Charles De Lauzirika Interview #2

Ridgetop: Just out of curiosity were there ever any other names you suggested for the Director’s Cut or the Assembly Cut? Or was that always just a decision for marketing and it was like “we’re going with this”?

I just thought it’d be called Special Edition, the same way it was previously. I think someone rightly so felt like because of the work we put into the audio, especially bringing back Sigourney Weaver and Lance Henriksen and Charles Dance – that was a lot of work – that maybe it’d be better to give it a different designation.

I was not privy to that conversation because I was elsewhere working on other parts of the project. I don’t even remember exactly because I remember one phone call I had where I questioned “are you sure you want to call it Assembly Cut because it’s not really an Assembly Cut, it’s the same cut as before, it’s just better audio” and at that point it had already been locked in in terms of menus and packaging. The thing you have to understand is a lot of decisions are made very early on. That’s why a lot of studio people don’t like it when you come up with something new or some change or some revelation late in the game because that can derail so much of the work they’ve already done in terms of menus and packaging and other things they have to generate at the studio.

So somehow somebody got through the pipeline far enough that it was too late to change so it’s not so much that it was a mistake, it was just that there’s so many pieces. There’s so many moving pieces on these projects that something like that I’m surprised doesn’t happen more often. That’s just one thing I wish we could have maybe locked in earlier versus assuming that was something to call it. But again it wasn’t my call and who knows why I got there that late in the game.

Ridgetop: Both Scott and Cameron supervised the alternate edition of their films and you’d had some contact with Jeunet for what you were doing on Resurrection. However, Alien 3 continues to be a point of contention for David Fincher but you reached out to him and very nearly spoke to him twice. Could you tell us about the efforts you went through to get Fincher involved on the Assembly Cut.

Well first I believe it was Sven at Fox who reached out to his office. I think what Sven told me was the phrase that came back was “it’s not my movie, do whatever you want with it” or something like that. So that’s where we started and then as we got deeper and deeper into it and we started discovering more and more things. Then we found this lost cut of the film. I wrote a letter to him and basically explained what we’re doing and why I was so passionate about it and “wouldn’t it be great if you came back in and participated. You could change the film however you want.”

Basically Fox… I don’t know if they would have followed through on this entirely but I hope they would have, which was Sven told me anything Fincher wants to do, they were happy to help him do it. I think the thought back from him was, again I don’t remember if he actually said this or this is just something that came up conversation with other people but the idea was “well, why didn’t you just let him do that first time when he made the movie”.

I think another phrase that came out of it was “the only way to make a director’s cut of Alien 3 is to burn the negative of the current film and let Fincher go back and start over and completely create a whole new film.” So that’s the type of mindset we were working with in terms of trying to reach out to Fincher, realizing the resistance that was going to be there. Plus you don’t want to antagonize the guy because he obviously had a terrible experience on it – famously. At some point you have to stop bothering him but we kept trying. Then around that same time, I was producing a Special Edition DVD of the movie One Hour Photo which was directed by Mark Romanek and Mark is a friend of Fincher and works with him.

They had office space together I think for a while and I asked Mark “would you ask Fincher, tell him about what we’re doing. Ask him if he would at least maybe just talk to me” and he said he’d try and then I don’t know, a couple weeks later I come back the office after lunch. There’s a voicemail and it’s David Fincher on the voicemail and it literally sounded pretty much like this. It was “Charles… this is David Fincher… I hear you want to talk to me… about… Alien 3” and it just cut out.

That was it. That was the entirety of the thing and you could tell he was so pained to even mention the title Alien 3. So I called back and I called his assistant. We never reconnected so that was one time and then the second time was I went out for lunch at this place called the Poquito Mas where our offices were. Fincher was there having lunch but he was there with like two or three other people and they look like they’re having an intense conversation. So for me to just waltz up and say “hey I’m working on Alien 3″ I don’t think that would’ve gone over very well.

