n a summer movie season bursting at the seams with bloated epics and ambitious action movies, The Chronicles of Riddick simply didn't find its footing. After a disappointing opening weekend (just $24 million, compared to the previous week's $93 million opening for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), the Pitch Black sequel quickly disappeared from view and ultimately collected a domestic gross of just over $57 million—a paltry sum considering the film's $105 million production budget. With the release of the upcoming DVD director's cut, however, Riddick may yet find new life.
David Twohy, who wrote and directed both films in the Pitch Black series, subsequently revisited the material and restored Riddick to the full scope of his original vision, re-inserting not only excised shots and scenes but entirely new characters to the narrative tapestry of the theatrical version. Twohy recently spoke to Science Fiction Weekly about the process of putting together his director's cut, uncovering secrets about the film of which he wasn't even aware and the possibility for future installments of the series.
The introduction you provide for the DVD indicates that the added materials are distinguished by small jumps in the picture. Were those intentional?
Twohy: It's not an intentional flag. For the theatrical cut, we were working off of a negative still—physical film—and if we cut for the theatrical release we actually cut the negative in certain spots to accomplish that. Now, when I want to go back into a scene and open it up again, because we were still working off of the source negative, you see that cut sometimes. A few years ago you couldn't do this. You couldn't work off of a negative that had been cut. Now you can, because at the digital lab they will scan the frame on the left-hand side of the cut and on the right-hand side of the cut, and they will clone an in-between frame and make it live again and spit it back out. So when you do that there's a little shift in the action; there's just a little hitch, a little hiccup in the middle of the scene, and that's an indication of where I've opened up the picture again.
Did you actually have to reconstruct the film altogether, or was the "director's cut" an initial version that simply had to be restored after the theatrical run?
Twohy: More the latter, but honing a cut for a theatrical release is always a strange process, because any time you're involved with a big studio film, there's a lot of people involved helping you shape that film. That's just the way it is at a certain budget level. But then, when the DVD rolls around, the director's cut, it's a whole different experience; it's just you and the editor. It's just two people in the editing room instead of many people in the editing room, and so I think this is a lot more like how I originally wrote the film—the director's cut.
How did you distinguish which scenes would be reinserted in the film and which ones would simply be compiled for the DVD bonus materials?
Twohy: Basically the approach was to put as many scenes that were appropriate back into the body of the movie so that it's one experience, and that gives us a movie that's about 15 minutes longer than the theatrical cut. But there were certain scenes that still were noteworthy but had long ago been abandoned, so the visual effects weren't ready; they were like half-finished. So I couldn't in good conscience put those back into the movie with half-finished visual-effects shots, because it would take you out of the movie and it would kill it. But, they were noteworthy for other reasons, so I kept like three scenes outside the body of the movie, and only by virtue of the fact that the visual effects were not finished.
Was any additional production or post-production work required to usher the director's cut to completion?
Twohy: One of the stipulations that the studio said when they said, "OK, you can do your director's cut," is "We don't want to spend any more money on visual effects, because we spent enough already." That said, I reintroduced a character named Shirah in this, who is Riddick's spiritual muse in the director's cut, and I was about 85 percent done with the visual-effects shots, and I didn't have money to complete them. So I went back to Rhythm and Hues, who had done some of the original work for us, and I said, "Look, I've got her. She's in parts. She's in various layers; can you just put her together for me?" And they were good enough to do that for free for this director's cut.
How does the restructuring of the film change the overall tone of the film?
Twohy: It does a couple of things, because the kinds of things I put back in are twofold. First, it was the MPAA stuff, stuff that I couldn't get in under the PG-13 banner. I submitted the film seven times to the MPAA, and only on the seventh time did they say, "OK, that's a PG-13." Each time, I had taken stuff out of the movie, so I gathered up all of that stuff and put it back in, so the action sequences are longer and tougher. On a secondary level, we worked on the depth of the characters.
In a "summer movie," there's a failing logic, true or not, that a summer movie needs to be a quick movie. You've got to be nimble; only the fast survive in the summer. As a result you find yourself pacing up the movie. I went back and looked at some of those scenes, how we had originally cut them four months before the release of the movie, and while I found them to be slower, they were also richer. You knew more about the characters; there were more nuances to the characters.
So, I went back in and as often as not went for the earlier cuts of a given scene. We understand Riddick better, we understand Imam better, we certainly understand the Vaako characters better, the two characters played by Karl Urban and Thandie Newton, as they conspire to unseat the Lord Marshal and as they contemplate regicide. You understand that better because I'm allowed to present their full scenes; there's some sexuality in their scenes as well that we shot away from the theatrical version, and I was able to restore that.
