Writer-director Quentin Tarantino revealed that he has put together a longer director's cut of his super-violent Western Django Unchained, with around 30 minutes of additional footage. Since his arrival on the film scene with 1992's Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino has over the years established himself as one of the most popular and often controversial directors in America.
After making his name with violent crime dramas like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, and later solidifying his status as a master of cinema with his two-part martial arts epic Kill Bill, Tarantino in recent years has turned his attention to creating historical dramas that give him a chance to homage many of his favorite old films while not exactly adhering strictly to historical fact. Tarantino first tackled WWII with his epic Inglourious Basterds, then turned his attention to American history and specifically the days of slavery with his Spaghetti Western tribute Django Unchained, starring Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz as bounty hunters and Leonardo DiCaprio as an evil plantation owner. Like Inglourious Basterds, Django played fast-and-loose with history while delivering loads of Tarantino's signature stylized violence and memorable over-the-top characters.
In what should prove to be a piece of great news for Tarantino fans, the director has revealed that there's actually another version of Django Unchained that is longer than the 165-minute one that played theatrically in 2012, and that there are plans to release the alternate version somewhere down the road. As Tarantino told Slashfilm:
I’ve actually cut a director’s cut of Django. That’s about like three hours and 15 minutes, or three hours and 20 minutes, something like that. That’s one I wouldn’t do as a miniseries, because it would just be better [as a movie]. I thought about that idea, but that would just work better as one movie. Just a longer one as far as I was concerned. So I’ve actually done that. We’re just kind of waiting some time after Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, and we’ll release that eventually.
In the same interview, Tarantino talked about his surprising decision to recut his Western The Hateful Eight into a multi-episode version for release on Netflix. It sounds as though there are no plans to give Django Unchained the same miniseries treatment, but there is a longer version that adds around 30 minutes of footage not seen in the theatrical cut, which it seems will get a release some time after Tarantino's latest movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood hits theaters. Unfortunately, in the same interview Tarantino said there are no plans for an extended Kill Bill The Whole Bloody Affair miniseries as all the footage he has available has already been used.
Of course, director's cuts of movies are not always great news for fans, as sometimes they result in bloated versions that only serve to demonstrate why the extra footage was cut out of the movie in the first place. It remains to be seen if Tarantino's extended cut of Django Unchained will indeed give audiences an improved experience, or prove to be a little too much of a good thing.
Source: Slashfilm
