Michael Mann Proves He's an Auteur by Continually Revising his movies
Revisio-News#4: 'Blackhat' Director's Cut Plus Maybe 'Manhunter'
Authorial Revisionism and Auteurism
Something that I’ve long found fascinating is the fact that numerous Hollywood filmmakers touted as auteurs have a tendency to revise and reissue their films, a fact that suggests that the ability or license to release an alternate cut of a picture may constitute a defining characteristic of the auteur director.
Case in point: Michael Mann.
Out of the 12 feature films Mann has directed thus far, he has retroactively revised and reissued seven of them in an alternate cut or version, namely Thief (1981), Manhunter (1987), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), Ali (2001), Miami Vice (2006), and Blackhat (2015). Some of these, in fact, Mann has revised more than once.
Mohicans has both a “director’s cut” and a “director’s definitive cut,” while Manhunter has at least five somewhat different editions carrying the “director’s cut” label. With each such release, Mann seems to reaffirm his authorship over the text, while simultaneously undermining claims to singularity of vision.
Based on my research, Mann also has a particular style of re-editing: many of his alterations tend to be small and largely imperceptible. Where some filmmakers like to make big, easily identifiable changes (such as Cameron, who specializes in adding completely new full scenes and subplots to his special editions), Mann prefers to make short, often surgical extensions and subtractions to existing footage. He might add a few seconds here, remove a line of dialogue there, and use an alternate shot elsewhere.
This isn’t to say that Mann doesn’t ever add new full scenes, or tinker with other elements of the picture, such as the color or transfer, but that the editorial differences in his movies rarely seem intended to attract attention to themselves.
Consequently, even if you are intimately familiar with the theatrical release, you might never notice any difference as you watch the new edition unless you’re specifically looking for it. Individually, such changes might some negligible. But as a whole, they can have some interesting effects on a film and its perception.
I personally find that making such tiny changes is actually more interesting than making big sweeping cuts, because it’s more about pruning, finessing the details.
All of which is to say that I’m kinda excited for the upcoming Arrow Video Blu-Ray release of Blackhat, as I fully expect it to exhibit those qualities. Here’s a trailer for the film in case you’re not familiar with it.
Blackhat Director’s Cut
Release Date: November 28, 2023 (BluRay and 4k)
Initially released in 2015 and becoming a critical and commercial flop, Blackhat is a (cyber?) thriller starring Chris Hemsworth as an expert hacker recruited by the FBI to take down a powerful cyberterrorist. The movie passed me and a lot of other people by when it first came out, but I’ve never really forgotten about it, especially thanks to the trickles of news regarding Mann’s director’s cut.
Mann first premiered his cut back in 2016 during a retrospective of his films at a New York film festival. At the time, in an interview for IndieWire’s Sad Happy Confused Podcast, Mann had stated that he views both this and the theatrical release as a director’s cut, but stated that he was not happy with the theatrical release.
As he put it:
“It was a challenging film to do because the ambition of the film was to an event driven narrative and develop characters within scenes, but have a very rapid narrative with rhythms imitative of how fast our world moves today in the digital information age. So this is why I intentionally had a rapidly driving plotline. But the engine of that was cyber tech so you had to track with the search for the code… which leads you on and on and on through various hacking techniques. So in moving some of the big pieces of story around I may have obfuscated [the audience] tracking the events of the basic plot.”
He adds that the biggest change was putting the events of the film in its original order, placing the events of the ‘Soy Hack’ first, believing that this would allowing audiences to better follow the ‘causality’ of the plot. He also takes full responsibility for all the issues and does not put it on the studio. The director’s cut is, according to Mann, about two minutes shorter than the theatrical.
I find his comments quite intriguing. Mann takes full responsibility for what he perceives to be the main flaw of the theatrical cut - its narrative structure. At some point during post-production, he apparently decided to move the order of the main events around, deviating from the script.
