The good news was I was able to get the financiers to pay for that, and I was able to do some experimentations that would later aid me to complete the film. Things with the mix, I knew for sure the difference between linear and non-linear was a big difference, and now I’d done this blow up from digi-beta and it just looked awful. I hated it. And I was able to see how certain dissolves would play out and I was able to see my six reels put together for the first time.
When you make a film, you can’t sit there and watch your film from beginning to end because the phone rings, you want to change something, you take notes – you can’t do it. The only way to do it is to organize a screening somewhere for anybody. And you watch it and because there’s other people there, you stay quiet. You don’t do anything and you feel any doubts you have enhance themselves, anything you like enhances itself. You don’t really care what people think. People hated the first screening of “Buffalo 66,” or they loved one time a screening when I thought there was still problems with the film. But whatever it does, it brings it out of you. It really does… Most filmmakers do that 100 times. With “Buffalo 66,” I went from the rough-cut to the finished film in a few days of editing. I did the same thing with “Brown Bunny.” Just a few days of seeing exactly what was wrong.
To answer the question, finally, I cut out a sequence between Utah and Colorado that was about another 7 minutes longer of driving. So from when he gets up in that motel and drives, till he gets into the night and into Bonneville in the morning, there was about 7 more minutes of just landscape and pulling over and putting his sweater on, and washing the car. And when you saw it in the reel on its own, it played beautifully. I will release that reel as a film, as a methodical film of somebody on a journey. It’s just beautiful, it just feels so real. In the film, I felt that it distracted from the film’s continuity. The film’s continuity sort of stalled there for a moment, so I cut that 7 minutes out.
The racing scene used to be another three or four laps longer and I physically couldn’t make it shorter for Cannes because I needed this digital technique later on. I needed a higher resolution scan because one of my cameras – if you notice at the opening of the race, there’s edge fogging. There’s flaring on the edge of the film, sort of distorted film. Then when the bike comes around the first curve, the camera switches to another angle and it stays on that angle the whole time. That’s because my camera broke. The side camera broke, that’s why it’s flaring like that in the first shot of the movie. So I had to use one camera for that whole race. And the way that I made the 15 lap race into an 8 lap race for Cannes, then eventually to a 4 lap race for the final movie, was by high-res scanning and moving in and doing a sort of seamless jump cut. So the race was 4 minutes longer. The Utah scene was 7 minutes, and then there was… I cut one other thing. Oh, the end. I cut off the end. I cut out the fake, ridiculous end.
Do you think it’s a better movie?
There’s one cut of “Buffalo 66” that’s 18 seconds longer. I almost locked picture, then I just made one more pass through the film and took out 18 seconds. I can’t bear the 18 second longer version of the film. I can’t bear it. It’s gloomy, it kills me. It’s like a million pins poking me. However, if you saw the 20 minute longer version of “Buffalo 66,” you would have basically the same reaction to the movie. Some people might argue that there was more there that you’d have missed. If you saw the released version, there would be things that you’d miss. I think that the finished version of “Brown Bunny” is exactly what I wanted it to be. If I go back and look at the rough cut, it would seem… It would irritate me on some level. Unfortunately, once people get to see it that way, they always tell you what they missed.
