By Not too long ago we reported that Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer would be getting cut by 20 minutes for US release because The Weinstein Company thinks flyover country is full of slackjawed dummies with short attention spans. It looks like the excessive cutting may not be happening. “Actually, it’s not true,” said Bong, who held the French premiere of Snowpiercer at the Deauville American Film Festival. “It’s a rumor.”
Bong elaborated: “Me and The Weinstein Company are still negotiating about everything. The movie at the festival, the French version is my own director’s cut. In Korea, Japan, France, and many other European countries have all bought my director’s cut. And for North America we are still negotiating with The Weinstein Company, we are discussing.”
Harvey Weinstein has a long history of cutting/altering films for domestic release, including many Jackie Chan movies, Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, and most recently Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster. One of the most outspoken critics of the possible cuts to the film is Snowpiercer star Tilda Swinton. I’ve included her comments on the matter after the cut.
Snowpiercer still has no US release date. Hopefully when we get it, we don’t get a butchered version.
[via The Hollywood Reporter]Tilda Swinton on Snowpiercer potentially being cut:
There’s no question that all English speaking audiences deserve to see director Bong’s cut, and we hope very much that we will all see it.
Maybe an effect of the film, it just occurred to me, is that when one has spent two hours in the claustrophobia of this train we can leave the cinema and feel the relief that we can make life wider, so maybe it’s a sort of aversion therapy to sit in the train for two hours.
That’s two hours, not one hour and forty minutes.
