10 Classic Movies The Directors Won't Stop Changing

Director Sergio Leone originally trimmed around ten hours of footage shot for Once Upon A Time In America to a mere six, intending to release the story through a pair of three-hour movies, but eventually settled on a single grandiose four and a half hour gangster epic. Ultimately, distributors talked Leone down to a mildly more comfortable 3 hours and 49 minutes, which was the version that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984.

Leone was forced to make a few cuts to secure an R-rating for Once Upon a Time's US release, removing rape scenes and graphic violence. However, this version was not well received by preview audiences. As a result, its American distributors cut the film by a further 90 minutes and rearranged its non-linear flashback narrative into a chronological one.

After this cut bombed at the US box office, Leone spent the rest of his life trying to get a better version released there, a legacy that he left to his children to complete.

Two years after the director's death from a heart attack, a 1991 VHS release restored the film mostly to how Leone had intended it to be released in the US (and was long enough to require two video tapes). But it took until his children regained the Italian distribution rights to Once Upon A Time... in 2011 for directorial tinkering to become a family legacy.

Leone's children, along with Martin Scorsese, supervised an "Extended Director's Cut", a four-hour version that was released in 2014 that had more content than the original Cannes 1984 version but less than Leone's intended cut. This is largely due to ongoing rights issues and there is every hope that yet another version will yet be released that truly restores Leone's original vision.