Alien 3 - Director's Cut Question
 

Is the Alien 3 extended cut in the Alien Quadrilogy Fincher's directors cut?

I'm confused because I always thought they killed his cut, didn't save his edit, told him he sucked, etc etc. But the card before the film starts indicates that this was actually a cut that he showed them.

Does anyone know.

IIRC, the Quadrilogy's "Assembly Cut" was an attempt to re-create what Fincher wanted (with his permission, apparently), but he wasn't involved directly so it can't be considered "official".

(thanks Randy)

Understood. But it seems like only certain sections of the sound or the music scoring would have been changing. And that the extended cut presevered all of his scenes. It seems like were basically seeing his vision.

I was always under the impression that they junked his footage.

Fincher had such a negative experience working on the movie that he never wanted to look at it again, but he gave his blessing for others to reassemble his initial cut as much as was possible. It wasn't that the studio junked his footage. They simply forced him to discard it before things like visual effects or professional sound mixing could ever be completed on the scenes. In the Extended Edition, some of the visual effects were finally completed with CGI, but the audio is obviously patchy in places because the original cast never finished their ADR, so the best that could be dug up were some dodgy location recordings.

As far as seeing Fincher's "vision", his vision was so badly compromised by the studio at every step throughout the production that we'll never know what he really wanted to make of the movie. The Extended Edition is the best assembly of the footage he did actually shoot, though.

Yeah, "his vision" will never be seen, as I don't think what he wanted was able to be filmed.