Can you describe some of the cuts the MPAA imposed on the film?
Twohy: Well, sometimes there are specific things, like decapitation; you can't do that. Get rid of it. There's a decapitation in this version of it. But as often as not, they don't like to identify specific things. It's a strange thing. They will say, "Well, we found you to be R-rated just for the general intensity of the action." So what are you going to do? They don't want to ever be accused of censorship, and their fear is if they point to a given moment or scene, they will be accused of being censors, so it's a guessing game they play between filmmakers and the MPAA. Specifically, a decapitation and then a lot of just intense action, even in terms of sound, sometimes; how hard a hit was, how "wet" a sound was. The theatrical version had to dry out a lot of the sounds. We mixed it wet, so we just went back to the "wet" version of the soundtrack.
How much is the boon of director's-cut DVDs a vindication of the effort you made on a movie like this, that may not have been as successful as you hoped or expected?
Twohy: It wasn't built-in, because there was some fear that—I was pushing to do this all along, but the studio was resisting for a while, because they thought I would be then shooting two movies on the set and that would slow us down and cost them money. And maybe that's a valid fear. But when I finally got in and worked it, yeah, it does feel vindicating, when I look at those old scenes that were done before I paced the movie up. They had a richness, and you just understood the characters better, and that's what I most appreciate about it. Also, it's presenting a tougher film as well, because Pitch Black was a tough film.
How many of the featurettes and bonus materials were created in between the theatrical run and the home video release?
Twohy: Those people are involved, the home-video people, at a very early stage. In preproduction, they are talking to you about things they want to do, but you don't hear them; it's just "blah blah blah" because you're involved with so many other things making the movie. You only start to pay attention in post-production. But they were there all along; they were there on the set, they were the guys who were shooting behind-the-scenes video to make sure they had what they need. They're involved in the process throughout, but you can only pay attention to them in the last three or four months, really.
What materials were you most determined to get into the director's cut that were excised from the theatrical version?
Twohy: It was restoring the action, and particularly what we call "one step, one kill." We never invoked that to the MPAA, but that was the sequence during the escape from the prison, and the sun is rising behind them, and Vaako's men are in front of them, and they have to get into that hangar. It was shot as this great brutal affair, and it got watered down because of the PG-13 rating, and I was most interested in restoring that to its full thing. And we were able to do that. And then the Shirah of it all, the Kristen Lehman character, who explains Riddick better to us, and the Vaakos, going deeper with them and showing their sexuality and how they operate—how she manipulated him to get where she wanted, which was to the throne. Those in full just really work well to me.
With the commercial potential of this DVD release, what possibility is there for future installments of the Riddick film series?
Twohy: A lot of people are watching this release eagerly to see how well it performs on DVD, because we know now that DVDs make more money than the theatrical release of the movie; it's more important to the studios' bottom line. We know that the director's cut will probably sell 70 percent of these units, so people are going to be judging it a lot on this release, as they did on Pitch Black, strangely enough. We did a director's cut on that, and it wasn't until four years after we released Pitch Black that we were in a position to launch a sequel to it. So it may take that long. If it does take that long, so be it, and we will continue the adventures of Riddick. If it doesn't happen, we will be making other films in the meantime.
How tough is it to revisit your film and record an audio commentary?
Twohy: I always have dissatisfaction with my films. Any time I see them, I go straight to the stuff that isn't right, and I beat myself up; I can't even see the good stuff. But, that said, it is actually nice to kick back and watch the film with the actors and relive the better days on the set, because every set has good days, and every set has bad days, but it was a fun experience laying down the commentary. It always is. That's like the real premiere for me. Premieres aren't fun at all; they're tension-filled. But when you kick back with the actors and you can laugh at yourself, you're laughing at tense moments like I did on a couple of occasions with Karl; when we did the commentary we were laughing about that tension on the set. That was healthy thing.
Were there any revelations by the actors about the production or finished film that surprised you?
Twohy: Oh, yeah. Karl says one time he was shooting a scene with the second unit, and I went over to bless the scene, and I spent all of my time dealing with the extra who was standing next to him, not to Karl. I was assuming, because it was an easy scene for Karl, he didn't need any leadership in that moment, but he brought it up in the commentary and said, "You spent your whole time talking to the extra! What was that all about?" I never knew he felt that way until it came out.
