Roger Deakins ‘sort of regrets’ we’ll never see four-hour cut of The Assassination of Jesse James
I have written extensively in the past about The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It’s one of my favourite movies.
Back in 2022 I spent a bit of time putting together a fairly authoritative ‘Everything we know about Andrew Dominik’s longer cut of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’.
It includes a link to a full script, screengrabs from cut scenes and quotes from both director Andrew Dominik and cinematographer Roger Deakins about a longer version. You can read that here.
Deakins has previously (back in 2019) urged the Criterion Collection to release the longer cut of the movie.
Last month, on his excellent ‘Team Deakins’ podcast alongside his partner James, Deakins spoke again about a longer cut — as long as four hours — that he ‘sort of regrets’ the public will never get to see.
Roger Deakins: “That’s the short version, you should have seen the long version which I actually love but it doesn’t exist anymore.”
Interviewer: “Is there any talk of it coming back?”
Roger: “No, no, Andrew is quite happy with this version but I’m sort of partly joking, we did see the first, the first cut, it wasn’t a rough cut it was a cut and it was like, it was nearly four hours wasn’t it? But it was really, it was really beautiful, I mean, most of what’s been taken out is after Jesse James is killed and it follows Bob Ford and it follows Zee, Jesse James’s wife, you go the funeral and someone tried to assassinate Zee at the funeral and it follows Frank, you know Sam Shepard, who took tourists around his ranch up in New England somewhere, they would pay to see the great outlaw living on this ranch and it’s all these little details of life and that, I mean I’m going on now, that’s what I love about the film; it brings in this whole sense of history and passing and the connections and, I sort of regret it’s not there but the book still exists, the book that the film is based on, The Assassination of Jesse James is very much what the film is, it’s all those sort of texturals of that period, it’s really interesting.”
James Deakins: “I also think that the studio had a hard time thinking well ‘what is the story after Brad Pitt dies?’, and yet that was in the title, that it was about Bob.”
Roger: “We built this, Creed was built up in the Rockies, I mean the whole town was built for the film and it’s amazing and there was this great big bridge over this canyon and Bob Ford had an affair with this other woman, this other girl, older woman and there were all these kind of existentialist conversations and anyway eventually she committed suicide off this bridge, I mean it’s all fact, it’s all true and it’s all that colour and nuance and I really kind of miss it myself.”
James: “And it really was a film about Bob and about this need to be famous and then getting it and it not giving him what he thought it would so it was a more interesting film that way.”
In the Q&A Roger admits he and Dominik did not always see eye to eye on the Jesse James shoot. It’s worth listening to (available anywhere you get your podcasts!).
Also, one last point from me, Dominik has previously been pretty clear he didn’t like the four-hour version and his favourite is only about five or 10 minutes longer than the ‘theatrical’ cut.
Further reading:
