Reshoots are a fight few films can win.
ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD COULDN’T FIX ERRONEOUS RESHOOT NARRATIVE
One imagines Ridley Scott must be very busy this week. The director’s latest picture, the J. Paul Getty kidnapping drama All the Money in the World, is poised to descend upon theatres in North America on December 22 — and, with only one month standing between him and that firm release date, he has elected to replace his movie’s star.
Kevin Spacey is embroiled in what you’d have to call rather bitter controversy. And so Scott, in a drastic and perhaps unprecedented bid to distance his film from the cause célèbre, will scrupulously excise him, and is as I write these words reshooting Spacey’s scenes with Christopher Plummer. Nobody knows how the reconstructed film will turn out. But it seems clear that whatever the result, the change is all anybody will talk about.
“Reshoots should be mandatory,” said director Andrew Stanton in a New Yorker profile in 2011, while the former Pixar genius was endeavouring to overhaul his live- action debut, John Carter. “Honestly, if we had the time and everyone was available, I’d do another reshoot after this one.” Art, Stanton believes, “is messy” — and the mess isn’t always easy to clean. If you shoot a film, screen it for a test audience, and find parts of it aren’t working, as Disney did with John Carter, it only makes sense to go back and fix it. The only problem — notwithstanding the mild logistical headache — is perception. If the press catch wind of reshoots, the notoriety can be insurmountable. “They’ ll f--- ing nail you,” John Carter star Taylor Kitsch said at the time. “Like the movie is doomed.”
This crisis is not unique to John Carter, muchpublicized and sneeringly discussed as its extensive reshoots happened to be. Indeed this anti- reshoot stigma surfaces any time a Hollywood production of note begins filming again once it’s wrapped. The fiveweek renovation of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story that bestowed it an entirely new ending was an unvarying fixture of the movie’s reviews, many of them negative. News that Suicide Squad had been drastically altered with new material made it an even easier target for vociferous criticism — and claims that it seemed incoherent had damning evidence in those reshoots. And hardly a single sentence was uttered about World War Z that did not address how much of it had been reshot after poor audience testing: whatever problems it seemed to have could be blamed with certainty on all this fussy retooling.
Of course All the Money in the World is an extreme case. A new star is more difficult to coordinate than a new ending by several or- ders of technical magnitude, and the looming December release date lends the process an urgency that’s extraordinary. On the other hand, the challenge for Scott has been somewhat overstated. Variety reports that the Plummer reshoots are expected to take “eight to 10 days,” and that most of Spacey’s scenes “involve him interacting with only a few other actors or featured solo shots” that will be relatively easy to recreate. Co- stars Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg had two weeks of reshoots written into their contracts as a matter of course. Scott himself, meanwhile, is well- suited to the demands of the strenuous production, having recently honed “a reputation f or bringing in pictures and on time and on budget.”
More difficult are the back-end obstacles. Spacey’s scenes must be reshot, but so too must much of the film be submitted to the rigours of editing and postproduction, hurriedly colour-timed, sound- mixed, and streamlined into the final cut. DCPs and prints must be prepared for theatrical distribution; more pressingly, screener DVDs for year- end awards consideration must be pressed and mailed out immediately. A month also leaves little time for marketing: Variety further reports that “the creation of new trailers, posters, in- theatre standees, and additional advertising campaigns could total millions once rush fees and takedown costs are added up.” It takes time to i mpress an upcoming movie onto the public consciousness. All the Money in the World isn’t only racing against the clock — it’s fighting against the sudden infamy of its hasty reshoots.
That is a fight few films can win. The irony is that reshoots are common, and in all but a few cases herald nothing dire. People have it in their heads that reshoots are a confession of guilt on the part of the filmmakers or the studio: that by undertaking such changes they are admitting the failure of the movie as it was initially conceived. The reality is that some things could work better, could be done better, with a few improvements or additional scenes. It’s only in the response to a retooled film that one sees the devastating effect. However negligibly the reshoots actually altered the finished product, the reviews treat them as hallmarks of failure — the reshoot as cardinal sin. It’s inevitable that whether All the Money in the World turns out fine with Plummer or would have been better with Spacey left in, it will be doomed to face the consequences of the reshoot narrative.
Months after the first John Carter adjustments, Stanton mounted a second set of reshoots: he shot a few expository scenes to help clarify confusing plot points, and a tender moment between his leads to better develop their romance. But as Kitsch predicted, John Carter was doomed. Critics could not seem to make it through a negative review without emphasizing the film’s tumultuous, lengthy production, its reams of reshoots and changes to the story’s scale and scope. They complained that it was confusing, misshapen, rough — Stanton’s adjustments had meant to refine and even simplify a complicated movie, but his efforts seemed to critics to merely contribute to the disarray.
The reshoot narrative proved inescapable. David Denby, writing in The New Yorker, echoed Stanton’s belief about art unintentionally with his two- word assessment: John Carter was “a mess.”
THE IRONY IS THAT RESHOOTS ARE COMMON.