Suicide Squad director David Ayer says the movie being released is “my cut”

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It’s not been a great week for David Ayer’s Suicide Squad (opens in new tab); The critical consensus of the film has been mostly negative (opens in new tab), and the fresh controversy concerning Warner Bros. studio meddling (opens in new tab) hasn’t helped matters. While there’s not much Ayer can do about the former, the director definitively told Collider (opens in new tab) that it’s his version of the movie that will be playing in cinemas:

“But this cut of the movie is my cut, there’s no sort of parallel universe version of the movie, the released movie is my cut. And that’s one of the toughest things about writing, shooting, and directing a film, is you end up with these orphans and you fucking love them and you think they’d be amazing scenes and do these amazing things but the film is a dictatorship (laughs), not a democracy, and just because something’s cool and charismatic doesn’t mean it gets to survive in the final cut. The flow of the movie is the highest master”.

“I think there’s a misunderstanding about filmmaking where you can somehow have this crystal ball and understand exactly how everything is going to work together and assemble together”, Ayer continued. “Because remember scripts type word on a page, a black and white page, and when you’re on set you’re dealing with shots and you’re dealing with dailies, and so you have this 7-minute shot and maybe only 10 seconds of that shot is gonna end up in the movie. There’s infinite combinations, infinite knock-on effects, and it’s this strange alchemy that happens and things that you thought during the writing phase breaking your back trying to explain and needs three pages to explain it, you realise it works with just a look on camera in the assembly”.

I’d take the director’s version of a film over a studio-meddled version every single time, so I like that Ayer seems satisfied with Suicide Squad’s theatrical cut. Whether we’ll get an ‘Ultimate Cut’ akin to Batman v Superman remains to be seen, but according to Ayer we can expect at least 10 minutes of deleted scenes when the film hits Blu-Ray stands in a few months. 

Directed by David Ayer and starring Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto, Viola Davis, Jai Courtney, and Joel Kinnaman, Suicide Squad is out in UK and US cinemas now.

Images: Warner Bros.