Besides
Superman, director Richard Donner’s films include the Lethal Weapon
series, Scrooged, and The Omen. His TV credits are a list of just about
every memorable show made in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s,
including The Rifleman, The Twilight Zone, Get Smart, The Fugitive, The
Man from U.N.C.L.E., Gilligan’s Island, Kojak, and The Six Million
Dollar Man. -- J.K.
Why reconstruct Superman rather than just cleaning and repairing it?
Well, this is 2001. In 2020 I assume there’s going to be a whole
different look, sound, and approach, and we will view this present period
much as we now view the ’70s -- that it was the Dark Ages. Maybe
we’ll be able to take an old image and digitally rework it into 3-D.
Who knows? But if you’re going to rerelease a film, why not bring
it up to date and make it as contemporary as is humanly possible?
Both the original cut and the new one are yours . . .
Yesssssiree, bub.
So why the change of heart? Why make the new cut 8 minutes longer?
I was scared stiff when I made that movie. I just wanted to keep cutting
down and cutting down, making it as short as I could because I didn’t
know how it was going to hold. The producers wouldn’t allow me to
test the film before an audience. They thought Warner Bros. was going
to steal the print from them! Ridiculous thing, but that’s what they
did. Supposedly the only one who had any objectivity was me, and that’s
stupid because I didn’t. Cutting is usually based on the emotion
of the moment or the instinct of the moment. The 8 minutes that went back
in are things that I was probably oversensitive to. But Superman belongs
to everybody.
We had John Williams’s music for it all, because everything had
been scored apart from two little pieces. We took other sections of John’s
score that I hadn’t used and put them in there, and it seemed to
play. Hope to God that he still talks to me after that.
You’ve got to really go back in time when you’re re-editing
a film, though. You can’t just cut it the way you would today, because
that picture was right for its time. We didn’t alter the sound mix
beyond the original concept. We just made it stronger, better, cleaner.
Otherwise, it would be like going back and redrawing the comic books.
