![]() ![]() Much – though by no means all – of the gore was excised, but gone too were a string of tension- and story-building scenes. Within a week, he and editor Martin Hunter had hacked Event Horizon right down to the bone – the duration of the final cut ran to a lean 95 minutes. Suddenly anxious about a film they’d previously championed, Paramount demanded that the film be cut down by about half an hour, and Anderson, running out of time and left dazed by the toxic reaction at the screening, acquiesced. The screening was, Anderson admitted, “Disastrous. ![]() Cannibalism, evisceration, dismemberment… if Paramount was expecting a spooky, darkly fun rollercoaster ride for the summer multiplex crowd, Event Horizon clearly wasn’t it. It wasn’t the lack of polish that left audiences reeling, however, but rather the sheer level of the gore and violence. That edit ran to around 130 minutes, and it was still rough around the edges – digital wire removal hadn’t yet taken place on some of the zero-gravity sequences, several effects shots were missing, and the sound still had to be mixed. Then came the moment of reckoning: an initial screening where both Paramount executives and test audiences would see the assembly cut of Event Horizon for the first time. Anderson found himself working seven day weeks to get the film in the can and, just to add to the stress, he still had more shooting to complete during the first two weeks of editing. The initial cut of Event Horizon was therefore assembled over the course of four stressful weeks – an absurdly compressed schedule, especially for a film with so many complicated visual effects. The studio wanted Event Horizon ready for August 1997, giving Anderson just six weeks to edit the movie. But the deal came with a catch: with Titanic delayed, Paramount had a gap in its summer schedule. Paramount was willing to foot a generous budget, too – something in the region of $60 million. Anderson was given plenty of creative latitude to forge his own idea of what Event Horizon should look like, and the director quickly jetisoned the alien infestation of Philip Eisner’s original script and began imagining something far more gothic and diabolical. ![]()
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