So again I tried to give him some room and I went outside and I called the guys back at the office. “Fincher is here! Should I go talk to him?” They’re like “yes, go talk to him!” And by the time I went back in, he was already gone so I feel like that was just the universe telling me leave the guy alone so we did. But again, we were always trying and we would occasionally have very minimal back-channel communications with his office but again minimal and nothing that was I think super impactful on the cut.

It was just more like I just polite back-channel conversations. Nothing worth studying further than that. I mean people love to read into this thing “oh man, it was so close. Fincher’s doing this.” It’s it wasn’t close at all. It was just we tried. He was not interested. We kept trying a little bit but at some point, it was just like “okay he’s just gonna get annoyed if we keep trying to push him on this.”

Ridgetop: When it became apparent that Fincher wasn’t going to be involved with the cut, how did you decide what direction to take with the Assembly Cut? Had you already come across any editing documentation and line scripts or was that later in the process?

We looked through everything that Fox had in their archive and their vaults and a line script would be helpful. Notes would be helpful but ultimately we found the Holy Grail which was we found an actual cut. Like we found the actual earliest longest most different cut of the film that Fox had that included all the stuff on the surface of the Clemens, all stuff for the Ox, all the stuff with Golic. All of that, we found in this cut so it was sort of like, “this is it.”

Why look further in terms of the creative intent when you actually have the product of that creative intent which was an early version of the film that Fincher and Terry Rawlings had generated regardless of whatever interference they had from the studio or producers. This was something they produced. So we looked at it and we determined “okay so this is viable in terms of it’s a full story. There’s no big missing pieces. It makes sense. It’s really cool. There’s a lot of great stuff fans haven’t seen before. Now we have to go about trying to find the negative for all of the new bits.”

Sometimes the negative was not found but we found alternates that were close enough. So, if you were to look at one cut versus the final cut of it, you probably couldn’t tell unless you’re super nitpicky that there were any minor differences because again it was so minuscule. So, we started basically conforming our new version to that cut that we found. The only big creative decisions that we had to make on our own without Fincher’s involvement was visual effects.

The remaining visual effects that had to be completed for this all to work and that’s where we talked a little bit with Terry Rawlings. We talked a little bit with Richard Edlund and Richard Ullman had this binder that had some storyboards in it and some notes. Like all visual effects. No, it’s not editorial notes. and how that was helpful was to see what the shot was. What the frame was they had in mind for these unfinished visual effects shots. Now some were in process. They were already being worked on.

Some were just elements that they had captured but they hadn’t composited together. Others completely had to be created from whole cloth but again because we had storyboards, because we had reference… I’m not saying it was easy but we had a clear path forward in terms of finishing what had already been in progress back in 1991 or whatever was when they generated this cut. My point was, let’s try to find a historical document or artifact or something that basically showed us what they were working on.

What was this cut going to be at this earlier stage of the film of the post-production process? It wasn’t us thinking “oh we have all the dailies of the film, let’s kind of cut this together any way we want.” I’m always against that. I always feel like it should always originate with the filmmakers. If we have to polish and finish up a few things to get it there, that’s okay just so long as it comes from the same source which in this case is the filmmakers.

We didn’t have interpret handwritten notes. We didn’t have to interpret much of anything. It was mostly just visual effects shots and some music and that was kind of it really in terms of just finishing something that had been like… I feel like in terms of the picture edit probably like 80 or 90 percent where the final version of the Assembly Cut ended up. So, it’s really almost already there just conforming to that.

Aaron: So how early on in the process did you come across this unknown cut? There weren’t like any points where you were working off the VHS workprint? Was it an early find that just made the road to restoration easier? Or was there any sort of period where it was you having to maybe think about doing this off your own creative energies?

