputation significantly (Ridley Scott’s KingdomofHeaven), but on the whole, their intentions are to more fully achieve the aims and purposes of the film and present audiences with a fuller artistic statement, even if it is arriving somewhat belatedly.

The works that seek to revise may be the rarest and most puzzling of all, but they seem to be the most prominent among most recent director’s cuts. With these, we see directors returning to the same work multiple times, adding more footage, taking some out, trying to find the version of the film that captures everything they want it to. For instance, Oliver Stone has recut his 2004 film Alexander three times—he even released a version in 2014 after the so-called Final Unrated Cut in 2007. (It’s called The Ultimate Cut.) But one filmmaker stands out as the greatest user (or perhaps abuser) of the director’s cut.

EXT. COPPOLA WINERY VINEYARD -- NAPA VALLEY -- DAY

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, 83, seated, raises a glass of Coppola Diamond Label Claret toward the sun. As he inspects the color of the wine, his face resembles Michael Corleone’s at the end of The Godfather Part III: heavy with the weight of a lifetime.

More than any filmmaker since Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola seems to be drawn back to the well that is the director’s cut the most. He's returned to The Godfather multiple times: there’s 1977’s TheCompleteSaga, which puts the first two films in chronological order and adds some scenes to the Young Vito storyline, the 1991 home video director’s cut of The Godfather Part III (adds seven minutes), and 2020’s The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (removes twelve minutes from the theatrical cut). He’s also reworked ApocalypseNow more than once, first with 2001’s ApocalypseNow:Redux (adds 49 minutes) and again with ApocalypseNow:FinalCut (removes 20 minutes from Redux). And then there’s The Outsiders:TheCompleteNovel (adds 22 minutes), The Cotton Club: Encore (adds 25 minutes), and the 2023 Blu-Ray release of B’Twixt Now and Sunrise, which adds 50 minutes to his 2011 feature, Twixt.

With director’s cuts of nearly half the films in his filmography, it would seem Coppola is an obsessive who just can’t stop tinkering with his old work. Or maybe he’s becoming concerned with his legacy in his old age. Less charitable people would say Coppola keeps going back to his old work because he is past his prime and looking to coast on his past achievements. But I think there’s something far more complex at play here, something that gets at the heart of what director’s cuts can do when they seek to revise.

Director’s cuts that revise may seem to be the most frivolous of the lot, but the more I think about it, the more I think they may also be the most interesting and the most vital of them all. CUT TO:

INT. SCREENING ROOM – NIGHT

Black. The iconic horn of Nino Rota’s Godfather theme fills the room.

Title Card

Paramount Pictures Presents.

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone

In some ways, The Godfather Coda is the strangest example because it’s a director’s cut of a film the director didn’t want to make in the first place. Coppola took on a third Godfather film to get out of the dire financial situation he was in after the failure of his daring 1982 musical One from the Heart. After a production troubled by casting issues, he had to rush The Godfather Part III through postproduction to meet Paramount’s Christmas 1990 release date. This is the real battle between Art and Commerce: films have release dates, and these release dates can affect the process of art, forcing a film to come out before the filmmakers have found its ideal form. This is certainly the case with a film such as The Godfather Part III, which, even though it received seven Academy Award nominations, was received as a failure at best, a stain on a beloved film series at worst, with most of the blame (unfairly) falling on Coppola’s daughter Sofia for her performance as Mary Corleone, and on Coppola himself for casting her. With such a bad reception, why would Coppola return to a work that he didn’t want to make to begin with, especially when he no longer needs a big payday?

But rationality is not what anyone wants from one of cinema’s most gifted madmen. (Also, to be fair, Coppola didn’t want to make the first Godfather film either.)

This film is a perfect example of what makes director’s cuts that revise so compelling and vital to our understanding of the artistic process. The Death of Michael Corleone gets at what The Godfather Part III, and, to some extent, the entire Godfather saga, is all about, both for Michael Corleone and for Coppola: the impossibility of escape. DISSOLVE TO:

FLASHBACK -- EXT. CORLEONE FAMILY COMPOUND -- DAY

MICHAEL CORLEONE sits with KAY ADAMS as Connie Corleone’s wedding reception swirls around them. Kay stares at Michael, shocked by the violent story he has just told her.

That’s my family, Kay. That’s not me.

