Update:Ain’t it Cool have now posted the full Spielberg interview referred to in this post: it’s here and well worth a read for Jaws fans.
Ain’t it Cool have released some snippets of a forthcoming interview with Steven Spielberg that are at once infuriating and gratifying.
Gratifying, in that Spielberg confirms that the Blu-Ray of Jaws (forthcoming at an undisclosed date) will have no Star Wars Special Edition-style alterations. Spielberg, it should be remembered, practically invented the modern craze for re-cutting movies with his “Special Edition” of Close Encounters in 1980. That movies’ muddied history shows both the best and worst of this kind of thing. The cut he eventually came up with the second time he revisited the film, in 1998, is in my view the best version of the film. Yet between 1980 and 1998 he managed to keep the original version out of circulation, prompting Pauline Kael’s memorable complaint that “…when you remember something in a movie with pleasure and its gone, you feel as if your memories had been mugged.” George Lucas’ butchering of Star Wars has become the key example of this kind of chicanery, although Spielberg’s recut E.T. is very nearly as bad.
But now Spielberg, at least, has seen the light, and is surprisingly forthright about getting stuck into Lucas on the topic:
Steven Spielberg:(In the future) there’s going to be no more digital enhancements or digital additions to anything based on any film I direct. I’m not going to do any corrections digitally to even wires that show.
If 1941 comes on Blu-Ray I’m not going to go back and take the wires out because the Blu-Ray will bring the wires out that are guiding the airplane down Hollywood Blvd. At this point right now I think letting movies exist in the era, with all the flaws and all of the flourishes, is a wonderful way to mark time and mark history.
Quint: I’m in total agreement with you. I wish you could talk George (Lucas) into doing the same thing!
Steven Spielberg: Well, I can’t!
Quint: (laughs) Yeah, I don’t think anybody can!
Steven Spielberg: George goes his own way and I respect him for it, but my new philosophy on this is to let sleeping dogs lie.
Quint: That’s great news for film lovers.
Steven Spielberg: When people ask me which E.T. they should look at, I always tell them to look at the original 1982 E.T. If you notice, when we did put out E.T. we put out two E.T.s. We put out the digitally enhanced version with the additional scenes and for no extra money, in the same package, we put out the original ‘82 version. I always tell people to go back to the ’82 version.
Quint: Having the option is the big deal for me. Using the Star Wars example, I don’t think there’d be an outcry if we could watch a nice transfer of the original versions. We’d be like, “George can do what he wants and I’ll watch it… but you know maybe the fans would like the option of watching the movie they fell in love with, too.”
Steven Spielberg: Yeah. And I think the other good thing is that they understand when they see a movie and they suddenly see something that obviously could have been done much better today and could have been corrected in the DVD/Blu-Ray transfer, they really appreciate seeing the strings attached.
If somebody put out George Pal’s War of the Worlds and took the strings off the machines I’d be very upset. When that machine crashes in downtown Hollywood, and you see the strings going from taut to slack, that’s the thing that allows me to both understand this movie is scaring the hell out of me and at the same time this movie is a creation of the human race.
That little taut-to-slack moment of those wires on that wingtip makes the original George Pal War of the Worlds work for me. It embraces my fears and it also alleviates them in the same breath.
What’s infuriating about this (beyond George Lucas’ intransigence, or that it took Spielberg so long to work this out) is that this is prompted by Quint talking about how much he appreciated the inclusion of the original mono soundtrack of Jaws on the DVD… yet neither version of the DVD released here in Australia includes that soundtrack, favouring instead a 5.1 remix. Worse still, the 1982 E.T. remains unreleased on DVD in this country, since here Universal have only ever released the infamous 2002 cut that replaced all guns with walkie talkies (amongst other egregious cuts and special effects substitutions). Other countries got both versions, but out here in the colonies we only ever got the butchered version.
