Yahoo Movies Jason Isaacs says Event Horizon's deleted scenes would be 'definitely illegal' to film now
The actor shares insight into the rumoured director's cut of the sci-fi horror film that fans have been calling to be released for decades
Event Horizon is a cult classic, so much so that fans have called for a director's cut to be released for years. But actor Jason Isaacs tells Yahoo UK he isn't convinced, and some of the footage that didn't make the final cut was "probably illegal to [film] then".
Isaacs played doctor D.J., who is part of the Lewis and Clark crew sent on a rescue mission of the mysterious spaceship the Event Horizon and becomes tormented onboard. The actor spoke about his experience on the film for Role Recall, admitting a director's cut is unlikely to happen because the scenes either don't exist or were removed from the movie because they went too far.
"I don't know about this director's cut," Isaacs explains. "If you watch the film it does occasionally flash — literally flash frames — to what happened to the ship when it went to hell and there's all kinds of what looks like, 'is it an orgy? Is it a massacre? What's going on?'
"They shot it on a soundstage next to us, and there are things that are definitely illegal to do now, probably illegal to do then, with a whole bunch of people with certain things wrong with their body or their mind."Jason Isaacs
"And Paul's best mate was shooting the second unit, and he kept coming back to our stage going, 'you will not believe what I saw this morning'.
"And I don't think putting more of that in there will make it work, and I don't think more people's visions make it work. Maybe Paul's got some footage somewhere. I don't think so, he's never mentioned it to me. I think it's a bit of a myth this director's cut, that's the film. But I might be wrong, I didn't direct it."
What do we know about Event Horizon's director's cut?
Paul WS Anderson's 1997 sci-fi horror film follows a space crew who investigate a missing spaceship that suddenly appears out of the blue near Neptune, and which they soon learn has sinister forces onboard.
The film was given a rushed release by Paramount, who needed a summer blockbuster and pushed Anderson to complete the movie and cut around 30 minutes of footage — scenes that were said to be too disgusting because of its brutal and sexually explicit imagery.
While Event Horizon was a critical and commercial flop when it was originally released it grew a huge fanbase after the fact, and once fans learned of the gory, more explicit missing footage they started calling for an extended edition to be made.
Some of the rumoured footage said to have been removed from the theatrical cut includes scenes featuring the spaceship's crew in hell, which were both gruesome and explicit to the point that adult film stars were hired to act in the scenes. The scene itself is partially included in the theatrical cut flashed up on screen in certain moments, and the footage is already twisted enough as it is — and is likely the scene that Isaacs is referring to.
Warning: This video contains graphic content.
Despite not knowing what else could be included in a director's cut, Isaacs says there is one scene featuring his character following his death that didn't make it into the film because it would have been too much for viewers to watch.
"They made this model of me, this extraordinary latex model of me with every broken vein, every hair, mole, eye colour and stuff," Isaacs explains.
"My whole naked body hung up my hooks, gutted from neck to navel with all my organs pulled out — which, by the way, I asked if I could keep and they said 'no' and I went home and said to my wife that they wouldn't let me keep it and she said 'what the f*** did you think we were going to do with it?'.
"The shot when I was dead started inside my stomach, pulled out and pulled back. I think it was so disgusting [test] audiences were either throwing up or swallowing down their sick so instead the shot starts wide."Jason Isaacs
As well as these scenes mentioned by Isaacs, other scenes known to have been filmed but that didn't make the final cut included a scene in which Weir (Sam Neill) crawled around like a spider, and a different ending where Captain Miller (Laurence Fisburne) fights a character known as the Burning Man, a crew member who haunts him throughout the film and who died during a previous mission.
Isaacs mentions the alternate ending, as he adds: "We also reshot the ending twice, rewrote the ending after we realised it didn't quite work, and then shot it, and then the ending didn't quite work and [we] reshot it again. Then we went back and corrected my Latin, which we got wrong and I think reshot the bit with Latin and it turns out we'd got the Latin wrong the second time."
While Isaacs says he doesn't feel the movie requires a director's cut, he still has fond memories from working on the film, reflecting:
"It's gained such an audience over the years, Paul is such a talent visually and so many other films have copied it since, copied not just the plot but its style, and none of them quite made it."Jason Isaacs
What has Paul WS Anderson said about the director's cut of Event Horizon?
Anderson has spoken of the prospect of a director's cut of Event Horizon being released in the past, saying that it is nigh on impossible because the footage wasn't archived properly. Speaking about the film for its 25th anniversary, he told Entertainment Weekly in 2022: "The problem with the deleted material is that we were right before the DVD revolution when Event Horizon was released.
"We were going out on VHS in ancillaries. And on VHS there was no room for all of these deleted scenes, there was no reason for the studio to keep it. Now if we'd made the movie a couple of years later, they'd have been all over the deleted scenes.
"But by the time DVD had happened, and the audience for the movie started demanding special editions, they hadn't archived a lot of that stuff. So it's just not there."
Anderson added that the only alternative would be to reshoot some of the deleted scenes, in a similar way to how Zack Snyder approached his director's cut for Justice League.
Event Horizon is streaming on Paramount+.
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Watch: Jason Isaacs looks back at his career with Yahoo UK