So just imagine you start the job with the studio and they start asking “what do you need?” And you start going through inventory lists. We had multiple people working on this and basically Fox sent over boxes and boxes and boxes of everything they’ve got so you have to open the box. See what’s the inventory for each box and then you have to like look at it all. So that was a process and I don’t remember exactly how early on it was since when we first started but it was probably a few weeks at least I’m gonna assume.

But in one of those boxes was this lost cut of the film which we had not known about. Only because of, as you point out, the workprint bootleg tape that have been going around was different. We weren’t getting any kind of guidance from Fincher understandably. Terry Rawlings was just very supportive and just basically tried to help us. But again he’s worked on so many films and so much time had passed so basically just kind of like a spiritual guidance more than anything else so you couldn’t say “oh and box 35, that’s what the lost cut is.” It’s like that’s not what happened. So yeah once that cut was found, then it was a clearer path. It wasn’t totally clear but was a clearer path forward to finishing.

Ridgetop: So, let’s fast forward a little bit to 2010 and the Alien Anthology is released on blu-ray. Yet again we were blown away by the new transfers and the swanky new menus in Alien 3‘s menu. You offer an explanation for that ever-bothersome mysterious Alien egg. Was there ever any temptation to try and fix that in the Assembly Cut especially given that the egg itself seemed to have been filmed during the LA reshoots? How do you head-canon the egg?

I don’t think it’s possible to actually real-canon the egg. There was never ever an instance of “let’s fan edit this lost cut into something that makes sense for fans or us or whatever.” So no, there was no temptation at all to try to manipulate an existing cut of the film to address this notorious continuity issue that fans have been up in arms about for so many years.

We thought it’d be kind of fun – again me doing the fun little nerdy thing for menus and whatever – to try to address this. I spoke with Raleigh Stewart who designed those beautiful menus and I mentioned to him I said “there is this one thing in Alien 3 since you’re doing these schematic breakdowns of Alien and Aliens, you see Sulaco, you see Nostromo. You see all these things that are very schematic driven and surveillance video kind of driven.”

I said “why not let’s take a stab at the egg for Alien 3.” I suggested use some clips from Aliens of the Queen with the egg sac and detaching and then the egg sac being deposited. So, do that and he did. I thought he did a fantastic job and I love the fact that of all four menu sets, that’s the only one that really breaks menu to tell a story where it’s sort of like each one is kind of color themed. Like Alien kind of green, Aliens kind of blue, Resurrection was kind of brown if I recall but Alien 3 is kind of amber golden or whatever but then it goes like kind of warning chevrons and alerts come up and it’s like oh there’s like an Alien presence.

It really draws your attention to the menu so that was a lot of fun but yeah, we talked about this. There’s no way to explain how that egg got on the Sulaco or even into the EEV. So that’s when you kind of have to start asking yourself like “Is there is a middle ground? Can you meet the fans halfway and give them a little something that makes it kind of fun even though it doesn’t get all the way there to being a real answer?” I also believe Alien 3… some people like to pretend it’s a hypersleep nightmare of Ripley’s, it didn’t actually happen.

I think it actually happened in the canon of the story. It’s just that it is a more nightmarish film than the other two. I think all of them are nightmares frankly they’re all the stuff of dreams. There’s kind of a dream logic sometimes to how it all works but when you come off of a real nuts and bolts film like Aliens which is like really easy to kind of sink your teeth into Aliens because there isn’t much to interpret beyond the drama and the character mistakes of the characters are facing and the mission.

It’s very like black and white in terms of what you need to understand in Aliens whereas Alien 3 is like almost more like a David Lynch film in a way. It’s really kind of like there’s a lot of different things interpret. It is like a nightmare. It has a dream logic to it and I think if you try to apply the Aliens black and white sensibility to the Alien 3 dream logic, those two are always going to clash. There’s really no way to mesh those two together and also obviously the real answer is somewhere in the making of Alien 3, someone just decided it doesn’t matter, let’s not even explain it, we’ll do it so fast, no one will care. Even I was like “Wow, where did that egg come from?”.