Hitting North American theaters this Friday for one glorious week, Never Say Never: The Director's Fan Cut excises select footage and adds about 40 minutes of unseen scenes per fan request. Beliebers will undoubtedly benefit most from the special cut (New songs! New Biebs footage! More fan videos!), but the re-edit has greater implications for a film industry still hesitant to embrace all that digital movie-making has to offer: It suggests that director's cuts and re-releases are no longer exclusive to the jurisdiction of home video, but instead can (and, if Chu has his way, will) begin bleeding into the theatrical space, blurring the lines between traditional windows of consumption.
Read on for the full Movieline Interview with Jon M. Chu, recent Emmy recipient for his work on the digitally-released online dance series The LXD, about what's been added to Never Say Never, what the recut means for the future of digital filmmaking, when he predicts the death of film will occur (hint: Chu gives celluloid more time than Roger Deakins did, but just barely), and if Bieber deserved the media shellacking he got for his recent pro-life comments.
Did you see that James Earl Jones performed "Baby" on TV? You've helped spread Bieber Fever so very far.
[Laughs] That was awesome! First of all, The Lion King is one of my favorite movies of all time. And the fact that Mufasa was singing it was like a dream come true. My worlds, colliding!
So, you went and re-cut Never Say Never. Were you keeping this news under your hat the last time we spoke?
We knew there was a possibility but we didn't know it was actually going to happen. There was a bunch of stuff we wanted to put in the movie that we had to cut out; it's already long as it is, and we wanted to keep it short and sweet. But ultimately it came down to, we can do this -- we have 90 percent digital screens, we can actually do it the way we release things on the web, let's do it! We finished on Sunday.
When did you start re-editing?
We always had pieces that we'd cut out of the movie but we didn't actually start putting them back into the movie until maybe a week and a half before the movie came out.
You asked the Bieber fans what they wanted to see and used their responses to make your director's cut, but were you mindful at all of what critics had said about Never Say Never?
A little bit. [Laughs] I knew when critics said certain things, I went oh, we have that. We just didn't put them in because they didn't serve the essential part of our story. But now we can delve into it a little bit more -- Justin's father's side of the family, his brother and sister, which we really don't tap into in the movie. And a lot of that is because they weren't at Madison Square Garden, so there was no conclusion to their story, it was just hanging there. But now we're like, let's put it in -- it can just hang there and it's okay because this is the fan cut of the movie. So we do things like that. We added in songs when we felt [initially] that we had too many songs before in other versions. This time we can put those in. There are new videos that fans sent in, of themselves lip-syncing, which were always a part of the movie but just felt too long and we cut that at some point, but now we can put that in. We have hundreds more fans in it, which is really cool. And we got to shoot the premiere and integrated that into the movie.
Shooting inside the theater, filming fan reactions?
Inside the theater, some fans waving glowsticks, some fans coming out, going in, waiting in line... all that kind of stuff. We wanted to show what it meant to go see Never Say Never that first weekend. We didn't include many [celebrities]; we wanted as much Justin as we could get in this movie.
I'd imagine plenty of fans would want to see Selena Gomez arrive at the premiere wearing Bieber purple...
She was wearing that Bieber purple! She looked great that night. I was impressed.
To be re-cutting and re-releasing the entire film so soon after release -- do you have the sense that this is a pivotal moment that could change the way films are made and consumed?
I totally think so. It's weird because movie-making and especially movie theaters have always been so old-school, and it wasn't until 3-D that a lot of them were forced to have digital projectors and even digital distribution. This process, changing it to digital, changes everything. We've seen it in amateur photography, professional photography, music, in every walk of life, but now it's the movies' turn. And everyone's been really scared to play around with it. Paramount, to their credit, which was sort of a rebel studio back in the Robert Evans days -- to say to them now, what if we changed it up? What if we organically changed it to be what people wanted more of, and we didn't have to worry about the movie being too long and all this stuff. They were like, we have the ability; let's just try it! If there's any movie to try it on, this would be it.
Was the idea to recut the film yours, or did it come from the studio?
It was both. I always thought, why doesn't this happen? Not even like just to re-release a film three weeks after it comes out, but to be able to see a movie and see an alternate ending. I know the struggle with the studio and the director is always a give and take, but to see them close together I thought was always something that was possible. We had talked about it while we were cutting the movie; maybe that's something we release later, and we kept saying, 'DVD.' But DVD extras are not the same as they used to be. I don't sit there and watch DVDs anymore. But I thought to experience that same idea, only in a theatrical way, would be really cool. And we all sort of agreed that this would be a possibility, not knowing it would actually happen.
What do you think this means for the future of the original cut? When is a film finished?
I think the original cut is our cut of the movie. That is the gold standard for our movie -- it's the length we want, it's everything we wanted in a movie. We didn't cut the audience short in any way in releasing that movie. This is sort of the extra, fun version where we did all the things that didn't necessarily have to do with our main story and we just put them in. This is out for a week, and the original will always be the original, and that's the one people will see. This one is literally for the fans -- for the people who say, we want more of his friends! We want more songs!
And pranks, we hear. What kinds of shenanigans did you include in the new cut?
There are a lot of pranks in this version, but I don't want to give them away. They're pretty funny when you see them. But you know, he's just a kid running around. It's a variety of pranks.
Since our last conversation, the whole Rolling Stone interview controversy happened. You've done some press with Justin, and we know from the film that he's got a very protective circle around him. What's your take on his abortion comments, and do you consider that to be an appropriate line of questioning?
I definitely felt like some of the questions were a little inappropriate, but you know, he's a kid and he can voice his opinion on what he wants to voice, and if people ask him he can choose not to answer or to answer. He chose to answer it and that's fine. That's the best thing about Justin; he doesn't sugarcoat anything on his part. He will always tell you what he thinks, and I think that's admirable. I didn't read the full article -- I only read the excerpts. The corrected excerpts, which was kind of annoying. But I do think that he's growing up, and he's going to have to deal with a lot of those things as he grows, and judgment on his character or what he feels about politics and things like that can come in time. But he's 16 years old, about to be 17. So I'm sure things will change.
Congrats, by the way, on your digital Emmy for The LXD.
Thank you! It's fun to have people even watch The LXD because it's such a crazy, random idea. And I love all those guys and girls and that they get recognition for it. People all over the world and even outside the dance community are seeing storytelling with dance, so that's pretty cool.
Dance movies, 3D, digital experimentation and two Justin Bieber movies under your belt... you're kind of an overachiever, aren't you?
[Laughs] No, I don't think it's overachieving! I think Hollywood's just slow. I don't understand why we're all connected wirelessly via a little machine that goes in our pocket, to everybody in the world, and you have to have reels for a movie. There are these six reels that get in my way, and I'm like, that doesn't feel natural. All these film people are like, 'No, it's part of the process, blah blah blah.' I'm like, screw that. In five years it's not going to be a part of the process, and all of the people who say that are going to be gone. So why not change now? To me it's not even cutting edge, it just is.
The Director's Fan Cut hits theaters February 25 in Canada and the U.S.