Just yesterday we reported that Lars von Trier’s latest film, Nymphomaniac, was being edited from its current five and a half hour runtime down to a more “commercially viable” four hours, and that the only way to see the full version would be at next year’s Cannes Film Festival. Today, the film’s producer, Peter Aalbeck Jensen, denied that, adding to the speculation that this longer cut may still see the light of day.
In an interview with Danish film magazine Filmmagasinet Ekko, Jensen said that there won’t be two separate cuts of the film (the rumored hardcore and softcore cuts), and that von Trier has abandoned the notion that he will have final cut on the project altogether.
“The short version is against Lars’ own will, but he accepts it because he understands market mechanisms,” Ekko quotes Jensen as saying. “You cannot make a film for more than 60 million kroners (about $11 million) that is so lengthy. Five and a half hour is so extreme that it reduces market value so radically that investors would have felt they had bought a pig in a poke.”
He then shot down the rumors that the film would be playing at Cannes and said that the version released in cinemas across Denmark will be the same one sent to all international distributors (with “all the explicit sex intact and in focus”), leaving it to the distributors in various countries to decide what they want to censor and blur out.
The move to not show the film at Cannes is not surprising considering von Trier’s recent history at the festival, so the best we can do now is hope that the inevitable Blu-Ray release next year features the full five and a half hour cut, because we all know that whichever version hits North America, it’s going to be heavily edited.
Tell us, are you interested in seeing a five and a half hour cut of Nymphomaniac? Let us know in the comments section below.