Kevin Smith Plans to Re-Edit Red State
Posted 02.03.11 by Ryan
Writer-director Kevin Smith premiered his penultimate movie Red State at the Sundance Film Festival last month to mixed reviews; some good, some bad. THR called Red State "cleverly contrarian enough to get a rise out of almost any audience" while HitFix called it "a failure on almost every level". Red State marks Smith's first attempt at a horror movie and follows a group of friends who end up encountering a fundamentalist preacher (Michael Parks).
Smith is planning to distribute the movie himself, touring the movie to several cities before the it's released in October. However, despite the lack of studio pressure, Smith admitted to BleedingCool that he feels he wants to make some changes and plans to re-edit the movie.
The movie that I showed the cast and crew screening at wrap, two days after we wrapped, I showed them the whole movie, that’s the movie I pretty much showed at Sundance with end credits attached to it ... I loved the movie, we knew what we were doing in terms of editing it, it was a beautiful running time and stuff ... and then we go to Sundance and I sit in the back and for the first time I get to watch it with 1200 people who have no involvement with the movie, no involvement with me...
So I’m sitting there going "Okay, there’s something I thought would work, didn’t play with the audience", "Something I thought would get a nice reaction just kinda laid there", "Boy, that played way bigger than I ever thought it would, maybe we should shape something around there" and just found some time to take out ... if I had to guess I’m saying five to ten minutes somewhere in there.
And [producer] Jon [Gordon] fought me on it. Jon was just like "Why bother dude, we’re our own bosses, nobody’s telling you to take it out," like back in the old days Harvey would be "I love it! Take ten minutes out," no direction at all, just take the time out, so John’s like "We don’t have to do that now, we don’t have to really cut the movie at all" and I said "Yeah, but I’m a filmmaker first and foremost, dude, and I want the movie to play as gangbusters as possible" and if the length of Parks' speech is making anybody remotely go "Maybe that speech is a little long"... I want them to love Parks as much as I do, so for me, right, I’m an editor, you kill your babies every step of the way as an editor.
Red State opens October 19.