The latest movie to get the director's cut treatment is Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam drama, Apocalypse Now, which Coppola has re-edited and remixed, extending the original 153-minute running time by about an hour. "The film audience today is more sophisticated and more tolerant," Coppola believes. "We felt now that some of the real unusual things we had in the original cut would bring it back to a level of avant gardeness and length that it needed."
The director discovered sections of the score - written with his late father, Carmine - that needed new music. "We found some scraps of paper in my father's stuff, some sketches," he says. "In particular, we found two parts, one very romantic, the other for the death of the Laurence Fishburne character. Using these was like working with my father again, across the great divide."
AT 79, Richard Farnsworth was the oldest actor ever to receive an Oscar nomination for best actor, when he was nominated for The Straight Story last spring. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, the actor committed suicide at his New Mexico ranch last weekend. Born in 1920, he was 17 when he got his first movie job, riding a horse in the Marx Brothers comedy, A Day at the Races, and beginning his career as a stuntman who doubled for, among many others, Roy Rogers, Gary Cooper, Joel McCrea and Henry Fonda.
He switched to chariot-racing in The Ten Commandments and was the double for Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, which prompted Farnsworth to comment: "I had real skinny legs. I looked like a crane in that short skirt. I didn't look like a gladiator."
After working for decades as a stuntman, he began to land acting roles and received his first Oscar nomination in 1979, cast as a ranch hand in Comes a Horseman. In 1982, he finally got his first leading role, memorably playing a bank robber released after 33 years in jail in The Grey Fox, which earned him the Canadian Genie award for best actor. Roles followed in The Natural, Rhine- stone, The Two Jakes and Misery before David Lynch cast Farnsworth as the dignified, ailing man travelling by lawnmower to reconcile with his estranged brother in The Straight Story. It was the performance of his career - and an unforgettable swansong.
The delightful Stephen Daldry movie, Billy Elliot, has collected the first of what may well be many awards. The movie, which stars Jamie Bell as a Durham schooboy who switches from boxing to ballet, won both the jury and the audience awards at the 11th Dinard Festival of British Cinema. It was placed third in the People's Choice awards at the recent Toronto Film Festival. And it now looks like Daldry may well emulate his London theatre colleague Sam Mendes (who directed American Beauty) by landing a number of key Oscar nominations for Billy Elliot in the spring.
From an initial entry of close on 100, three projects have been selected as the winners in the latest round of the Film Base/ RTE awards. They are Beached (Karl Golden, writer-director; Martina Niland, producer), Great Party (Sinead O'Brien, director; Rachel Kilfeather, writer-producer), and Crowning Glory (Ronan O'Donoghue, writer-director; Iseult Howell, producer).
Film Base will conduct a number of courses over the autumn/winter period, dealing with independent film-making, acting for screen, scripting and shooting on DV (digital video), and a practical workshop for actors, writers and directors conducted by director Vinny Murphy. For further information, call 01-6796716.