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Few actors have had as diverse a career asBilly Bob Thornton. Since breaking out in the ‘90s, he’s demonstrated a knack for playing gruff curmudgeons with a heart, and he’s one of the rare actors who can effortlessly pull offdrama and comedyequally well. Films likeMonster’s Ballshowcase his ability to beautifully project internalized emotion, theFargominiseries proved that he could be genuinely terrifying, andBad Santashowed him at his most laugh-out-loud funny.
Yet most people don’t realize that Thornton actually hit the big leagues as a director. His 1996 filmSling Bladeproved an out-of-nowhere critical and commercial success, winning him an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. But his sophomore directorial feature,All the Pretty Horses, aWesternfilm, bombed at the box office and with critics, and the experience left him so miserablehe switched to acting full-time. Despite this, as many outsiders and several involved in the film’s production have attested, the mediocre film audiences saw was once much better, and his original vision had been significantly cut down and compromised.
All the Pretty Horses Faced Heavy Studio Meddling
All the Pretty Horseswas highly anticipated at the time, as it was the first film adaptation of a work by Cormac McCarthy, and initially, Mike Nichols (The Graduate) was courted to direct it. He passed on the offer, and the job instead went to Billy Bob Thornton, who’d recently broken out as an actor and director withSling Blade,arguably still his best performance. His original draft of the script was slavishly faithful to the novel, about a young cowboy in Mexico who falls in love with a wealthy rancher’s daughter, but he faced problems as soon as production started.
While his eyes were set on casting Penélope Cruz as Alejandra, the rancher’s daughter, studio executives tried to push for Natalie Portman. While Thornton stuck to his guns and got his desired actress, this incident only proved a harbinger of bad things to come. Thornton’s first cut reportedly clocked in at almost four hours, and the resulting clashes to cut down the running time led international studio backer Columbia to give Miramax the domestic distribution rights.
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Some believe that Miramax co-chair, now-disgraced andconvicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein, sought to retaliate against Thornton, who’d refused his demands to make any cuts toSling Blade. He demanded over an hour of footage cut, bringing the run time to under two hours. Additionally, he mis-marketed the picture, leaning into the romantic subplot to appeal to wider audiences. In contrast, Thornton had intended to stay true to the story’s core as a coming-of-age tale, where young John Grady Cole learns that his idealism of adventure doesn’t match up with the uncompromising nature of the larger world.
Cole’s actor,Matt Damon, wasvocal about his disdain for Weinstein’s marketing. As he elaborated in Peter Biskind’s 2004 bookDown and Dirty Pictures, “On the poster, they put, “Some passions can never be tamed,” which is exactly what the movie’s not about. There is no love story, it’s about unrequited love, it’s about life being bigger than these people and just crushing the passion out of them.”
All the Pretty Horses Was Originally Much Longer
In the years since the release, more details about Thornton’s original version of the film have come to light, as well as the way certaincreative decisions were forced on him. Damon detailed in aPlayboyinterview in 2012, “Everybody who worked onAll the Pretty Horsestook so much time and cared so much. As you know, the Cormac McCarthy book is set in 1949 and is about a guy trying to hold on to his old way of life. The electric guitar became popular in 1949, and the composer Daniel Lanois got an old 1949 guitar and wrote this spare, haunting score. We did the movie listening to his score. It informed everything we did. We made this very dark, spare movie, but the studio wanted an epic with big emotions and violins.”
Additionally, shortly after Weinstein’s fall from grace in 2017, film critic Matt Zoller Seitz outlined onTwitter/Xhow he’d once spoken with Thornton about his original cut. The almost four-hour version, he’d explained, was an assembly cut, which he had never intended to screen for executives until Weinstein forced him to. He elaborated, “Meanwhile,the cut that Thornton DID approve has never been released, in part because Harvey Weinstein himself misunderstood (on purpose, probably, given his experience in the industry) what an assembly cut is, and confused the public to mutilate and bury Thornton’s film.”
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Thornton himself has corroborated this, explaining that the 3 hr 50 min version ofAll the Pretty Horseswas a rough assembly of almost everything they’d shot and that his director’s cut clocks in at 2 hr 42 min, making it possibly one of the mostdrastically different director’s cuts out there. He also explained that he owns a VHS copy of his preferred version and that Miramax once offered to release it on DVD with Lanois’ original score. But he declined the proposal out of respect for Lanois: “Dan felt like, ‘if my music wasn’t good enough for them to put in the movie, then I don’t know if I wanna put it in there on the DVD,’ so I stood by him. I’m not gonna ever go side against an artist.”
Would All the Pretty Horses Have Been Better if It Was Longer?
But would this longer version have improved the film significantly? It’s hard to say, as opinions here differ. Cormac McCarthy himself, who was disappointed in the final cut, told theWall Street Journalin 2009 thathe felt Thornton should’ve gone for a “pick-and-choose” approachto better capture the story’s essence rather than adapt the book front to back (it’s for this reason many are still skeptical afilm adaptation of his masterpiece,Blood Meridian, can work).
Matt Damon disagreed, telling Peter Biskind, “It was like if you bake a souffle and somebody wants you to make it half the size, and you just chop the thing in half and try to mold it and make it look like that was how you made it to begin with. It can’t work.” In any case, Thornton’s original cut seems to be a fascinating holy grail of lost media, and if he ever changes his mind and decides to show it to the world one day, we’d be excited to see it, regardless of its final quality.All the Pretty Horsesis streaming onTubi.
