The Director's Cut By Jeet Heer National Post (August 10, 2001). Philosopher James Burnham used to tell his students, "You can't invest in retrospect." Burnham's common-sense aphorism reminds us it is futile to linger over the past, constantly dwelling on what might have been, say, if we had bought Microsoft stock when Bill Gates was just another computer nerd. It is an inevitable part of life that we have to live in the present and plan for the future. No one needs this advice more than a group of high-profile film directors, most of whom gained fame in the 1970s, who are constantly revisiting the scene of their early success. Taken together, these filmmakers have created a troublesome and growing film genre: the director's cut. Some of these directors, notably Ridley Scott and Steven Spielberg, have had long and fruitful careers. Others — Francis Ford Coppola is the best example — are unquestionably spent volcanoes. What unites these directors, successful or not, is that they cannot leave their early work alone. Hence, movie buffs are confronted with multiple versions of such classic films as Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Scott's Blade Runner and Coppola's Apocalypse Now. The director's cut purports to be the definitive version of a film classic, but it actually ends up muddying things because it ignores the fact that film is a collaborative and time-bound art form. Actors age, film sets are torn down, footage gets lost. Given the inescapable ticking of the clock, it is impossible for a director to go back in time to when he first worked on a film and restore his supposedly lost vision. At best, a director can cut and paste with what footage remains, but there is no reason to believe that afterthoughts and second guesses made decades after a film is shot give us a more authentic version of what the movie should be. Films are a product of their times. In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola released a movie that, among its other virtues, had a great title: Apocalypse Now was not only appropriate for a movie about the Vietnam War, it also perfectly captured the mood of the late 1970s. The Shah had fled Iran, the Western world seemed to be running out of gas, and the Russians had invaded Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, books about the end of the world, notably Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth, were selling in record numbers. With the stately Biblical word "apocalypse" counterbalanced by the more urgent "now," the title resonated with the tenor of the times. Twenty-two years later, we have Apocalypse Now Redux. Right from the start, we notice the title has lost its historical resonance. The fancy Latinate word "redux," so redolent of long novels by Anthony Trollope (Phineas Redux) and John Updike (Rabbit Redux), negates the urgency of Apocalypse Now. After all, redux means to restore, but how can you restore an apocalypse, especially one going on "now"? It is no accident the director's cut is a product of the filmmaking generation of the 1970s. Before the '70s, such directors as Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks thought of themselves as craftsmen. They knew film was a commercial and collaborative medium, so they worked within the system to produce a polished final version. Hitchcock was such a control freak, he would storyboard every scene in a movie before the shooting even started. This gives his movies their classical feel of internal coherence and finality. In the 1970s, a new generation of directors came to Hollywood. They saw themselves as artists, not craftsmen. Borrowing from French film theory, they called themselves auteurs and adopted the pose of the Romantic artists, whose work was allowed to be incomplete and messy because it came from a personal vision. Trusting his genius as an auteur, Coppola started filming Apocalypse Now without an ending in mind. He seemed to have thought that months spent in the jungle with Marlon Brando would inspire a conclusion to the movie. As a result of this messy production process, even when first released Apocalypse Now had two distinct endings. For arty audiences, Coppola made a 70mm version in which Brando's Colonel Kurtz, a military hero gone bad, is assassinated by Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), who then returns home. In the more widely distributed 35mm version, Willard orders an air strike on Kurtz's compound after the assassination, thus destroying all evidence of his evil reign. With its two endings, Apocalypse Now was, right from the start, a messy, incoherent work. Since Coppola never knew how he wanted to end the movie, there is no reason to believe his third thoughts are any more valid than his second or first thoughts. The most recent version of this movie will not clean up this messiness, but only add another layer to a large pile. By its very nature, Apocalypse Now can never have the coherence and finality we associate with a Hitchcock movie. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, first released in 1982, offers another example of how the director's cut creates more problems than it solves. While directing the movie, Scott got into an argument with the star, Harrison Ford. Scott believed Ford's character, Deckard, a cop hired to hunt down and kill androids, should himself be an android. Ford rejected this idea, believing it robbed Deckard of his humanity. Working with his producers and actors such as Ford, Scott had to make numerous compromises in the first version of Blade Runner. In addition to adding a voice-over and a happy ending, Scott was allowed only to suggest that Deckard was an android, but the idea is so ambiguously presented that the audience can make up its own mind on the subject. In the early 1990s, Scott made suggestions for a new release of the movie to make it closer to his original ideas. In addition to removing the voice-over and happy ending, Blade Runner: The Director's Cut (1992) also resolved the issue of Deckard's humanity: In this version, he is clearly an android. Many critics and fans are unhappy with this loss of ambiguity. By making Deckard an android hired to kill androids, rather than a human who comes to appreciate the humanity of androids, the film lost its moral centre. Moreover, if Ford played Deckard as a human, the director's cut violates the integrity of his performance. Ironically, Scott himself is not completely happy with the second version of Blade Runner. Busy working on another movie, he did not devote all the time to it he had wanted. Most of the re-editing was done by another filmmaker, Peter Gardiner. For this reason, Scott has been known to refer to the 1992 release as "the so-called director's cut." Once again, a new version of the movie does not resolve problems inherent in the filmmaking process, which by necessity requires compromise and teamwork. As long as directors think of themselves auteurs, they will be seduced by the idea that they can produce a definitive "director's cut." But the goal of a director's cut will not help them make more coherent movies. Only by giving up the claim to artistic supremacy will directors be able to return to the more realistic self-conceptions of craftsmen such as Hitchcock, who knew how to begin making a movie and also how to bring it to an appropriate end.