Restructuring the film apparently made it hard to follow and so negatively impacted audience enjoyment. He doesn’t specify, however, why he did this.
According to MovieCensorship:
“It is speculated that the studio wasn't happy with the structure of the movie and wished for a bigger threat for the thriller instead of such a trivial thing such as stock market betrayal.”
This sounds plausible, though I’ve found no direct corroboration from Mann himself that this was the case. Presumably, the new cut builds much better and gradually raises its stakes. So watching it with back-to-back in theory could be useful for learning how to tell a story and/or move scenes around editorially, in that it ought to illuminate what happens to narrative comprehensibility and pacing when one extensively switches up the order of multiple sequences.
A Strange Release/Revision History
The upcoming BluRay release by Arrow Video is going to be the first time the Blackhat director’s cut has received wide circulation and accessibility. Even so, its road to home video has been a little strange.
Following its premiere at the 2016 NYC Retrospective, it was then broadcast on the cable channel FX back in 2017. Presumably, this happened only once or twice as FX is not a premium cable channel that repeats its licensed movie titles over and over.
The theatrical cut of Blackhat received a video release from Universal back in May 2015. Blackhat then at some point received a slightly different international cut which also became available on video though was not advertised as a different cut all that much. Yet the director’s cut was MIA for video up all the way up to now.
In fact, despite its reputation for being a boutique video distributor that appeals to collectors of multiple versions and bonus materials, Arrow initially wasn’t even planning to include the director’s cut in its new limited edition! The decision to actually add it only came about after a vocal fan backlash.
Consequently, Arrow pushed the release of the Limited Edition back from its initial May 29, 2023 release date to September 4. At the time, they announced:
““We listened to your feedback about our release of Blackhat not including Michael Mann's revised director's cut of the film and we are very pleased to confirm that the original digital files have been found. It will now be included as a second Blu-ray Disc. To allow time for disc authoring and quality control, we have had to push the release date back to 4th September. We hope you understand the necessity for this delay and are as excited as we are to be able to feature this significantly different version of the film alongside the two previously announced cuts.””
Source: Dawn of the Discs
However, the release was delayed two more times, first to October 31 then finally to November 28. Assuming nothing goes wrong, then in a little over two weeks, the director’s cut will finally have become available on Blu-Ray in a high-definition digital transfer, which means you should be able to watch the movie with consistent high-grade quality from start to finish.
In addition to having three different cuts of the film, the release will have some nice bonus features, including an audio commentary track. All in all, the BluRay edition can be preordered right now for a little under $30.
I do wish there was maybe a feature-length BTS doc on the disc as well but the special features Arrow has listed make this a pretty sweet deal, in my opinion. Definitely more price-appropriate than the Hellraiser Bloodline workprint.
A New Manhunter director’s cut for 2024?
Something Mann said about reworking Blackhat on the podcast stood out to me:
“What’s wonderful about digital is that we’re able to improve these things, modify them. I’m impelled to do it… I didn’t feel complete with Blackhat before.”
These comments corroborate something I’ve long suspected: much like George Lucas, Mann is enabled by ongoing developments in technology. He is compelled to tinker and revise older works, because it is possible. This ties into the fact that Mann basically made a new cut of Manhunter for every new home video format.
And in turn, it suggests we might see more revisions from Mann in the future, possibly for streaming or 8K Mega-Hyper HD BluRay.
This is one reason why I am inclined to believe a certain rumor I’ve read recently on Twitter by an account called The Discfather, which claims that Mann is planning yet another a new cut and restoration of Manhunter, possibly for 2024.
See, Mann already released a DVD ‘director’s cut’ (his fourth I think if you count the various cuts he made for the Showtime channel) in 2001 and then a ‘restored director’s cut’ in 2003 (if memory serves correctly, this was primarily to address the bad video quality of the director’s cut footage on the earlier release, though I think the 2001 director’s cut was missing some crucial moments and dialogue).
