No idea about a director's cut, but I'd welcome it - some aspects of the film feel truncated and confusing.
If I were the cinematographer, I'd have quit and not done the film since Mann only shoots on HD video now. It looks like shit - it's not so much depth of field issues, really ... I can't quite put my finger on it, but there are a lot of blown-out bright lights and things like that. And I read a review today in the waiting room at my doctor's office from the Chicago Tribune where the guy praised the "inky blacks" in some scenes, saying that the effect could not have been achieved on celluloid.
That is bullshit. The "inky blacks" he's talking about weren't inky nor black - they were riddled with video artifacts, especially video noise, which meant the blacks had a layer of red, green, and blue noise all over them. And anytime a character moved against a dark background, you could clearly see trails left behind. It's just hideous.
I think part of it is that Mann was going for a grimy film look, but if that's the case then why the fuck did he use video? I know it can look decent - look at Zodiac. That was (mostly) shot digitally, and it looks halfway decent. Not fantastic, but not awful.
And I used to have roughly equal respect for Depp and Bale ... now, as you said, what happened to Bale? Depp's consistently fantastic, but Bale ... eh. Hit or miss.
I love Road to Perdition, and think Hanks did a great job. I'm a huge fan of Sam Mendes (the director) and Thomas Newman (the composer) - which reminds me, the music in Public Enemies irritated the shit out of me. Way overbearing most of the time, and there were a lot of very bad music fades. The sound editing in general was very poor.
Now, back to the state prison thing - for the hell of it, after my doctor's appointment today, I drove by the prison to compare the landscape to what I saw in the film last night. I was correct - trees and hills everywhere, whereas in the film it was a dry, flat grassland with a dirt road and a gas station. But I no longer wish they shot it in Michigan City at the actual prison, because after looking at its current state, that would have been impossible. The prison itself now has a great many chain-link, razor-wire fences, huge parking lots, many CCTV cameras, there are always cars parked around it ... it just wouldn't have worked at all for the period.
But they could at least have gotten the landscape right ...