SPOILER ALERT – DON’T READ THIS UNLESS YOU’VE SEEN "RUNNING SCARED"
Is There an Alternate Ending?: Without giving anything away, Kramer said he never shot an alternate ending (this will mean much more if you’ve seen the film). “I get asked that question a lot and it was the only ending. It’s interesting. In retrospect I’ve questioned whether that was the approach. But you know what? In the moment in watching that movie it’s such a brutal sort of…the audience just gets thrashed around and dragged through this. I always felt as a filmmaker, and I knew I made the right decision again last night [at a screening in San Franciso], that it’s so intense an experience to just end up in a dark place where for the sake of being very noir about it or something like that, I just think would have worked against this film because of how much you’re rooting for this guy and the situation. Enough people, enough blood gets spilled and it’s kind of like a dark fairy tale.
I do think it ends kind of well but probably with scars. We don’t know where that relationship is going and a lot of things, so it really was the only ending. But it could have worked definitely in another way and it was just… I know a lot of people probably think, ‘Well this is the studio forcing me to take that approach,’ but I do tend to be a kind of a resolved ending kind of guy. You know if, and I say this, if a certain revolution was not made toward the end of the movie then I think a darker ending might have been more fitting for it.”
