Interview with William Gibson from suicidegirls.com
DRE:
What happened with Johnny Mnemonic? I blame Dolph Lundgren.
WG:
Oh no [laughs]. I would blame Sony Pictures Imageworks. Nobody got to see the film that Robert Longo shot. Longo shot the script I wrote which I was happy with. The tragedy with Johnny Mnemonic is that we shot an ironic broadly comic action film that at some level was supposed to be about bad science fiction movies. We were not trying to make a blockbuster mainstream adventure film starring Keanu Reeves. When we started shooting that film Keanu wasn’t a movie star. Speed came out while we were shooting. As soon as it was a hit we had guys from the studio coming out of the woodwork telling us that we shouldn’t shoot a funny movie, where’s the bus? It just got worse from there. We kept doing what we wanted to do. Keanu and Dolph were both doing exactly what we told them to do. Sony cut 90 % of Dolph’s role because they said it would offend the religious right. He doesn’t even have a character in the movie they put out. He’s just this insane caveman who comes rushing in and flinging people around. It doesn’t make any sense. In the film we shot you get his backstory where he is preaching stark naked to churches full of women whoa re afflicted with the weird disease in the movie. He completely got into doing this comic villain and it just ended up making him look like an idiot. I personally felt very bad about that because he was doing what he was told to do.
From Gibson's blog
Alas, that's the tragedy of JM as released: it was *full* them, as written and shot, but Sony surgically excised every one they could. They'd have probably cut the Room Service speech if it had been possible.Ever notice how little sense Dolph Lundgren's Street Preacher character makes? Just this big lunatic who periodically rages onstage and tosses people around?
I'll tell you something you may not believe: Dolph Lungren can actually do *comedy*. I mean, like, who knew? But he can, and did, with great gusto. The nature of his character was anchored in a scene in his church (he's the local Panawave-equivalent) in which he preaches, buck nekkid and skin-studded with creepy nano-gizmos, to a congragation of adoring female NAS victims. He delivers a bombastic, faux-Sterlingesque, literally balls-out *sermon* on the virtues of posthumanity. It came off sort of like Fabio as the Jesus you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley. It *rocked*. Hilarious. So Sony cut it.
They cut it out of fear of offending the religious right. No kidding. They actually told me that. That's the sort of thing I mean when I say the JM you see is not the movie we shot.
[JM as I wrote it, and Longo shot it, is only available as the published screenplay (but quite readily available as that). I only agreed to publish it, in the first place, because I wanted to be in the position to demonstrate the difference between what I wrote, and we shot, and what they released. I doubt there's even a remote possibility of there ever being a restored "director's cut", although the Japanese version of the DVD is a little closer to our intention.