If you remember back at the New York Times detailing the tumultuous production of Paul Schrader‘s The Canyons starring Lindsay Lohan, Schrader mentioned screening the film for Steven Soderbergh who then told Schrader he’d do an edit of the movie if he was given the footage for 72 hours.
Schrader told the Times, “The idea of 72 hours is a joke… It would take him 72 hours to look at all the footage. And you know what Soderbergh would do if another director offered to cut his film?” Schrader held up two middle fingers saying, “That’s what Soderbergh would do.”
Well, fast forward nine months, The Canyons has been forgotten, and now we learn Soderbergh offered a little help on another film coming out this year and this time the director accepted.
In a profile on director Spike Jonze, who has Her set to play the New York Film Festival shortly, Vulture learned Soderbergh took what was said to be a 150-minute cut of Jonze’s latest film and cut it down to 90 minutes in a matter of 24 hours. Note, that’s 36 fewer than he offered Schrader and considering he wanted all of Schrader’s footage suggests a massive difference in the state of the two films at the time Soderbergh saw them.
Soderbergh’s cut isn’t what you’re going to see in theaters on December 18 or what audiences see when the film closes the New York Festival on October 12. Instead Jonze used his cut as more of a guide. Speaking on the situation Jonze told Vulture:
“[Soderbergh is] the smartest, fastest editor-filmmaker I know. He got the movie on a Thursday, and in 24 hours, he took it from two and a half hours to 90 minutes. We basically said, ‘Be radical, shock us,’ and it was awesome. He said, ‘I’m not saying this should be the cut of the movie, but these are things to think about.’ It was amazingly generous of him, and it gave us the confidence to lose some big things that I wasn’t ready to lose [before]. Even though we didn’t use that exact cut, we were able to make connections between scenes out of connections he made. And making many of the cuts he suggested was a really good kind of pain.”
Fascinating, isn’t it, how one director looks at it as “generous” and the other compares it to one big “fuck you”.
From what I’ve seen, Her now runs approximately two hours long so Soderbergh’s assistance helped Jonze remove about 30 minutes from the film. It would be interesting to hear more about the difference in the edits, but I would suspect with so much time between now and the film’s release, we’ll definitely get more along the way.
