Cut Scenes

Personally, I think the film is outstanding "as is" (always have), but of course I'd LOVE to see deleted scenes, interviews or just about anything that has to do with the making of this (excellent) film.

Sadly, I doubt we'll ever get a 'Special Edition' of Creator.



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Wait a minute... who am I here?

I'd seen the TV version wayyyyy back in 1989. I can vaguely remember there were lots of flashback scenes with Harry and Lucy in them. But I'm unable to recount exactly what was left out of the longer version.

That is very interesting. I never knew about these deleted scenes. I have seen Creator a bunch of times on cable, but would love to have seen it w/ these deleted scenes.

If the cut (or never used) scenes are as the original poster described, I would have to say — against my usual feeling — that I probably would NOT want to see them. And would have even less desire to see a "director's cut" with their being restored in the running plot of the film.

This, as I said, is unusual for me. Yet "Creator" is a highly unusual film — a combination of whimsy, science, comedy, satire, raw emotion, romance, and (that rarest of screen attributes) intelligence.

What makes such a combination work, if it ever does, is a delicate balance that, I fear, can only come from happy accidents. It's rarely deliberately designed. And when it happens ... well, an over-emphasis on parallels, as in these cut-scene descriptions, could very easily throw it out of balance.

Flashbacks, especially, risk doing this. They have to be set up with enough justification for, well, their being set up at all. "Casablanca," for example, managed it. A substantial backstory served to amplify the two central characters' pasts, about which the viewer had only seen hints. Yet that film really had only two tones, those of personal drama and of wartime intrigue. Not six or seven.

I don't see that working with "Creator." Allusions were enough, and at times far more effective. We see quick glimpses of a vibrant, eventually pregnant, Lucy in Harry's mind's eye. Yet only after several such silent cameos do we realize — partly from the absence of any "son," except for proteges like Boris — that he must have lost both wife and child unexpectedly. That heightens Harry's air of melancholy. (It helps that O'Toole can nail melancholy.)

What becomes important is that we have to make that realization ourselves. It isn't spelled out directly. That makes a viewer, if he or she is at all sympathetic to Harry as a brilliant but troubled eccentric, far more involved in wanting to see the main plot resolved.

The director may have regretted losing his flashbacks and more explicit parallels, but other elements would have had to be removed to allow for them. I'd say those would be the varieties of tone and personal interaction that make this cast memorable and well-meshed, despite some unlikely choices.

Would I have imagined Vincent Spano could portray a young graduate student, and an ardent lover, and a frustrated realist in the lab, and a wannabe idealist in his own life? Not offhand. Yet this had enough varied slices of life surrounding his character to make all of them believable. The same was true for every major part, and even most of the minor ones.

If the plot creaked too much, we wouldn't have had that serendipity.
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Yvaine: What do stars do best?
Captain: Well, certainly not the waltz!

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