10 Film Director's Cuts That Actually Made The Movie Shorter

Shorter by: 3 minutes

The Coen Brothers aren't the kind of directors to do things conventionally. So, when it came to doing a director's cut the brothers turned to neither revisiting one of their Oscar-winning classics like Fargo or one that didn't quite land first time round like The Hudsucker Proxy. Instead they returned to their cult favourite debut feature and looked at it again with the skills honed through a hugely successful career since.

Noirish darkly comic revenge thriller Blood Simple was already a smartly scripted and tautly structured movie which would not have benefited from extraneous additional material.

Instead, when it came to putting together their new cut of Blood Simple, the Coens took a lean 99 minute movie and turned it into an even leaner 96 minute one. A lot of this was achieved simply by stripping scenes back to their barest essentials to give an even tighter edit.

Blood Simple's 2001 DVD release, however, came accompanied by an intro from a pompous fake "film historian" claiming that the new cut was made to remove "the boring bits" of the original film. It should go without saying that this cult classic doesn't really have a lot of boring bits and the intro was part of the same metatextual playfulness that also prompted the brothers to sell Fargo as "a true story".