There’s good news and bad news for fans of “The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford,” the 2007 Western from filmmaker Andrew Dominik starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck and featuring a gorgeous score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. While the film was a flop at the time at the box office— it made $15 million worldwide on a budget said to have been $30 million and made all of $3 million domestically— the film has since gone on to become a huge cult classic, routinely listed on many Best Films Of The Decade lists (including ours). Even Pitt has called the moody, atmospheric Western one of his favorite of his own films.
READ MORE: The 100 Best Films Of The Decade [2010s]
For years, there’s been talk of a legendary, longer, four-hour cut that’s in the vault somewhere. The film’s cinematographer Roger Deakins semi-recently lamented the loss of that cut, talking on his podcast in 2020, about how he thought the longer version was much better but that it hadn’t been seen outside of its Venice Film Festival world premiere (there are many conflicting reports about this, and it seems like Deakins actually probably saw the cut in the editing room as the Venice premiere was seemingly its normal length).
Now, Dominik himself had confirmed the existence of a longer cut in interviews before and had reiterated so again in an interview with Collider, which is the good news. The bad news is, it’s actually probably not four hours long, and as he’s suggested in the past, no one seems to be interested in releasing it.
While doing press for “This Much I Know to Be True,” his new Nick Cave and Warren Ellis documentary, Dominik once again spoke about ‘Jesse James’ but poured a little bit of water on the rumors that his extended cut was four hours in length.
“It does exist,” Dominik said, explaining how he had a dream to low-key release it in a local video store. “There used to be a video store around the corner from me where I was living in Los Feliz. And I thought I could just have the director’s cut in this one video store. You know what I mean? Like, I could just have a little DVD that I’ve made that we could just rent from this one video store. But the video stores are gone now.”
As he’s said in the past, Dominik said folks like the Criterion Collection—who you would think would be dying to release it—weren’t interested. In that comment, he spoke about the real length of the extended cut.
“Listen, we tried to get Warner Bros. to allow us to release a longer version of it,” he explained. “They’re not interested in doing it, and I think somebody tried to petition Criterion to do it. Criterion were not interested in Jesse James. There is a better version of Jesse James—in my opinion—that’s about 15 minutes longer. And that’s the one that Roger was talking about. He’s never seen one that’s longer than that.”
“The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford” runs two hours and 40 minutes, so an additional 15 minutes is obviously more than an hour shy of four hours.
“There was a three-hour version, right? 15 minutes longer than what it is, three hours. There was never a four-hour version that was any good, believe me,” Dominik said, also explaining there’s a version that’s only five minutes longer that he thinks is better too.
“The problem with it was—the really good scene in the film, it sat in the version that was 15 minutes longer,” he said. “It didn’t sit in the version that was only five minutes longer. Although, I think in that version, we used a truncated version of the scene, but there’s the moment where the film was done, in my opinion. That was the one that was 15 minutes longer. But there’s another year of warfare that happened from that moment on.”
And by “warfare,” he likely means, the months of arguing with the studio over his final cut of the movie.
Regardless, there you go, the long version of ‘Jesse James’ is actually more like three hours long and it still looks like no one is interested in releasing this longer cut, which honestly feels like utter madness. Even a regular Criterion edition of ‘Jesse James’ would be much-coveted and likely fly off the shelves. There’s not even a special edition of the film and all that exists is a pretty standard Blu-Ray release back in 2008. I definitely don’t believe we’ve heard the last of it, but it does seem strange that 15 years after its release, and its reclamation as a modern classic that no one has released even a basic special edition of the film somewhere. Someone needs to reengage that Criterion conversation.