Michael Corleone spends the rest of the three Godfather films trying—and failing—to make that statement true. Michael’s statement encapsulates his tragic fate: he becomes the exact opposite of what he wants to be. In The Godfather III, we see him confronting this fate, realizing he can repent and run from his mistakes all he wants, but he will never get very far. Life will always refuse him redemption. Circumstances will always suck him back into the criminal world. The film ends in an act of mob violence in Sicily, far from the American Dream the family has been chasing. That dream has only led them back to the violence and vengeance of the Old Country. As Michael laments in the film’s most iconic line, “Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.” The film proves just how naïve this statement is: he was never out because “out” does not exist. The differences between the old world and the new are mere illusions.

One difference that is not mere illusion is the difference between The Godfather Part III and The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, for they are indeed different films that deserve different titles. The new cut moves briskly from the jump, tightening slack scenes to restore their punch, reorganizing others to fit the film’s theme rather than narrative chronology, and jettisoning many of the moments early on that play the same notes as the previous two films. These moves are marked steps toward making The Death of Michael Corleone more of its own film, less subservient to the original film. In breaking from The Godfather Part III’s rigid adherence to the tempo and structure of the other Godfather films, The Death of Michael Corleone serves as a corrective to their sense of grandeur and elegance that reveals the emptiness and delusion at the core of it all. It’s a film as tired of pretending as its characters are, and, unlike The Godfather III, it is ahead of them in releasing itself from these illusions. With a more critical distance, the film shifts the tragedy from us lamenting the Corleones not getting what they want to us pitying that they ever thought they could.

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

Michael’s line may as well be Coppola’s too, first for The Godfather III and again for The Death of Michael Corleone. Read one way, Paramount is the mob pulling him back in and preventing him from achieving total independence as a filmmaker. Or perhaps it’s Coppola who pulls himself back in: like Michael, when he finds himself in dire straits, he returns to what he knows, no matter how much he loathes it. But I think the truth is really something different, and it’s also what director’s cuts that seek to revise are all about: it’s the work and the mysteries it still has to share that keep pulling the filmmaker back in.

Which version of The Godfather Part III is definitive? That’s kind of for the work to tell us and for us to find. As a character in Wim Wenders’s criminally underseen 1982 film about filmmaking, TheStateofThings, remarks, “a film isn’t a prefab house. It has a life of its own.” After watching both cuts over two days, it seems to me that there is a stronger version of this story out there, one Coppola may yet find a way to tell. Even though it may be called TheDeathofMichaelCorleone, this story is still very much alive and growing toward its fullest expression. Coppola may think he’s out, but there is still a chance the work will pull him back in. It’s happened before.

INT. EDITING ROOM -- DAY

WALTER MURCH, 79, fires up Avid Media Composer and begins clicking buttons.

The door opens.

Francis Ford Coppola, 83, enters and takes a seat on the leather couch. He looks at the large monitor as Murch presses play.

The notion that we may need yet another cut of the third Godfather movie is not the answer that anyone wants to hear, but each work of art has a form it’s seeking to achieve, an ideal version that is dictated by the work itself, not its creators. Director’s cuts at their best are the continued search for that ideal form, and when we watch them, we join in that search.

The hardest part of all is being open to that search. In the case of so many director’s cuts, we see the filmmaker ignoring what the work is telling them. They keep fighting against that ideal form, in the hope they will impose their will on material that will always be indifferent to their wishes and intentions. Coppola himself has fallen prey to this with ApocalypseNow, a film he already found the greatest expression of in 1979. Coppola can’t let go of some sequences in that film even though they detract from the monomaniacal descent into madness the story clearly wants to be. But he keeps searching for another version, one that will meet halfway the film he wants ApocalypseNow to be with the film ApocalypseNow is, even though such a quest is bound to fail.

But perhaps that situation is in fact a wonderful thing. Our understanding of what we make changes, and we have the chance to see new things in it. They say the editing of a film is the final draft of the script. But that’s not really true: it’s just the next draft. Another one may come along. And we have to keep listening to what the work has to tell us about itself, watching it for what it still has to reveal.

In a director’s cut that revises such as The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, we see an artist engaging in revision and critique with the work, still searching for its ideal form. Although this means that the artist—and the audience—keeps going back to the same well, it means the work is still being built. The new form illuminates something new about the essence of the work that went unnoticed before. It never ends, and I think that’s beautiful.

INT. VIDEO STORE – NIGHT

The lonely teen stares at the three versions of Blade Runner.

He grabs all three and walks to the counter. It is going to be a long night. FADE

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