- Time
- Post link
I ran a James Cameron fan blog and podcast for a while (and wrote a book that aspired to be of Secret History of Star Wars quality, but failed) and I wanted to share some of Cameron's ideas about SEs in general and also about the SW SEs in particular:
Would you redo the effects in The Abyss the way George Lucas did with Star Wars?
I went back and did a special edition of The Abyss, using all the building blocks that weren't used because of time constraints, and we made it clear that this was an alternate version for people who don't mind watching a three-hour movie. But we didn't go back and change the actual imagery; we just edited it together—so it's more of a historical document. It's a little weird to go back and do all the things you wanted to do back then. It's a little like thinking through your own navel. It's revisionist history. On the other hand, when it earns you another $150 million . . .
-Premiere Magazine, 'The Territory Ahead', 1999, by Anne Thompson
----------
Omni: The Special Edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind seemed to contain nothing more than a few pieces of footage cut from the original.
Cameron: Close Encounters was the model for subsequent Special Editions: let's go back and cut the film differently, add some stuff that wasn't finished and release it again theatrically. It was an interesting idea. I personally thought that it wasn't a better film. There was a certain kind of religious awe at the end of the original version of the film that was demystified in the Special Edition by going inside the saucer and seeing all the aliens. I thought that was a mistake, and with The Abyss, I didn't want to set myself up for the same criticism.
What I'm still not clear on -- and I'm sure fans of Close Encounters know -- was how much of the Special Edition was footage Steven [Spielberg] had actually shot [and left out] and how much of it was stuff he'd intended to shoot, hadn't and went back to shoot later. To me, that gets into a strange zone of revisionism I think is unhealthy. When we restored The Abyss, we had some of those ethical considerations, but they were very minor. Basically, we only put back scenes that I'd done, that were in the script, on the call list, that we had shot to be in the film and had taken out only to release it at what we thought was a commercially viable length.
-Omni Magazine. '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: The Movie Director as Captain Nemo'. 1997. by Bill Moseley.
----------
Cameron on the 'Abyss' SE in the laserdisc intro in 1993:
"We didn't slavishly put back every single scrap of film that was shot, because issues of pace and style are still important. It still has to be a good movie.
I created my own ground rules for the restoration.
I would not touch the scenes that were in the 1989 release version, even though there are a few things that make me cringe that I would do differently now. That seemed a violation of the rules to me.
Since the scenes were cut out originally before the score was done, some new music was created, and some of the old score was reused in places. Where a number of shots or short scenes were added to an existing sequence (such as the search of the submarine) we rescored the whole sequence rather than create a patchwork of music “bridges”.
We didn't do any new photography.
Effects shots in the wave scene had to be completed using existing photographic elements. They were completed by ILM, with many of the same people involved who started the shots in 1988."
----------
Cameron on the TITANIC re-release:
When asked about making changes in the movie, Cameron joked that he'll let George Lucas be the filmmaker who goes back to his earlier work and changes things. "That's an example of what I don't want to do," he quipped, then added. "That's not a slam. I think he considers his movies a perpetual work in progress. For me, the problem is when you pull that thread, it all unravels because where do you stop? For example, I've done three expeditions to the Titanic, I've done literally hundreds of hours of exploration of the interior of the wreck, always photographing all the stairwells, so I know the places where the film is wrong." In other words, Cameron has been able to learn a lot more information about the interiors of the Titanic than he had when he made the movie, but he knows that going back to fix those things would be very time-consuming.
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=83123#ixzz1bmzkOoQA