But he was never really satisfied with how the film’s extra footage looked because it was sourced from a low resolution videotape. This made it impossible for the footage to look seamless and consistent with the footage from the theatrical release.
Think of seeing a movie with crisp, high quality imagery only for the picture to cut to a VHS scene the back, you get what I mean. It is a jarring experience. The quality gaps were magnified when the latest director’s cut showed up on Blu-Ray from Shout Factory a few years back, which presented it in high-definition but with standard-definition inserts for the non-theatrical footage.
If this is indeed another cut and is being restored, then it’s possible Mann has finally found a celluloid source for the extra footage he wanted to integrate into Manhunter. Thus, we might finally get a truly definitive, quality-consistent director’s edition of Manhunter next year. At least until the next leap in video technology, that is.
Annotations
Other auteur-revisionists include Charlie Chaplin, Ridley Scott, George Lucas, Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Oliver Stone, and Quentin Tarantino. Honestly, there are too many of them to count.
Personally, I hope that at some point Mann finally decides to revisit The Keep, his weird genre film from the 80s, which famously went really wrong behind the scenes and remains a movie he is quite unhappy with.
Though there are plenty stories of movies that have been extensively restructured in post-production prior to theatrical release (Batman Forever comes to mind), it is somewhat rare to find multiple cuts of the same film that have notably different orders of events on video. Off the top of my head, I can think of the chronological versions of reverse-chronology pictures like Memento or Irreversible, and the chronological re-cuts of The Godfather Part II, such as the one that came out on TV in the 80s. Then, of course, there’s the recent Hellraiser Bloodline workprint.
Ironically enough, I once tried to make a fan edit of another Chris Hemsworth movie by switching around its first act with its second, which meant a good chunk of the film would play out in flashback. I thought this was a good idea, for the chronological order was, in my mind, rather bad for doling out information to the audiences. My recut unfortunately, was never finished.
Readers, what do you think?
Anybody here seen 'Blackhat'? Did you like it? Do you plan to get the director's revision?
Do you like Mann's films in general? Does he tinker with them too much?
What are your thoughts on auteurism? Is releasing a director's cut a sign of being an auteur?
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I think there's benefits to having director's cuts and for upgrading content produced in a lower resolution. But there are problems with that as well. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a notorious upgrade to HD because it caused problems. Apparently the HD version meant that crew members appeared on screen like boom operators and stunt people become more visible because it wasn't shot for such a high resolution.
At a certain point too, you have to just let things go. I've thought of this when it comes to writing. I could endlessly revise things that I wrote or I could simply publish them and get them out there for people. If I'm constantly revising them, I never get to the publishing stage. So I just let things go.
As someone who has been much more interested in TV over film, it took me a while to understand the idea of Director's Cuts of films. I didn't know that the voice considered to be the author of a movie is not necessarily the person writing the screenplay, unlike TV where we focus on showrunners if not a full writer's room. There are always people who blur lines in TV (who direct AND write, or who star AND write, which is happening more and more - though it's not like it's completely new, with works like Twin Peaks out there), but most of TV is much more about long-term writing than long-term directing. And so I see a lot of fan edit projects in TV, and have maybe never seen a TV director's cut?
Fans might re-edit the order of scenes or episodes or cut them together differently, use different music, do their own upscaling or re-colourization, or even throw in dubiously canonical deleted scenes. A lot of what I'm talking about here unsurprisingly immediately brings to mind LOST for me. There's the notoriously terrible (if popular) Chronologically LOST, which placed things in 'absolute timeline' order, with the date being what informs the choice of placement, and the more recent Circle cut which involves a lot more of those 'fan as auteur' choices described above (and the ordering of the plot is character-centred, based on their experiences, rather than based on a specific datestamp).
I'm just curious about if you have any more thoughts on those kinds of differences in what it means to 'reissue' content between TV vs movies.