Kenneth Lonergan Reflects On Director’s Cuts & Battle To Edit ‘Margaret’

While Kenneth Lonergan has been on the interview circuit promoting his new Starz mini-series “Howard’s End,” he’s also seen renewed interest in his sophomore effort “Margaret.” The 2011 Anna Paquin starring film was notable for the protracted editing process, resulting in a years long battle between the filmmaker and the producers, who demanded his film not exceed a two and half hour running time. The result was a theatrical release the director didn’t support and Fox Searchlight half-heartedly put into cinemas.

However, Lonergan would finally get to realize his version with a limited Blu-ray release that saw his longer director’s cut included as a bonus feature. However, the filmmaker would be the first to admit that director’s cuts aren’t always the best versions of a movie.

“They’re all so different. ‘Apocalypse Now Redux,’ for instance, seems like this great creative experiment after the fact. I prefer the original ‘Apocalypse Now’ myself, but I can see that doing the longer version so many years after was a tremendously enjoyable experiment for Coppola – just to see what the film would look like if he put absolutely everything he shot back in it,” he told The Guardian. “But it doesn’t seem like the kind of director’s cut that represents the director’s original frustrated intention. It’s pretty well known that Ridley Scott was unhappy with the original release of ‘Blade Runner’ and that his subsequent versions were his attempts to get the film back to where he had wanted it to be all along. The extended edition of Margaret absolutely meets that description. It represents my best attempt to bring the film to life as I conceived and wrote it, and as I came to understand it as a director.”

When it comes to “Margaret,” Lonergan reflects on the attempts to wrangle his movie into a version that would please everybody. Even Martin Scorsese took a pass at the edit and “worked really hard on the cut; he tried and I thought found a way to maintain the integrity of the movie while keeping the running time down.” The Scorsese edit, alas, would not see theaters, even though both Lonergan and Fox Searchlight gave it a thumbs up, but producer Gary Gilbert balked — the Scorsese cut has a mere 12 minutes longer than the contracted 2 hours and 30 minutes. But was Lonergan being difficult? He doesn’t think so.

“I found myself focused on what felt like a new way of telling a story on film. One of the elements that felt very different from anything else I’d ever done or seen was this idea of letting the scenes play out much more as if they were happening in real time than is normal in a movie. In ‘Margaret’ I tried really hard to create a more naturalistic rhythm, so that even if it feels a bit slow at first, after a while you get absorbed into the story as if it was something you were really watching in real life,” he explained.

“But I certainly didn’t go to all that trouble just for the sake of being different. This particular story demanded this particular treatment. For one thing, the film is about a teenager who discovers that the center of the world resides not in herself but in everybody’s self equally,” Lonergan continued. “And since teenagers – and some grownups too – tend to see their lives in very dramatic and cinematic terms sometimes, it was very difficult trying to tell that story effectively through conventional or ordinary cinematic means. The structure of the film exemplifies the story. Whenever we tried to shorten the scenes to meet the demands for a shorter running time, the whole film fell apart.”

“For a long time I really thought that I could get the film down to two and a half hours and still be happy with it. But it turned out to be impossible,” he added. “The two-and-a-half hour version – the theatrical version – is my best effort to meet my contractual requirements while doing the best job I could, but I never considered it finished and I was never particularly happy with it. Because I was being sued for having supposedly failed to release a cut of my own, I wasn’t able to express any preference or dissatisfaction with the theatrical release publicly. But I wouldn’t have anyway, while the film was still in release; it would have been unethical, for one thing. I did express my unhappiness behind the scenes at great length, in a vain effort to secure the release of a version I liked better. Happily they approved the extended edition, which apart from some technical deficiencies which I hope to correct some day, is very close to the movie I wanted to make in the first place.”

The entire Guardian interview is insightful into how Lonergan works and specifically his relationship to the sprawling, complicated, and many ways best film he’s written and directed. Read it in full and be sure to check out his Hayley Atwell/Matthew Macfadyen mini-series on Starz this spring, which received positive reviews when it premiered in the UK last year.